It's a clever idea: Open an upscale restaurant that serves flatbreads topped with cheeses, sauces and meats, make it feel trendy and modern, and never, ever use the word "pizza".
This is the formula of Urban Flats, and judging by the crowds that cram the Florida-based chain's Nashville location nightly, there's something to it.
Aside from drawing curious diners, the place has become a hot spot in the Gulch neighborhood in downtown Nashville. With tweaks to the recipes and wine list, Urban Flats would feel like it's more about the food and less about the concept.
For example, many of these non-pizzas (or flatbreads, as they're called) come with a default layer of mozzarella. Why, when there's a much better cheese pairing within reach? And if this is not a pizza place, why have we seen many of these combinations of toppings before at, well, pizza places?
One could argue that this is nothing more than a gussied-up pie parlor, but Urban Flats does make some very interesting food that a pizza joint, no matter how upscale, has yet to match in this city.
Take the Reuben flatbread: Capped with Swiss, brightened with sauerkraut and fleshed out with corned beef, it's better than its sandwich ancestor. Playful drizzles of French dressing and a sprinkle of caraway seeds take it even higher.
The balsamic glaze alone is reason enough to order the Black and Blue flatbread, but you've also got a mash-up of roast beef, bleu cheese and roasted tomatoes to look forward to.
The foundation of each flatbread is the same: a thin, somewhat sweet whole-wheat dough that can embody chewy and crusty in the space of millimeters. How it pairs so well with wildly different flavor groupings is a mystery, but it does.
The same can't be said for all that mozzarella. It doesn't do anything at all for the Moroccan flatbread, which also suffered from over-spiced curried chicken. Sheep's-milk feta or perhaps a yogurt sauce would have been a better choice.
Feta in place of mozzarella also would have improved the Black and Blue, and by the time I got around to trying the fig-and-prosciutto flatbread, I asked for that substitution. It made for an interesting tussle with the fig-jam base and the too-sparse shreds of cured ham, but in the end there was just too much fig.
The best dish I tried on my visits came not from the flatbread menu, but from the appetizer roster: the "urban crostini" with cubed butternut squash, roast garlic, lots of bitter arugula and that same marvelous balsamic glaze from the Black and Blue flatbread. The interplay of the sweet, savory and bitter ingredients were near-sublime, and darting in and out were these spicy candied pumpkin seeds that left me kind of wild-eyed.
Nothing else I tried as a starter came anywhere close. There was a canned-tasting tomato bisque that was almost rescued by a warm berg of creamy goat cheese. The "urban spicy roll," a tortilla stuffed with Italian sausage, onion, peppers and bacon, was pleasing enough on its own, but it came mismatched with a quartet of sauces which included a standard-tasting ranch and honey mustard.
For dessert, I recommend the chocolate lava cake, which is precisely what this oft-botched sweet should be. The sponge cake was as moist as it could be, and the bittersweet lifeblood that ran from the core was delightful.
But overall, a less-than-meets-the-eye reality is what I've taken away from eating there. There are some intriguing dishes at fair prices (Most flats, which are more than enough for one person as a whole meal, are under $10), but at the end of each meal I felt like I'd been spun more than I'd been served.
