High Steaks

Alex Plotkin came sailing out of Chops’ kitchen with a 12-pound side of beef swaddled in a cloth napkin and nestled in the crook of his arm like a baby. He presented it to me at the dinner table and pointed with pride at the USDA Prime stamp adorning the Cryovac bag. A thin film of blood kaleidoscoped inside as Plotkin shifted the meat in his hands. “This is my New York strip,” he said. “And that USDA Prime stamp is one of the things I look for with every piece of meat I receive.”

A former football player, Plotkin lives a life that reflects an athlete’s dedication. Though his playing days are long behind him, his hips still form a perfect triangle with his shoulders, and he gazelles through his dining room at a svelte six-foot-four and 210 pounds. His hair suggests meticulous effort, with a few perfect strands spilling down his forehead like black water over a cliff’s edge. His suits are immaculate, his shoes shine, and sometimes, when the 12- and 14-hour days at Chops steakhouse begin to weigh on him, he retires from the restaurant floor to his office, where he steals 15 minutes of sleep in a leather chair.

At age 39, Plotkin is plowing through a career in restaurants that has taken him through some of the city’s toniest spots, including Four Seasons and the Palm, where he worked in management. Like Chops, these aren’t the kinds of spots where restaurateurs normally haul sides of raw beef into dining rooms during the dinner rush. But life hasn’t exactly been normal for Plotkin since a certain February Sunday when he arrived to open his steakhouse for dinner, unaware that the following three sentences about his restaurant had been published in the Inquirer:

 “A serious power-lunch crowd makes this sunny room feel like ‘the Palm on City Line.’ A recent meal, though, was expensive and disappointing, from the soggy and sour chopped salad to a miserably tough and fatty strip steak. The crab cake, though, was excellent.”

To the average reader, the 44-word mini-review of Chops probably doesn’t seem like a big deal. The quick takedown actually appeared at the end of a full review of Fleming’s steakhouse, in the “Or Try These” section. And yet because the words were written by Inquirer dining critic Craig LaBan, arguably the paper’s most influential voice, they took on an almost Biblical importance among Philadelphia restaurateurs — an importance, it’s now safe to say, that passeth all understanding.

LaBan enjoys a peculiar celebrity in our city, a famousness for being faceless. Most food critics strive to maintain their anonymity, but LaBan turns the practice into show biz, donning all manner of outrageous costumes for public appearances: Zorro masks, fake beards. He has even spread an armful of baguettes in front of his face like an Oriental fan. Some restaurant critics avoid writing negative reviews. LaBan considers himself a consumer advocate, and highlights a restaurant’s sins. As the Inquirer’s dining critic, he holds the loftiest platform for food coverage in the region. So when he cast this particular stone in the direction of Alex ­Plotkin, it rippled in all the pools the restaurateur cares about: at a Gladwyne mah-jongg party, where Nellie Goldman, a regular customer, says the chatter quickly turned to that morning’s write-up on Chops; at the Green Valley country club, where LaBan’s entire Sunday column was said to have been posted on the bulletin board with the three sentences about Chops circled; and in the office of Joseph Manko, a Lower Merion attorney. “I told someone I was going to Chops,” recalls Manko, “and they said, ‘Why would you want to go there? That place just got a bad review.’”