Where I recommend a restaurant that needs no help getting good reviews, Flock & Fowl

While it is, compared to LA, NYC or Hong Kong, a small city, Las Vegas is plenty big.  Big enough that it is hard to keep up with all the culinary happenings for free. Flock and Fowl is a culinary happening, to be sure, and it only opened in 2015, I feel like I have missed out by not getting in on the ground floor.  If writing about restaurants was my job, I would have found it sooner.  Thanks a lot, Obama.

As the title above suggests, I haven't heard anything negative about Flock & Fowl.  I have never met anyone who has eaten there that didn't think it was great.  This review, then, is totally unnecessary.  As Flock & Fowl is already beloved, my adoring words will only serve to enrich the rich.  By my own (unpublished) ethos, I should be looking for an underrepresented restaurant with great food to promote. (I note, ironically, that I write this post in the same week that Chick Fil A opened two locations in Las Vegas).

But I won't.  I do this for free and now that I have eaten at Flock & Fowl twice, I want to tell you about it.

In the tradition of hipster-ish cuisine, Flock and Fowl is predictably in a too-small space in a generally undesirable location (between I-15 and Las Vegas Boulevard on Sahara).  It also promotes an overly obscure cuisine - chicken from the island of Hainan in China.  So, having established the many reasons to cock one's eye at Flock & Fowl (because we love to ridicule the hipster), let's do the right thing and look at it objectively (and subjectively, since I don't have an empirical formula for goodness).

This is the menu.  The glare obscures some of it.  However, the house rules are more interesting than the menu.  Most important - your entire party must be "here and happy" in order to be served/seated.  I haven't seen them have to enforce that rule, but it would be fun to watch as it probably requires drugs or kittens (how would you enforce happiness?).  

The first item on the menu is the poached chicken.  It comes with a poached breast, rice and garnishes/sauces.  In the bowl is a "perfect" egg (this is an extra, it doesn't come with the meal).  It is an egg that was cooked in its shell at 163 degrees celsius for 45 minutes.  It is mostly like a poached egg, but it is not a poached egg.  It is a PERFECT egg.  This picture, aside from the red sauce to the right, looks only slightly less bland than gruel.  The chicken is just poached chicken.  The bland appearance and description of this dish, though, is what inspired me to write this post.  And, to fully  explain myself, I must, as always, digress.

I have been cooking scrambled eggs for myself for about 30 years.  I am cooking towards an ideal.  There is, in my mind, a perfection that could be attained in my scrambled egg cooking.  I would posit that in my scrambled egg cooking, I am seeking to create something that is nearly exactly like the Platonic "form" of a scrambled egg.  The "form" exists outside of space and time, but it is the essence that all scrambled eggs represent and approximate.  I have experimented with milk, cream, butter, slow cooking, fast cooking, Chrissy Teigen's method, Ian McKellan's method and the Cook's Illustrated method.  I feel that my eggs have begun to become a better representation of that  Platonic form, though I have not  yet achieved it.  In spite of this, I feel that the form not only exists, but that I will recognize it when I find it.  That I feel the presence of the form, is evidence of its transcendent nature.

I am only a philosopher insomuch as Wikipedia can make one of me.  However, I feel like the simple first menu item at Flock & Fowl is an attempt to create in this plane of existence, the Platonic form of poached chicken.  For purposes of culinary talk, a short form for the Platonic ideal of poached chicken could be referred to as the standard.  That is, this is the standard to which all poached chickens would seek to recreate.  If you are an engineer, the ASTM testing protocols would be intended to show whether or not you have created a reference poached chicken as opposed to some other less than exemplary version.

So, that chicken. It was moist, it was tender, it was good.  The sauces were not over abundant, and why should they be.  They are intended to accompany the very template from which God himself created the poached chicken.  How much can the lily be gilded?  I asked for some sriracha and Jenny (who actually tries to learn the names of her customers) happily brought some, but only after reminding me that there was a sambal already on the plate.  Once reminded, I didn't need the sriracha.

My friend got the breaded chicken fingers and a perfect egg.  It also got high marks.

Here is the perfect egg in action, perfecting all over my rice.  

In  my prior visit, the visit during which I apparently forgot my phone had a camera, I had their "indo fried rice" which included bacon.  We a also had some wings.

I've already gone on too long on the philosophy stuff to maintain your attention much longer so let me sum up:

All this talk about forms is only to point out that this restaurant is not out to dazzle you (although the wings and indo fried rice are dazzling).  This restaurant's devotion to a simple, superbly executed menu is almost religious.  They practice an arcane type of culinary mysticism that generates really well done food. I feel like Flock & Fowl are saying to me "Here is the potential of what is, in essence, a boiled chicken breast.  This is only attainable by ascetic chefs who have taken a vow of silence and own no material goods." But, there is little magic in it.  By using really good chickens, really careful preparations and carefully calculated quantities and types of sauces/garnishes, you can eat a chicken the way God would.  That is, in its perfect form.  I can only assume that if there is magic in Flock & Fowl, it comes from love.

Hat tip to Plato.