If there were an award for best restaurant name, I would nominate the sleek new Gulch eatery Urban Flats. Disregard the wag on the Scene's food blog Bites who thought it was "country music's newest supergroup." The moniker refers both to the soaring loft-style apartments in the Icon tower, where it is housed, and to the roster of flatbreads that anchors the seasonal menu.
When I recently gave directions to someone joining me for lunch, I loosely described Urban Flats as "the new pizza place across 12th Avenue South from Watermark." Upon arriving at the ground-floor restaurant a few minutes before me, my companion explained to the hostess that he was supposed to meet someone at the pizza place across from Watermark. He asked if he was in the right spot, and she responded simply, "We are a flatbread place." Fortunately, I arrived in time to keep him from turning around and trolling the Gulch in vain for a pizzeria.
Seconds later, comfortably ensconced at a table beneath the constellation of de rigueur pendant lights, my companion pursued the subject with our server. "What exactly is the difference between pizza and flatbreads?" he asked, reminding me of an old joke about the difference between apartments and lofts. To her credit, our server kept her composure as she answered something along these lines: "Well, they're like pizzas, with lots of toppings on them."
Of course, that prompts the circular question, "What exactly is a pizza?" But suffice it to say that Urban Flats traffics predominantly in light whole-wheat dough fired to a thin crispness in a stone-hearth oven, then topped with creative combinations such as turkey, pear and brie and curried chicken with olives and red peppers. A flatbread arrives on an oval wooden tray—reminiscent of a painter's palette—reflecting an artistic approach to combining flavors, colors and textures on each specialty combination.
In contrast to a full-fledged puffy pizza crust, the thin flatbread serves as a delicate vehicle, allowing the flavors to shine rather than swallowing them up like a self-inflating life raft of dough. As a result, the combinations can be vibrant without requiring piles of food to break through the bread, making flatbreads versatile as an individual meal or as a shared appetizer to accompany the wine list at Urban Flats.
Over several visits, we formed a nearly unanimous attachment to the fig-and-prosciutto flatbread topped with a house-made fig jam and crumbles of blue cheese and mozzarella, and it is this balanced medley of sweet fruit, tangy cheese and salty meat that will most likely draw us back to Urban Flats. We also enjoyed the Reuben, a faithful flatbread interpretation of the classic deli sandwich, with thinly shaved corned beef, Swiss, mozzarella and a light sprinkling of sauerkraut and caraway seeds, drizzled with a thick pink trail of Thousand Island dressing.
The 18 flatbreads include the Standby (pepperoni and mozzarella) and a couple of meatless varieties: the Melanzana (topped with eggplant, pesto and mozzarella) and a roasted vegetable flat. When we gravitated toward the Black and Blue (steak, blue cheese, spinach and bell peppers with mozzarella and balsamic glaze), we were delighted to find beef tender enough to bite through without mangling the whole assemblage of crust and toppings.
As much as we enjoyed the flatbread itself—crisp on the edges, faintly chewy in the center and with a rustically granular texture of ground wheat—we found it best to let flatbreads be flatbreads. In other words, don't mess around with the Urban spicy roll, which overplays the flatbread theme by rolling up chicken, sausage, bacon, peppers and onions in a tortilla (a far less interesting bread that is, indeed, flat) and delivering it with a rainbow-shaped tiered tray of dips, which someone at my table coined The Gateway Arch of Condiments. While the presentation was pretty, the overall sandwich was dry and did not benefit from a marriage of the many ingredients. Nor should you be seduced by the dessert flat, which, on our visit, was a s'more-themed palette of marshmallow and chocolate on the sweet whole-wheat crust, a dry confection that was no doubt spawned by the same economics that lure pizza places to craft desserts out of leftover dough.
Urban Flats' non-flatbread fare—salads, sandwiches, starters and entrées—reads like a Best of the Aughts sampler. Seared scallops, lobster mac-and-cheese and sliders all make an appearance, as do cedar-planked salmon and seared tuna salad.
But while many items were predictable, a few were unexpected, such as the steak cooked tableside on a sizzling stone and the shepherd's pie. And some of the most standard-issue fare was surprisingly well executed. Chicken en papillote was memorable not for the breast cooked in parchment, which was impressively plump and juicy, but for its beautiful medley of roasted vegetables—including mushrooms, purple broccoli, Brussels sprouts, yellow cauliflower, carrots, onions and squash. Cooked to perfect non-mushy tenderness and bathed in roasted garlic butter, the wintry harvest outshone virtually everything else on the table.
Slightly overcooked and bland day-boat scallops would never have made us think we were in a coastal city, and the mac-and-cheese was a near-actionable drowning of lobster meat in yellow goo, but Urban Flats delivered a trio of crab cakes that did the company's Florida origins proud. Plump with sweet lump meat and colored with a light patina from searing, the crab cakes arrived with fresh pineapple salsa and an unabashedly spicy sweet dipping glaze, bobbing with chili seeds.
We concluded our meal with a tiny chocolate Bundt cake filled with molten chocolate sauce—far superior to the dry dessert flat.
Located just around the corner from the Scene office, Urban Flats has already earned favor with all manner of appetites, hearty, healthy and veggie among them. Since flatbreads top out at about $10.50, we have found it a relatively affordable lunch outing (sans the wine the staff persistently recommends), with an attractive if slightly spare setting and reliable friendly service. Such professional packaging is little surprise, given that the Florida-based company was founded by an alumna of Disney and brought to Nashville by Henry Hillenmeyer, a veteran of Cooker Restaurants and the Wendy's chain.
The surprise came when I asked my dining companions if they would drive back to the Gulch for dinner at Urban Flats. "I love the food," one person said, "but I don't get in my car and drive to dinner at any of those suburbany-feeling places."
Suburbany? But this is Urban Flats. It's in the Gulch, for Pete's sake. It's full of stained concrete, glass and industrial-height ceilings. You think it feels suburbany?
Well, yeah, maybe a little—only because everything at Urban Flats is new and still has that just-add-water-and-pendant-lights sheen to it, like so much suburban strip-mall architecture. But the restaurant isn't a phony. It doesn't pretend to reclaim an old industrial space, as do so many new projects—which reminds again me of that joke about the difference between lofts and apartments.
Instead, it's just a new, clean restaurant in a new, clean building in a newly cleaned-up neighborhood. As the Gulch continues to develop its own character and personality, Urban Flats will serve as a sturdy anchor for the new urban dwellers.
Wait a second, you ask—what is the difference between lofts and apartments? As with all the other solutions to life's questions, you'll find the answer on the Scene's food blog, Bites.
Urban Flats opens daily at 11 a.m.
Email cfox@nashvillescene.com, or call 615-844-9408.
