Playing Dress-Up

Chaucer’s is what happens when investors have lots of money and space on their hands. You’d never know it from the outside, though. A few metal chairs and tables outside the front doors constitute a patio effort. Near the edge of the window is a lighted “open” sign, the kind you might see in a convenience store or a mutt groomer. A simple banner is strung near the lit Chaucer’s Steak House sign indicating that the place now serves lunch.

Open the door, and you’ll feel as if you’ve been sucked through a wormhole into another dimension, one designed by the artists who composed Trump Tower or maybe Binion’s Horseshoe. The ceiling has more arches than a Roman sewage system. A 40-foot stone water wall tinkles along the entire northern span of the dining room. Room dividers are finished in long sloping triangles rendered in wood. Leather chairs have casters. It feels like a plush air-hockey parlor for ’70s-era nouveaux riche (don’t muss the frosted mullet, baby).

There’s a 25-foot-long sushi bar, too, one you can’t belly up to. This makes no sense. Part of the charm of gnawing on sushi is watching the steely ballet of a skilled sushi swashbuckler behind deliciously gruesome displays of carved fish corpses and the fleshy remains of violently evicted shellfish. Plus, you have to ask for chopsticks, even after ordering seaweed.

Sushi is good: cool, fresh, supple and mostly void of the perceptible stench of less than staunchly fresh seafood. One end of the spider roll is the head and shoulders of an enormous prawn, crisp spindly legs and antennae reaching out from the rice pad like a desperate fly fisherman trying to escape a pair of flooded waders. The interior is tasty fried crab. Instead of being bright coral and translucent, salmon roe unfortunately is dark, as if it had been presoaked in soy.

The surprise here is the uni (sea urchin reproductive equipment). Most places present uni (when they have it) that is edible, but nothing that stuns the tongue with opulent sensuality. Others provide good specimens, while a precious few others grant you exquisite examples: a span of gold blushing into orange that is rich in creamy nuttiness, cool (but not cold) and firmly perched on a nori-swaddled rice oval that isn’t too narrow. This set of mustard yellow urchin genitalia was near dead center on the uni quality grading scale. Yes, the rice oval was too narrow, though the roe didn’t ooze off the sides like coagulating butterscotch sauce. Portion size was heavily controlled. The whiff of cost control was thick.

The only stumble pinched between our specially requested chopsticks was the ika, knobbed slices of firm, milky squid flesh. It leaned a bit too confidently into the realm of fermenting aquarium water.

Management claims the sushi team has New York Nobu pedigree, and you can smell it if you scrunch your nose and sniff like a basset hound. Here’s a gem: sunomono. Sunomono is Japanese for “vinegared things.” You have to love a culture that invents a special name for a dish with vinegar in the marquee. Rules allow for the “things” to be a loose assortment of whatnot. Cucumber, seaweed, carrot, beans, poultry, beef and cooked and raw fish are all candidates for a vinegar spritz. At Chaucer’s, the ingredients are washed in a blend of soy, rice wine vinegar and perhaps a few drops of sesame oil. Two pieces of creamy cooked shrimp rest near the edge of the bowl. A pleated slice of white tuna, feeling in the mouth as though it was slightly seared, rests close to the middle of the bowl. Eel rise out of a vinegary murk at the other end, while thin slices of raw scallop rise nearby. The tiny scallop sheets are smooth, tender and sweet, with none of the fishiness that plagued the squid.

Seaweed salad arrives in a large bowl with limp strings of seaweed tangled into a hump near a fluff of terrestrial greens. A thick, clumsy slice of lemon, too cumbersome to skillfully utilize, beds on the greens.

But what’s this over in the expansive lounge flanking the sushi bar? It’s a jazz band, with real people, not just some lone guitarist or pianist with a programmable rhythm method thumping through the dining room. It’s a genuine trio with a bass player, keyboardist and a real person frenetically beating skins with real sticks. Chaucer’s also has a 35-foot marble bar with copper accents, lots of elaborate wine and liquor racking and a pair of 40-plus-inch flat-screen televisions “for sports lovers and movie buffs,” the Web site assures.

But Chaucer’s flaunts its steaks more than anything. Management says Chaucer’s is 90 percent steak house, leaving the jazz, sushi, flat-screens and chairs on wheels to scuffle over the remaining 10 percent. The meat is prime Angus in various guises: a peppercorn fillet, a cowboy rib eye and a surf and turf featuring a 10-ounce fillet drenched in a black pepper merlot sauce mated to a 10-ounce lobster tail in lemon-butter sauce. The cowboy and the surf and turf reach astonishing fiscal heights: $39 and $65, respectively. Budgetary pressures forced us downward: a 12-ounce New York strip bleeding dark dribbles of mushroom demi-glace over a ridged berm of garlic mashed potatoes for $28. While stunning in appearance, the steak is unfortunate, especially when the Angus/prime designations enter the mix. The exterior is delicately crisp, scaling in hue from amber gray to charred black. The interior is fired to a perfect medium-rare rose. Juices run freely. But the meat flavor is hollow and listless; the textures infuriatingly tough. This is a steak that requires considerable wrist and jaw endurance. The fibers are vigorously sown with gristle, white musculature cables standing starkly against the intense red interior.

The striped sea bass is visually arresting, too: a bleached white fillet with flakes fanning conspicuously on a rounded ridge forming the crest of the meat. It rests in a pool of tarragon cream. Again, textures falter–a spongy, almost rubbery chew that puts a spring in the molars.

Spicy coconut sauce couldn’t save scallop textures either. Bound in strips of bacon, the scallops are dry and nearly flavorless, leaning closer to gasket material than shellfish. The bacon binding is shriveled and cooked into irrelevance, draining it of its richness and cured intensity.

Originally an expansion node off the Chaucer’s Steak & Sushi restaurant in Addison, the Mockingbird Station Chaucer’s is completely severed from its forerunner after the founding and common partner was bought out. And like its Addison inspiration, Chaucer’s desperately seeks upscale respect as it valiantly struggles to escape an air of muffled cheesiness. Apple crisp is an apt metaphor. Visually it is stunning, with juicy apples generously pebbled with crunchy crumbs. Yet those crumbs are more mushy than munch. The metaphor is punctuated by its crown: a creamy swirl of what tastes like Cool Whip. Cool Whip should never be seen in the company of $65 surf and turfs, especially if the restaurant doesn’t have the decency to dress in Naugahyde and Formica.

5321 E. Mockingbird Lane at Mockingbird Station, 214-821-3001. Open for lunch 11 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Monday-Friday; open for dinner 5-10 p.m. Sunday-Thursday, 5-11 p.m. Friday & Saturday. $$$