There might be more small plate restaurants in NYC than branches of Duane Reade. But, as Neil Stewart discovers while working his way through the menu at Flinders Lane in the East Village, there are small plates and there are small plates
I love Flinders Lane. You can get the most fantastic coffee known to man. You can eat a three-course meal composed entirely of desserts. You can browse Melbourne’s best record shop, buy the highest-end varieties of Melburnians’ beloved black clothes, admire the singular all-cardboard interior of Aesop’s flagship store…
Oh, wait, hang on – not that Flinders Lane? The one on New York’s Avenue A? Well, scrap all that. This is a restaurant that can bring a whole street on the other side of the world into disrepute. And I’d been so excited to visit. On Lexington Street, Little Collins has imported a little bit of Melbourne coffee culture into New York; here, I thought, feeling a pang of nostalgia on browsing the Flinders Lane NYC website (with its evocative picture of, er, Hosier Lane), might be the next best thing to the impractical business of flying out to my favourite city for dinner.
But no.
I’m so over this pretence that offering meagre portions of food “to share” is anything other than a way of maximising profit
First of all, let’s talk about small plates. Like those other disincentives restaurants insist on putting in place to inconvenience their paying guests (see also: table-turning, where you’re permitted a mere 90 minutes to get through brunch before you’re turfed out, back onto the street where you earlier stood in line for an hour meekly awaiting your unreservable table), it is impossible to see this as anything other than blatant greed on the restaurant’s part. I’m so over this pretence that offering meagre portions of food “to share” is anything other than a way of maximising profit. You know bad things are on the way when you’re assured that you should order a great stack of different dishes “so everyone can try a bit of everything”. You know what’s nicer? Presenting substantial portions that represent actual value for money, and leaving decisions about whether to share the dishes to the diners themselves. At Flinders Lane, the plates are so small that divying up a serving of fluke carpaccio with black beans is a process tantamount to performing keyhole surgery.
We were advised to have about half a dozen plates among three of us. (We initially picked five, then added a sixth in a forlorn attempt to make ourselves feel full.) What there was of what we had ranged from good to excellent; tandoori rabbit, in particular, was beautifully tender, with a great, subtle grilled flavour. It came with approximately three square centimetres of naan bread and a small heap of julienned green papaya. The baby squid – two clusters of tiny tentacles and a handful of ringlets – came perfectly cooked (it’s easy to get this wrong) and the slab of grilled watermelon they sat on was an unusual and clever thing to pair with seafood. Here’s that legendary “Mod Oz” fusion of Asian-Pacific flavours and good local produce, done really well. But oh! The servings are little. How much profit is this place making on that squid dish? The ingredients must cost all of about a buck. To charge $18 (plus tax, plus tip) for the result smacks of – let me use the Australian vernacular – “taking the f–cking piss”. As for the chopsticks inexplicably provided with the first couple of dishes (you try eating a slice of watermelon with those), they’d be better bringing us microscopes to be able to see what we were eating.
He stared at me reproachfully, in the manner one might regard pond-scum that had revealed an unwelcome ability to answer back
The room is spacious and well set out, with tables not too close together; in common with innumerable other restaurants, some element of soft furnishing would cut down the clattering ambient noise, which bounces off the half-tiled, slate-grey walls. The music – an ever-mutating mashup of indie and pop tunes – was smart, fun, and well-judged. The fun element stopped there, though; our server, who bore an unnerving resemblance to Vincent Price in full Prince of Darkness mode, seemed to actively resent taking our order. We asked about desserts. “There are three. Ice cream. Coconut. Bread pudding. Watermelon jelly.” He fell silent. “Is that it?” I asked, semi-joshingly. He stared at me reproachfully, in the manner one might regard pond-scum that had revealed an unwelcome ability to answer back. Under other circumstances we might have taken it upon ourselves to try and charm him, or at least to make him crack a smile (we’re masochists that way), but not here. Had he delivered the minuscule servings of food even slightly less joylessly, we might even have been convinced we were having a good time.
I cannot believe anyone accustomed to New York’s generous-to-a-fault portions is going to come away from Flinders Lane satisfied. We three wandered out onto Avenue A afterwards, $300 worse off and about as hungry as we had been on arriving. My advice to Flinders Lane: drop this silly sharing-small-plates gimmick and serve this food in the decent proportions its quality merits. My advice to would-be diners: eat before you come, or be prepared to hunt down some late-night pork buns at Fat Buddha, two blocks away, afterwards. My advice to the real Flinders Lane in Melbourne: start looking into whether anyone’s ever sued a restaurant for defaming the good name of an entire street. C
Flinders Lane NYC, 162 Avenue A, New York 10009 USA
212-228 6900; flinderslane-nyc.com
