Stopped Clock

There are some skillful strokes — but Time still needs more of it.

by Elisa Ludwig

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Published: Jun 25, 2008

Shirley Nicole Fonner REGAL TENDER: One of Time's more successful entrées features IPA-braised veal cheeks slathered in a bourbon fig confit. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the lives of our restaurants. For many years, the German beerhall Ludwig's Garten (no relation to this writer) seemed like an anchor in a changing neighborhood that might be called Center City East, B3 or Midtown Village, depending on who you talked to. Now, the lederhosen and futball crowds have made way for Time, a self-billed restaurant/whiskey bar/taproom from the owners of nearby Vintage, which has given the dank square footage new (and trendy) life.

At Vintage, Jason and Delphine Evenchik have already demonstrated their design savvy, so it is unsurprising that Time has been done up with dramatic but tasteful flair — the dining room sports raised banquettes, black floors and a strikingly large bronze chandelier dripping Venetian glass. French windows open to Sansom Street, inviting streaming light and the occasional catcall from drunken passers-by. The whiskey bar, decked out with exposed brick walls, cozy booths and a bar menu is opposite, while the L'Etage-esque Bohemian Absinthe Lounge serves live music, DJs and glasses of the newly legal chartreuse liquor upstairs.

Between them, the three party zones smartly cover all the nightlife bases, offering a serious list of potables (including dozens of artisan bourbons and scotches plus a thoughtful list of international wines and beers) that will please just about all comers — except maybe fruity-tini drinkers. But they have Old City.

Yet like anything designed to please most of the people most of the time, there's a flimsy vagueness about the place. With its gilt clocks and silk-screened images of timepieces affixed to the walls, the "concept" seems to be nostalgia itself — whether the longing is for an '03 vintage or for an era when drinking hallucinogenics and grooving to jazz were the habits of true bohemians, not Urban Outfitters-clad condo owners. The more time I spent there, the more I started to think I needed that absinthe to puzzle it out.

At first glance, the menu, too, looks like it was cribbed from times gone by, or at least a 1960s steakhouse: There's shrimp cocktail, oysters Rockefeller and steaks of many strips and loins. "Old man food" — simple stuff we don't see enough of these days. But the creative license chef Keith Murphy (formerly of Vintage) takes with these ghosts of menus past is almost contemporary to a fault.

Those oysters are actually shell-less bivalves battered in panko crumbs and fried to a lovely crispness, but they're served atop slabs of hardened, charred pancetta blanketed with gloopy artichoke spinach dip. Another dish is billed as a Napoleon, but the tomatoes and mozzarella with basil and spinach is simply a vertical Caprese — only the roasted tomato coulis is dull and the unseasonal tomatoes are dry and unyielding. And maybe I'm just catching the nostalgia bug, but is it wrong to hope for plain old shrimp cocktail — without the Bloody Mary sorbetto — every now and again?

Sometimes, though, the dishes are less a clever "take" on a cliché and more of an inspired improvement. Crabcakes, golden, crisp-shelled patties filled with fluffy seafood mousse, are ingeniously paired with pickled jalapeño slices, acidity cutting the richness. Veal cheeks are braised in IPA until fork-shreddingly soft, slathered with a syrupy bourbon fig confit and served with browned fava beans and cippoline onions. Both are worthy matches for the well-chosen beverages here.

A New England lobster roll is spruced up with lemon aioli, a soft, shiny brioche roll and an unnecessary but nevertheless scrumptious sage brown butter for dipping — but it is, for all intents and purposes, a lobster roll as you know it. And at $16, it seems rather meal-like to serve as a starter. How about some sliders instead?

About half the time, though, one wonders whether the clocks are calibrated in the kitchen. The mako shark filet is grilled to desiccation, making it an undeserving companion to a lemony slaw of shredded brussels sprouts and bits of pancetta. The same sort of protein travesty occurs with wild boar chops, whose gamey goodness is rendered undetectable through overcooking. The secondary actors beneath — the buttery biscuit, silky sautéed apples and subtly truffled haricots verts with corn niblets — are working overtime to support the supposed star of this plate.

Also overdone: an otherwise tasty New York strip topped with melting clots of gorgonzola butter. While the bed of sautéed leeks is a sweet foil for the meat, the other accompaniment — a mound of congealed butternut squash risotto with a little fried quail egg on top — is pretentious and superfluous.

After all this, there's an appealing simplicity in the brownie sundae. Though it's short on ice cream and long on brownie, there's no turning away from a wedge of cake this simultaneously flaky, dense and deeply chocolatey. Green tea ice cream, served in a teacup with a twisted cookie stick cutely placed to approximate steam, is another simple if contextually odd treat. Our server promised us that the pecan pie would be unlike any other we'd tasted. It came, even softer and gooier than the typical slice, redolent of honey and bourbon with a scoop of butterscotch ice cream and caramel sauce squiggles. It was good, sure — but not the kind of dessert memories are made of.

(e_ludwig@citypaper.net)

Time

1315 Sansom St., 215-985-4800, timerestaurant.net

Hours: Mon.-Sat., 5 p.m.-2 a.m.; Sun., noon-2 a.m.

Appetizers, $7-$16; Entrées, $15-$32

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