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Flat Three restaurant review: thought-provoking food
Holland Park restaurant specialises in ‘ferments and flavours’, but what does that really mean?
Inconspicuously nestled in a downstairs room on Holland Park’s high street is Flat Three - a restaurant that wants, intriguingly, to tell a story with its food. The restaurant's team of chefs works with ingredients that are sourced both locally and from around the world and ‘reshapes’ them into surprising and quite often spectacular dishes.
Menu items that could sound slightly mundane anywhere else (sand carrot, jus and pickled wild carrot) are transformed into dishes that really pack a punch. And at Flat Three, vegetables aren’t just a side dish they are the star of the show. The roasted celery, walnut and meju starter somehow creates a blue cheese flavour, but without a crumb of cheese in sight.
There is magic in this cookery. Black garlic is left to slow cook and self caramelise for two to three weeks until it becomes a delicious creamy treat that will have you licking the plate.
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But the star of the show is the restaurant’s cabbage, deonjang and mussels dish. The sauce might not sound like much - ‘mussel and smoked fish bone stock emulsified with lacto-fermented butter from recycled whey’ - but given the opportunity, this reviewer would happily drink a vat of it with a straw.
One dish left me stumped however: the dandelion, porcini and buckwheat dessert. The pudding is almost like a plant-based creme brulee and as impressive as it is in concept and execution, it is not delicious. Perhaps it would be tastier if you didn’t know the ingredients as you ate it; my brain was telling my tongue that a porcini jelly was not meant for dessert.
Matched wines and sake have been carefully selected here, so it is worth going for the pairing menu. Every choice is surprising and genuinely adds to the dishes.
Flat Three offers thoughtful food, but it is all approachable. It isn’t often that you go to a restaurant that is difficult to categorise, but that is Flat Three’s strength. Is it Korean? Is it Scandinavian? The fact that it doesn’t fit into a single box makes it all the more intriguing.
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