The new Pine Street Grill pays a tasty tribute to the long-gone Dmitri’s and an iconic Philly dish
Pil pil shrimp is reborn — this time with bread included.
Restaurants are not around forever, so it is special when a signature dish takes on new life well after last call.
Take the Milan salad, essentially a deconstructed BLT with shrimp dressed in a distinctive Italian-Russian dressing, popularized by Jimmy’s Milan. Three decades after the Rittenhouse supper club’s closing, it lives on two blocks away at D’Angelo’s. (Co-founder Tony D’Angelo was Milan’s chef.) Order the D’Angelo’s salad, take a bite, and enjoy the time warp.
Restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow, who will open the swank Mr. Edison at the Bellevue next year, told me that he plans to revive other Philly classics, including Georges Perrier’s galette de crabe, the Le Bec-Fin chef’s take on a Maryland crab cake.
Now let’s consider shrimp pil pil, which restaurateur Dmitri Chimes introduced in the mid-1990s at Pamplona, his Washington Square West tapas bar, and later served at all of the locations of Dmitri’s, his no-frills Greek taverna. The appetizer delivered a one-two punch of chili and garlic with a burst of lemon to prep you for your entree — perhaps the smoky char-grilled octopus or a rich bowl of cioppino.
When chefs Amanda Shulman and Alex Kemp were planning their new Pine Street Grill at 23rd and Pine Streets — which housed a Dmitri’s from 1999 to 2014 — they asked their Fitler Square neighbors what they wanted in a restaurant. “They all kept referring back to Dmitri’s,” Shulman said.
Kemp said he called Chimes, who still lives in the neighborhood. “He hand-delivered us the recipe,” he said. “We’re just super-excited to keep a part of his legacy going. I will say that ours is more of an homage since we know it could never be exactly the same. We started with Dmitri’s recipe as a base and then iterated it a bit, but inherently, it has [the] same ethos and qualities.”
Kemp and Shulman have done justice to this classic.
Pamplona/Dmitri’s recipe called for large shrimp. At Pine Street, they’re going big with six jumbo shrimp, topping them with an abundant sauce that is far creamier and more herbaceous than I remember. They’re also thoughtfully adding grilled bread to ensure plate-cleaning.
Now perhaps they’ll consider adding spanikopita or baklava to the menu...