Kimera
19530 Jamboree
Irvine, CA 92612
(949) 261-1222

My first restaurant review in months, you must be so excited!  I know I’m excited to be writing about real food that I actually ate in a restaurant again.  Better still, I get to illustrate my enchanting literature with rapturous photographs from my new camera taken under the watchful (and suspicious) eyes of my waiter.  Some of these pictures are embedded in the post below, but definitely check out the photo gallery to see the whole Kimera album.  And now, without further ado, I give you: Kimera.

Before describing my dining experience at Kimera, I think it’s important to understand where it’s located.  It’s in the Newport Beach business area of Orange County inside the Google building.  So, in a word, corporate.  It turns out that this word describes the restaurant’s interior fairly well actually.  You can see in the photos that it is a very bizarre mix of Asian (bamboo ceilings, huh?), Latin American (lots of warm yellows and reds on the walls), and just plain corporate.

Because I think that atmosphere is such an important part of a dining experience, I want to talk about the interior just a little bit more because it’s indicative of how Kimera approaches food.  I don’t think they know who they are, and it shows.  The genres of decoration aren’t necessarily bad (though the corporate art is terrible and, though bright, a bit depressing), but they’re mixed in ways that made little to no sense.  I found that the menu was largely the same: the food was good, but the selection was all over the place.  This is something that I’ve complained about before, at Café Nuovo in Providence.

If you’ve never had a cocktail with lychee in it, you should do yourself a favor and order one as soon as you possibly can.  When I saw that they had lychee martinis, I was all over it, and it was delicious.  It’s hard to describe what lychee tastes like, but I’ll try: imagine a tart pineapple mixed with kiwi juice.  It’s sort of like that.  Anyway, you can imagine that it would be easy for a lychee drink to be too sweet, but this one was perfect.  It wasn’t too sweet, also not too strong, the vodka was smooth, and the lemon gave it just the right level of acidic bite.

On with the meal!

Appetizers bizzarely ranged from oysters to sweet chili prawns to Caesar salad, the type of genre-crossing that doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you’re the Cheesecake Factory.  Regardless, I ordered ahi teriyaki (pictured below), which was okay.  The ahi itself was great, crusted with just a bit of pepper and very fresh.  The most disappointing part of the dish were the cold soba noodles, which were completely drenched in teriyaki and jalapeno soy, making their taste incredibly perfumed and too spicy.  They overwhelmed the delicate flavors of the ahi, cucumber, and avocado, so I was forced to leave them uneaten.  I did like, though, that they brought chopsticks as utensils for the course.

The other appetizer ordered was beefsteak tomato salad (pictured below), sort of like a caprese only more “mod”.  Unfortunately, the dish simply left me wanting a real caprese and not the imposter sitting contently in front of me, trying to impress me with its good looks.  In brief, too little mozzarella, too much tomato, and the inclusion of avocado was a bit strange as it wasn’t complemented by the sharp acidity of the balsamic vinegar at all.  To their credit, the ingredients were very fresh and the presentation was nice.

After the appetizers, the dreaded early plate clearing occurred.  “Oh no!” I hear you cry.  Yep, I almost cried out too, but despite my own advice to the contrary, I stayed quiet.  Maybe I’m more of a wuss in real life than on this blog, who knows.  Service had been spectacular and not overly attentive up to this point, but the early clearing made me stop paying attention.

The main course selection was also confusingly genre crossing as evidenced by what we ordered: seafood yellow curry (very Cuban), lamb tagine (very Moroccan), and roast chicken (very generically American).  I have to say, though, that the main courses redeemed the restaurant a bit from the appetizers.  The curry was deliciously creamy and mild, while the vegetables were crisp and packed with flavor.  I really enjoyed the unexpected but noticeable addition of the cilantro, it added some much needed pep to the cream.  The shrimp and walu (a white buttery fish) were both fresh, though I would have preferred all shrimp as the walu’s texture and was a bit too soft to combat the cream of the curry and the taste was too bland to complement the peppers.

I can’t really comment on the lamb and chicken dishes as I only had small bites, but first impressions were as follows: the lamb dish was weirdly and overly spicy, something you don’t usually see with cous cous.  The meat was tender, but I felt like the combination of very spicy cous cous and lamb needed something like a traditional Moroccan yogurt with cucumbers on top to cool off the tongue, but maybe that’s just me.  The chicken was very nicely presented, but was just chicken.  It tasted distinctly roasted and juicy, but the dish was marred by the fact that the potatoes were served lukewarm.  Oh well, you can’t have it all I suppose.

I want to make special mention of an experience I had with the waiter during the meal at this point.  In my curry, there were veggies that looked like they could either be thinly shaved carrots or cut peppers and I wanted to know which, so I asked our waiter.  He didn’t know, but ventured a guess that they were peppers.  I thought that was that, but he soon returned informing me that he had asked the chef and had learned that they were in fact orange mini-peppers.  He didn’t have to go out of his way like that, but it was very much appreciated.  It ALMOST made up for the early plate clearing, but not quite.

Desserts.  I feel like it’s both easy and hard to go wrong with desserts.  On the one hand, all the diner is expecting is something sweet, so put something sugary on a plate and you could be done.  Well, in practice I guess it’s just not that easy.  Desserts at Kimera were more disappointing that the appetizers.

I got the chocolate torte, which I’m sad to say wasn’t a torte at all.  Tortes should be flourless, dense, deliciously rich and dangerously thick.  This was airy, light, definitely flour-full, and not in the least bit intense in the chocolate department.  On top of that, the “coconut anglaise” tasted nothing of coconut, or anything at all for that matter.  It was just white ice.

The profiteroles (by the way, what’s with the classic French dessert being on the menu at a Cuban/Asian/American restaurant?) were shockingly bad as well.  Profiteroles are best in their purest form: frozen vanilla ice cream inside fresh pastry balls with warm chocolate sauce drizzled on top upon ordering.  With these the ice cream was melting by the time in got to the table, the pastry was soggy and chewy, and the “Mexican chocolate” was really just cold chocolate sauce with waaay too much cinnamon poured on top.  An interesting take on the classic dish with a lot of potential, but severely hampered by its temperature problems.

On the whole, I actually had a good time at Kimera.  The food was lively looking and well presented, service was great besides the plate clearing thing, and the decor wasn’t oppressively ugly at all.  While their food was certainly not perfect, I think they got the important parts right: the main courses were great and appetizers were fairly good.  Dessert in most restaurants needs work, so I wasn’t entirely surprised to learn Kimera was no exception.  Would I return to eat?  No, probably not, but I would recommend trying it if you’re in the area.  Orange County has certainly seen much, much worse.

The Good: Nice presentation, great main courses, reasonable prices, spectacular cocktail list, ‘lively’ decor

The Bad: Service needs work, menu and décor are both very genre-confused, desserts and appetizers leave something to be desired, they certainly have all sorts of identity problems

The Word: I won’t be going back to Kimera anytime soon, but relative to other local choices it should definitely be on your radar.

Don’t forget to check out the photo gallery to see more photos from Kimera not included in this post.

Mark posted this on July 11, 2008 and is filed under Restaurants.