Pennsylvania regional fare blends in at Society Hill Society

CATCH UP: Striped bass and cockles at Society Hill Society.
Neal Santos

Long before there was a chef at Society Hill Society, there was a menu. If that sounds kind of backwards, that's because it is.

"It looked a lot like a Caesar salad and a burger and a chicken sandwich," remembers Yun Fuentes, the Puerto Rico-born Garces vet who would eventually become the head chef at this quietly gorgeous reboot of Headhouse Square's old Artful Dodger. Fuentes was leery. So Reed Barrow, SHS's artist-entrepreneur owner, asked him what he would cook. "I told him, I want to do exactly what you're doing with the space, with food."

What Barrow has done with the Society Hill Society space is "standing out by blending in," a catchphrase Fuentes repeats like a mantra at a biotech retreat. After gutting the dirty Dodger, Barrow filled in the design blanks by taking cues from the neighborhood's Federalist architecture: chestnut woodwork, soft gray wainscoting, stained glass, schoolhouse booths. A small solar system of globe lights illuminates the cracked plaster ceilings, and the chairs look lifted from Betsy Ross's crib. Seated in a cozy bracket-shaped booth tucked into a window nook, one of my dinner guests observed, "This is what City Tavern should look like."

The bar greets you first, an island of hammered copper with a counter-mounted citrus press and wood-and-brass Czech draught fountain that looks like something sourced from an antique locomotive. It pours one beer only: Pilsner Urquell. Sadly, my lanky bearded server informed the Urquell had run dry, so I shifted focus to the neat, not-too-thinky cocktail menu by Paul McDonald, who left Farmer's Cabinet for Society Hill Society. For the Drink of Summer 2014, look no further than his easy-to-love Fuzzled, a rum-and-club swirled with rhubarb-thyme syrup; the only thing missing is a front porch. Bourbon, often pigeonholed as a fireside sipper, also gets a warm-weather look in Considering Cap, a tumbler of squeezed-to-order OJ, coriander and lime. The Bourbon stands out while blending in.

As promised, what Barrow did for the bricks, Fuentes has done for the food. The menus, printed on papyrus-like pamphlets, are love letters to Pennsylvania past. Recipes culled from Fuentes' thorough research — dude even went to the library! — include snapper soup, pierogies, shad and shoo-fly pie. "Things that have been left in the past," he explains, "but not as they were, but how they should be now."

Keystone Heritage cuisine, if you will. From chef who's spent his time in Philadelphia cooking Spanish (Amanda, Tinto) and Latin (Rosa Blanca, briefly) food.

It's a valiant endeavor, and one that paid off intermittently at Society Hill Society. Dark and tender pretzels with house-made mustard stood in for bread service with aplomb. Egg cheese, a ricotta-like recipe Fuentes unearthed in an old cookbook, was a cool, creamy contrast for charred toast and pickled asparagus. April's shad is now May's striper, a pristine brick of fish in a smoky pond of cockles and elegant ham broth conjured from hocks, clam juice and lardo. Fuentes has even given his stocks, the foundations of any restaurant, a Pennsky bent. Instead of chicken and vegetable stocks, his larder has ham and "orchard," the latter suffused with tons of local apples.

Molasses, the pre-sugar sweetener of choice in the former Commonwealth, is a go-to, too, and not just in desserts (though it figures heartily into the shoo-fly pie whose layer of fig gives a pleasant Newton effect). It lends complexity to the Vidalia onion jam paired with the unfortunately truffled pierogies, and to the ketchup dabbed on juicy backyard-style burger.

That burger, I can't believe it's only $8. I'd pay double for the simple construction of beef, lettuce, tomato, onion and cheddar if you wish—I did—on a house-baked potato bun. It proved a calling card for Fuentes' bordering-obsessive attention to detail. The onions are triple-soaked to draw out their bitterness. The bun isn't just made from potato flour, but actual potatoes. "I wanted to see the flecks of skin," and sure enough, you do. The coarsely ground, plancha-seared patty pulled the best qualities from brisket and sirloin. "I decided to have a sirloin steak on menu, just so I could use the scraps for a burger," Fuentes says. That's some brilliant reverse engineering right there.

The actual sirloin, sourced from Oregon's Painted Hills and beautifully cooked, is also worth having, by the way, even if its bed of succotash (red bell pepper overdose) and crown of raisins bloomed in white wine is not. Fuentes loves a bloomed raisin! Their cousins, currants, stumbled onto a scrapple salad drunk with Madeira.

That salad was a wreck, its block of clunky duck scrapple buried under frisee like a dead body. Fuentes' attempt to merge a diner breakfast and a Lyonnais salad included savory duck skin granola, clumpy pistachio butter, useless foie gras vinaigrette, molasses and a poached egg. It was hard to eat, too, perhaps a good thing.

While that salad had too much going on, the other had too little. Fresh baby mustard, arugula and cress don't need much, but a few translucent slices of radish and a peppy Meyer lemon ranch dressing do not a proper salad make.

But at least it was light. My main gripe with the whole Pennsylvania theme is its senseless disregard for the season. Don't get me wrong; Fuentes is cooking with seasonal produce, but the recipes are wintry as hell. A bowl of roasted mushrooms and chestnuts was lovely, but who wants that when it's 70 degrees out? How about duck breast with kraut and caraway crumbs? Block o' pork belly with apples and dumplings? Call me in October. Chicken potpie croquettes? That's what Pennsylvania cuisine is built from, unforgiving winters and a sturdy German backbone.  

Then again, I ate my words when the faschnauts came. Plumped with smooth, house-made Bourbon apple butter, these plush oval Dutch donuts screamed fall, and I did not care. The sidecar of dip was not caramel but dulce de leche. "I know were calling it heritage cuisine, but this is my heritage so we had to do dulce," Fuentes laughs. I'm good with that. Pennsylvanians do most, but not everything, better.

Society Hill Society | 400 S. Second St., 267-273-1434, societyhillsociety.com. Sun.-Wed., 4-10 p.m.; Thu.-Sat., 4-11 p.m. Snacks and appetizers, $4-$12; entrees, $17-$32; dessert, $8.