Originally published June 10, 2001
The football is brought to our table with the pomp of a championship trophy, teed up for the dinner's kickoff. The restaurant's menu is painted on the side.
I can't resist picking it up. I lay my fingers across the laces, squeeze the firmly inflated pigskin, and toss it gently into the air. A perfect spiral lands in my lap, the menu facing up.
A 48-ounce porterhouse for $65.95? Yikes, that's for offensive linemen only. Unless, of course, you're itching to have your name etched in the hall of gluttony on the Shula .com Web site, which is dedicated to the former Miami Dolphins coach whose upscale steak chain recently rolled into town.
I'm not.
Don Shula may have been one heck of a coach, but his latest restaurant is no victory dance in the end zone. ( Shula 's Steak 2 sports bar opened two years ago in University City. ) In fact, bringing up the rear of an all-out steak-house blitz on Philadelphia, the new Shula 's is waiver material. Too slow. Lacking the skill or creativity to compete. And talk about overpaid. Not on my roster.
It's not so much the kitschy football theme I mind - the souvenir shop selling pigskin checkbook covers and luggage tags, or the black-and-white game photos framed in gold around the room. Although I wonder: Who in Philadelphia really cares about a 1972 Dolphins team?
What really draws my yellow flag is the flagrant incompetence of this restaurant in the Wyndham Philadelphia at Franklin Plaza (most of the 12 Shula 's Steak Houses are in Wyndham hotels), and it's exacerbated by prime-time prices.
The steaks begin at $31 at dinner, expensive but competitive with other big-ticket steak places in town. But the quality's just not there, despite the beef's much-touted Black Angus pedigree.
The restaurant rolls around a display cart of shrink-wrapped meats and a giant lobster to tempt you, a blatant rip-off of a bad idea from Morton's that doesn't work here either. By mid-evening, the poor lobster is half dead and the meat has turned gray beneath the suffocating shine of plastic. Yum.
The cooked versions weren't any better. I didn't eat one cut of meat that was truly succulent - the giant prime rib had a watery, thin flavor; the filet was oversalted; and the Kansas City strip had a metallic aftertaste typical of wet-aged steaks that sit for days in their own blood.
The cowboy rib-eye steak was so tough that I literally began to tire as I chewed and chewed and chewed. I didn't feel so bad when I looked up. A diner seated beneath a picture of Larry Czonka rumbling for a touchdown had actually fallen asleep over his steak. Too many thrills for one night.
A great steak house isn't about flashy trick plays. It's about churning out the ground game and running up the gut with consistent, solid players who don't need gimmicks to succeed. But Shula 's staff fumbled the easy hand-off every time.
The young servers were very nice but shamefully undertrained. It was tacky enough to make them deliver our food from a bus tray propped up beside the table, each dish topped with a metal lid under which the steaks were waving little doneness flags. But the wine service was truly pitiful.
I felt bad for our friendly server when, after some exasperation, he let me show him how to uncork our wine.
Getting the right bottle had been enough of a challenge. Though the restaurant had been open only a few months, the vintages listed on the wine list were already out of date. Twice we were brought '98 cabernets instead of the '97s listed (with no mention of the substitution by the waiter or price adjustment on our check). A '98 Hanna hadn't developed nearly enough complexity to be worth $55, though a delicious '97 Simi cab, for $48, had plenty of character.
And character isn't in big supply here. Even for a steak house, the presentations are drab, the food plopped onto plain white plates where it lies naked before the diner.
There were a couple of mediocre, but still recommendable, dishes. The big barbecued shrimp were wrapped in a thick, overwhelming strip of bacon but were tasty, dabbed with a tangy sauce. The steak tartare wasn't exactly light but had a zesty flavor from capers and Worcestershire sauce. The thick cut of dolphin was moist in its delicate egg-battered crust. And though its graham cracker shell was soggy, the key lime pie had a good citrus snap.
The rest could have been highlights in a steak-house blooper film. The steak soup was sour and looked like thick chili that had crusted under a heat lamp. The lobster cocktail was rubbery and dry. The salad dressings were gloppy, and the Caesar salad was topped with what appeared to be store-bought croutons and preshredded cheese.
The kitchen claims to shred its Parmesan in-house. It also purports to use fresh spinach. But the pureed greens spooned over the oysters Rockefeller and in the side of creamed spinach had a dank, freezer-burned taste. The potato skins were burned. The hash browns were mealy. And the bludgeon-sized baked potato (about 11¼2 pounds) had the leathery skin of a spud kept too long in a humid warming drawer.
The tender T-bone lamb chops would have been fine had they not tasted completely charred. The only steak (of five I tasted) that I'd order again was the 24-ounce porterhouse. It's the small one.
Most desserts are made off-premises. Still, someone ought to tell the baker that the "perfect season seven-layer" cake actually has eight layers.
But why order prefab sweets when Shula 's makes a souffle? It's a big production that takes more than a half hour to arrive, prefaced by excited updates from the eager staff. "Your souffle is in the oven! ... Your souffle is almost ready! ... Your souffle is coming any moment!"
Suddenly several waiters hustled through the dining room as if setting downfield blocks while our server rushed to the table with a large round dish on his tray.
Nice dish, I thought. Where's the souffle?
I had to crane my neck to see how far it had fallen. It was, in fact, concave - as if one of the football menus had landed inside. Now isn't that taking a clever theme just a little too far?