Plum, the new incarnation of Richard Chen's in Pittsburgh

Plum

Though a lot of new restaurants have opened in our area lately, some may be having difficulty in staying afloat.  Less than a year after it opened, Richard Chen--which I reviewed previously--had to shut down for "renovations".  We got the strong sense this meant they had had poor business, perhaps due to a reputation for being too expensive.  Perhaps to fight this impression they reopened this past August rebranded as "Plum".  They began with a "soft opening", then had an official grand opening later.  We decided to give them another try shortly thereafter.  In spite of the reopening we had no trouble getting a reservation, but the restaurant did seem to be doing a brisk enough business.

Plum shares a lot of similarities with Richard Chen.  They preserved most of the décor, which we regarded as a good thing.  The biggest change was the addition of a sushi bar, but the rest of the main dining area was almost exactly as I remembered it.  I didn't recall such details as the glass candle holders with stones in them, but I could easily have simply not noticed that on our prior visits.  The knives that could be balanced on their ends with blades vertical were still there, a touch we both liked.

The biggest changes came with the menu.  There was very little, if anything, in common with the prior menu.  At the very least, none of the dishes we'd ordered on our previous trip to Richard Chen's was available.  We were very sorry to see the excellent pork belly appetizer go, but there was some consolation in our being able to try the sushi, a completely new addition.  The cocktails we'd liked so much on our prior visit were unfortunately another victim of the menu change.  The compensation was that the wine list was much less expensive.

The waitress asked us if we'd been there before, we said we'd only been there when it was Richard Chen's.  She said something along the lines of their now trying to be "more informal, more fun".  I knew what she really meant was that they were less expensive.  I have to admit that I found her a bit ditzy, or perhaps just being asked to serve more tables than she should have.  She left our menus after we were done ordering and didn't seem all that quick to serve us at other times.  On the other hand she did try to be helpful.  There was an amusing incident where she knocked my soy sauce over.  It was too much of a disaster to really clean up; she just covered it with a napkin!

The other members of the staff were very solicitous, though.  It was clear they had been told to serve customers well to help establish the restaurant's reputation early on.  A woman who may have been a manager came over to talk to us for a while.  We said we liked the restaurant (and we did like the addition of sushi).  Had we been thinking we might have suggested bringing back some of the prior dishes we'd liked.  She said they were changing their wine list around.  We got the sense they might be trying to get rid of their old stock, which may have explained the reduction in wine prices.  Otherwise a change so soon after their rebranding would not have made much sense.

One of the areas in which the service fell sort was in the water.  It seemed like people brought fresh water frequently early in our meal, but by the time we got to dessert nobody was filling our glasses.  Janna eventually went off to find a pitcher on her own.

Janna got sushi, while I got regular appetizers and an entrée, maximizing our ability to evaluate the menu changes.  I wasn't sure what I'd get with my first appetizer choice, a Thai style beef salad.  The beef tasted grilled, and was served atop greens with a very sweet sauce.  With the greens it was too sweet, but the beef flavor disguised it well.

One of our favorite sushi appetizers is seaweed salad, so Janna got their rendition.  She was dubious at first when she saw it came with unaccustomed cucumbers, but in the end really liked it.  The salad was spicy, and the cucumbers helped cool the mouth.

As for the sushi itself, they had a selection of rolls and pieces.  Many of the rolls had odd names, perhaps part of Plum's attempt to be "more fun".  We tried the "Hawaii roll", which was pretty good though nothing particularly special.  I could see that some of the other specialty rolls were quite gigantic, thicker than normal.  The other items we tried were good though not as spectacular as Umi, our favorite local sushi restaurant.  Janna's favorite was probably the giant clam, which she said tasted "like the ocean".  I personally liked the fatty tuna, tasty and with a tender, buttery texture.

I didn't find my entrée to be as good as the sushi.  I ordered a Singapore-style shrimp, thinking perhaps I'd get something like Singapore rice noodles (a favorite of mine).  In the end it turned out to be shrimp served on a bed of lettuce, practically swimming in a red sauce.  It was quite messy to eat, and the sauce was certainly too abundant.

Though I could have done without we decided to get dessert.  I had jasmine tea cakes.  The cakes had a dab of ice cream atop them, then a crisp with a strong flavor, perhaps poppy seeds.  The server who brought it apologized that the ice cream was falling off one of my cakes.  There were also slices of some spicy-tasting fruit, perhaps pear with cinnamon.  Most of the pieces were tender but one was a bit too firm.

Plum is certainly a change from Richard Chen's.  The lower prices are welcome, but the meal is not as special as our one Richard Chen experience was.  In the end we will probably go more often to Plum for dinners than we did to Richard Chen, but they'd make less money off of us.  The loss of the good cocktails is another way in which they lose a potential money-making opportunity.  Will they succeed in this new form?  I wish them well but do think we lost something in the change from their prior incarnation.