December 12–19, 1996

food

Still The Best

A top restaurant dresses up, but its food needs no improvement.

By Jim Quinn

Susanna Foo

1512 Walnut St., 545-2666

Atmosphere: Businesspeople, hipster suburban artsy daters, ad men and women talking ads, gay and straight, black and white.

Price: High, and worth what it costs (if you've got what it costs): $65 a person for the fall banquet, plus wine and tip.

Four Stars: Among the very best restaurants in the city for many years.

Only two restaurants have ever been awarded four stars by this writer: Le Bec-Fin for everything, and Marra's for American pizza — both indisputably at the head of their very different classes for many years. Add to that short list Susanna Foo, right up there with Le Bec-Fin.

Susanna Foo, named for its co-owner and executive chef, started out across Walnut Street in 1980 as Hunan. Susanna took a French cooking course at the Culinary Institute of America and found her career: mixing French and Chinese recipes, fresh and unusual ingredients and knockout presentation. She and her husband moved to the new restaurant in 1988, and just kept getting better. Recent redecoration means the looks have caught up with the food. This is at once a subdued and stunning restaurant.

The walls are shades of brown; not earthy browns — more like Necco Chocolate Wafer and whole wheat cracker. Huge chinoiserie tree trunks and songbirds sprawl across big diptych wall mirrors. Angular sprays of Oriental flowers sit here and there around the room.

Service is unobtrusive and superb. Several waiters have been here since the 1980s, all know customers by name, and know clearly what their customers expect. Le Bec-Fin and Four Seasons have service like this. New restaurants can't possibly match it.

Prices are high. The Fall Banquet special, highly recommended if you have the price, is $65 a person. With one glass of wine ($10), two cups of coffee and tax, the bill was $147. Add a 15 percent tip, measly for this kind of service, that's $170 for two. Wines by the bottle on the excellent list start around $40. And go up.

Big crowds of businesspeople do business at many of the big tables in the middle of the room. The most important person at any table, the one everybody wants something from, is always dressed the worst, talks and gestures and listens the least. At power central, power is inattention. Suburban men about town who mousse their ponytails escort sweet youngsters who can't learn to use chopsticks — because they already know how to giggle fetchingly at their failures. The dating crowd is black and white, gay and straight — everything but Asian. But this is Susanna Foo cuisine, not Chinese.

BANQUETS (five dishes, $65): These change with the season. They are, comparatively speaking, a bargain. We got Maine lobster and rice paper rolls. A big fresh lobster, steamed tender, the tail split, half tucked on each plate under half the front carapace; a claw tucked under half the tail fan. Very pretty and very delicious. Rice paper rolls are filled with chopped lobster, ground lobster, ginger and bits of corn, then deep-fried to blister palely — extremely delicate and flavorful at the same time. In the middle of the plate, fresh green Asian beans and hair-thin strands of deep-fried sweet potato.

Grilled sea bass was dark papery skin, moist tender meat, covered with chanterelles and mango sauteed together, over smooth leaf spinach just wilted in an acid-sweet sauce. Roast squab was extraordinarily tender, half a large fat-free breast, medium rare, full of flavor, over fresh artichoke heart, covered with a slightly sweet reduced stock, flanked with unusual maitake mushrooms, and sweet buttery butternut squash cut into big U's. Baby rack of lamb was three chops, so small the baby must've been stillborn, neatly grilled with real lamb taste and a kind of preemie ultra-tenderness. They leaned against sweet rice mixed with baby corn kernels, covered with a mix of fresh and extra-mini lettuces.

Dessert was chocolate mousse mixed with bits of tiny Asian bananas, covered with dark chocolate, flowered with whipped cream, stuck with triangles of sesame tuile — like peanut brittle, but with rich seedy grittiness. On the side, a made-in-house fortune cookie, dipped in chocolate, with gibberish-charm fortune. YOU WILL MAKE CHANGE FOR THE BETTER, mine said. So I gave my sweetheart two fives for a 10.

LA CARTE: Sweetbreads ($11.50) come in a big white double bowl, 18 inches across. They are the fat, expensive part of the gland, braised in dark veal stock with just a touch of ginger, mildly hot, rich and buttery soft. They sit on top of thin strips of fried artichoke heart that have a tender beany crunch, mixed with bits of asparagus and spinach barely wilted in veal stock.Dim Sum ($11) is a fat deep-fried chicken dumpling, a fatter steamed veal dumpling seared brown-black, a small shrimp dumpling, and a 2-inch tube of Asian eggplant grilled just enough to get a char flavor, no more.

Quail ($25) is two tiny birds, boned except for leg and upper wing, handsomely browned, stuffed with rice, gizzards, fennel-flavored Chinese sausage, full of wild flavor. They sit in the middle of a big white plate surrounded with strips of the chewy sausage and haricots verts cooked till done, not a second longer. Venison ($28) is seven small filets, unbleeding medium rare, extraordinarily tender with a mild but real game taste. They come sitting on fettucini cooked with saffron, drenched in venison reduction, mixed with strips of sun-dried tomato, broccoli rabe, and something to give them a slight smoky taste.

Sorbets ($7.50) come with a big sheet of sesame tuile, and deserve special mention for being made of fruit, not bottled essences. No icy raspberry sludge! Real coconut with its threads, mango with its creamy softness, pineapple you can almost chew. Chocolate espresso torte is a low round of extra-extra rich chocolate coffee cake that's almost a mousse, topped with dark chocolate, then a light chocolate cup in which sits chocolate ice cream drooled with more chocolate. All around, big commas of chocolate, like the yin half, or yang, of the yin yang symbol. Coffee has always been among the best in Philly.