Flat Three

Join us for drinks and food at Flat Three in Holland Park. Offering gourmet tasting and pairing menus in our comfortable and relaxed restaurant.

Visit Flat Three Restaurant in Holland Park - Flat Three

http://flatthree.london

Flat Three, restaurant review: 'Hardcore food spods should be all of a

It would have been the last straw, had Flat Three not been the kind of place to have already taken the last straw, burnt and freeze-dried it, and served it crumbled over a pickled sea urchin.

Born of an experimental supperclub collaboration which matured into a real-life restaurant, Flat Three's none-more-foodie concept is a mash-up of Japanese, Nordic and Korean influences, helter-skeltering across continents with an open mind and brimming foraging bag.

Head chef and co-founder Pavel Kanja, an alumnus of Scott Hallsworth's Wabi, does things the hard way; his menu is spiky with charred fish bones and rape- leaf water kimchee.

A typical dish reads "alkaline udon, lemon thyme, onsen quail egg, baked salt koji, sea urchin butter".

All the Michelin-friendly frottage, the fervid introductions of new dishes as "a brilliant idea from the chef", the donning of a single white glove, Michael Jackson-style, to clear our plates, makes for a claustrophobic night.

Flat Three restaurant review in The American, the magazine for ...

In the early '80s I worked in two Japanese restaurants in New York (they allowed child labour then) and came to love both the food and aesthetic.

Chef Pavel Kanja trained in a number of Japanese restaurants.

It excels in food preservation and fermentation, important elements of Pavel’s kitchen.

Pavel is a vegan and offers both plant based and mixed tasting menus at £69, an alcoholic pairing at £49 and non-alcoholic at £33.

Pure Zibibbo (Muscat of Alexandria) grape, it was dry, packed with mineral, intense citrus, peach and a touch of bitter at the finish.

Flat Three, restaurant review: 'Hardcore food spods should be all of a

It would have been the last straw, had Flat Three not been the kind of place to have already taken the last straw, burnt and freeze-dried it, and served it crumbled over a pickled sea urchin.

Born of an experimental supperclub collaboration which matured into a real-life restaurant, Flat Three's none-more-foodie concept is a mash-up of Japanese, Nordic and Korean influences, helter-skeltering across continents with an open mind and brimming foraging bag.

Head chef and co-founder Pavel Kanja, an alumnus of Scott Hallsworth's Wabi, does things the hard way; his menu is spiky with charred fish bones and rape- leaf water kimchee.

A typical dish reads "alkaline udon, lemon thyme, onsen quail egg, baked salt koji, sea urchin butter".

All the Michelin-friendly frottage, the fervid introductions of new dishes as "a brilliant idea from the chef", the donning of a single white glove, Michael Jackson-style, to clear our plates, makes for a claustrophobic night.

Flat Three: restaurant review | Jay Rayner | Life and style | The ...

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.

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.

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”.

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.

■ 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.

Restaurant Review – Flat Three

Just before Christmas, I visited Flat Three – a restaurant born from an experimental supper club, serving Japanese-Nordic fusion food with a touch of Korean influence, near Holland Park station – exclusively serviced by the Central line.

Inside, an open kitchen greets customers, filled with seemingly calm chefs plating blocks of gelatinous tofu, picking fronds from comely edible flowers or grilling expensive cuts of beef.

Crystal clear with a sapid taste of cauliflower, this particular element demonstrates the level of gustatory skill that’s expected when charging £26 for an otherwise unaccompanied fillet of fish.

This beef is of such astounding quality that even Wagyu ‘yakinuku’ (£30) cut from the short rib, a considerably less expensive cut, is tender when served medium-rare, all without the necessity of long, slow cooking.

Yet with such quality of produce and flagrant respect for ingredients showcased – most food sampled is worth saving up for, not to mention braving the abhorrent Central Line.

Flat Three in Kensington | Restaurant review – The Upcoming

Here in its Holland Park building there are three options available: a la carte sharing plates, a normal tasting menu and a plant-based tasting menu.

For the majority of what’s on offer the plant-based plates match the regular ones hit for hit, packing an impressive punch into vegetable dishes like Fermented Cabbage Wrapped in Chard with Celeriac and Onion Broth and linseed noodles, king cabbage and gochujang with a fermented chilli paste and bay leaf oil.

The only slight disappointment is a sand carrot dish (smoked sand carrot, miso and Cornish seaweed), which made three mistakes: its first was being the only dish I had all night that looked like it might have come from a more traditional classical restaurant, putting it rather at odds with the rest of the menu; second, the vast majority of carrots have a notorious reputation for not tasting of very much; and finally, the regular menu at this point served a fillet of sea bass delicately poached in a fermented cauliflower broth infused with a little ginger and garlic and served with ramson leaves, which was so good as to make me not pay much attention to the carrots.

Careful thought has clearly gone into the menu with intelligent decisions taking what might be standard fine-dining dishes and taking them in a new direction.

Here, it is served in a large enough quantity so as to provide a vegetable element to the course, giving an equal weighting to the scallop and the vegetables and balancing the dish beautifully.

Flat Three | Restaurants in Holland Park, London

An expensive restaurant that takes inspiration from Japan, Korea and Scandinavia for both its look and its menu.

But this isn’t a Japanese koan, or a haiku.

Ikejime is a Japanese fisherman’s technique for paralysing a fish using a spike driven into the spine, and no one could tell us how it had been done to our turbot.

Korean, Scandinavian and Japanese influences collide on this menu like a Harajuku fashion victim’s dress sense.

Less impressive were the three tough little cubes of tuna that were fibrous and ridiculously small, costing £14 as a starter on the à la carte menu; true Japanese o-toro should be melt-in-the mouth, not chewy.