Flat Three, 120-122 Holland Park Avenue, London W11 (020 7792 8987). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £100
Halfway through my first driving test I knew I had failed, even without being certain as to why. As a callow 17-year-old I simply understood that I had been tested and found wanting. I felt the same way as we reached the main courses at Flat Three, a new Japanese-Scandinavian-inspired place in London’s Holland Park.
As with all restaurant reviews something was being tested; in this case it was my good taste. I sensed that if I didn’t quite get it, if I didn’t quite manage to enthuse over every last poised, tweezered and distressed mouthful, the failing would be regarded as mine, not theirs. You know those kids at school who were into bands with German names you couldn’t quite pronounce? The ones who implied that if you weren’t into those bands, too, you weren’t cool enough? Eating at Flat Three feels like being fed by them.
The notion behind the place isn’t bad. Normally I would call for the burning and burial of chefs arguing for the fusion of apparently random culinary traditions. Then, once the sentence had been carried out, I would offer to dance all over their graves. Most cack-handed fusion isn’t inventive and it isn’t exciting; it’s just gastronomically illiterate and a little bit desperate. The bringing together of Japanese and modern Skandi culinary ideas does, however, make a modicum of sense. Both can have an aesthetic built on minimalism. Both can go big on aromatics and the cult – and right now it is a cult – of fermentation. Both wouldn’t kick a bit of raw fish out of bed.
The chef Pavel Kanja, who worked for Scott Hallsworth at Japanese restaurant Wabi, investigated all these ideas in the kitchen of his business partner Juliana Kim Moustakas, where they also hosted a few supper club evenings. Flat Three is named after the address which housed that kitchen. The space for their restaurant is a wide, featureless basement with a couple of booths tucked into vaulted arches, and an open kitchen. In there you can watch intense men with beards do things with chopsticks. There’s any colour you like here, as long as it’s beige.
Which stands as a metaphor for the meal. You might enjoy an impressionist landscape, executed only in shades of taupe and dun. You might find it calming and reflective. But a whole bloody wall of them just becomes relentless. We eat good things at Flat Three but nowhere near enough of them, and the repeated flavours clustered around mildly bitter greens, lightly iodine-rich umami notes, a bit of toastiness and a touch of pickle, do not a satisfying meal make.
You can choose between a five- or nine-course tasting menu. Commendably a pair of these are entirely vegetarian, though the kitchen makes its own preferences clear by calling those featuring meat and fish “chef’s choice”. Oh, I see. If you don’t order one of those you are specifically opting to eat something the chef would not himself choose. Tricky blighters, words. We ignore the chef’s preferences and go à la carte.
A selection of nine snacks, in square bowls three down and three across, brings some pleasing things. One of these, a tangle of shredded, caramelised and crisped anchovies – a classic cheap snack food across various bits of Asia – will be the one addictive flavour bomb of the night. It suggests largesse and generosity. Warmed button mushrooms with edamame beans and a miso-based sauce is nice enough. They tell me proudly that they make their own miso, which is nerdy and engaging, but not massively relevant to my enjoyment of it. After that it’s a bit of pickled this and marinated that. It costs £19.
Part of the problem is dish descriptions that don’t follow through on the plate. I’m intrigued by “diver scallops, buttermilk, charred fish bones, pickled kombu and spring beauty”. On the plate it is a couple of nicely seared scallops topped with fur balls of crunchy seaweed. The charred fish bones do not register. Mandolined discs of turnip braised in beurre noisette look pretty but taste of long-stewed vegetables that expect to be ignored on the side of a Sunday roast dinner.
A lump of cold smoked salmon is pleasing where cooked and slippery where raw, which is generally all over. A glass of hot, pale tea on the side adds nothing. I have no idea what “midnight” means in the description of a short rib dish and I resent the notion that I should have to ask. If it refers to when they started cooking it, they should have got going a lot earlier, say around 6pm. The oyster sauce with which it is dressed gives a coating of flavour, but the meat is undercooked.
If you need vigorous knife action to get into long-cooked short rib you know something is up. The accompanying stalks of Japanese knotweed reveal only that, if you were desperate, and your plot overcome by this famous scourge of British flowerbeds, you could eat your way out of your garden. I will never willingly do so again.
Desserts taste like they’ve been made by people who don’t like either dessert or you. Strawberries come on a violent vinegar syrup with a “geranium ice cream” that proves there is a level beyond lavender in the scary aromatics scale marked “old ladies’ knicker drawer”. The exact nature of the ingredients in “toasted rice, sencha ice cream, ama koji porridge, cherry beer sorbet, buckwheat” need not detain us; it’s just a bunch of mildly sweet, slippery textures. Best of the three desserts is a dandelion coffee cream with sweet-sharp sea buckthorn sorbet. Neither has much to say to the other.
The wine list is expensive and weird. There’s a general list of reds and whites and then a selection of Rieslings and Pinot Noirs. Perhaps they insist that these are the two grapes that go best with this food. I am minded to admire their obstinacy and nerdiness; their absolute determination to pursue their own aesthetic. I am minded to do this until we get the bill. Feel free to be nerdy about your food. Explore the intersection of Japan and Scandinavia all you like. But don’t you dare go charging £100 a head for it. Those tasting menus are £79 per person. Starters are in the teens, some mains over £20 and desserts a shocking £9.50. Right now the team at Flat Three are living out their dream. But it feels like they are trying to do so at everyone else’s expense.
Jay’s news bites
■ For those who don’t want their Japanese food adulterated by concepts or fusions, Chisou, with sites in London’s Mayfair and Knightsbridge, is one of those exceptionally reliable outfits that operates under the radar. The menu, like many in Britain, covers a broad spectrum of the Japanese repertoire – sushi, sashimi, grilled dishes, noodles and small plates – and does it solidly and at a reasonable price (chisou restaurant.com).
■ If there was any doubt over the strength of mid-market chains in Britain have a look at the 2014 figures for TGI Fridays: profits are up 22% to £10.7m for 70 sites. Sales are up 7.4% to £174.4m, and there are plans to open 16 new restaurants by the end of 2016.
■ The word ‘authentic’ can cover a multitude of sins. The Cosmo Group, with nearly 20 massive pan-Asian restaurants across the country – some are the biggest in Britain – is to launch a concept called the Authentic World Kitchen. Innovations include a holographic receptionist, which is indeed authentically troubling (cosmo-restaurants.co.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
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