LITTLE ROCK — What Next!?
Very few restaurant reviews are easy to write. They involve more than just showing up at the establishment, consuming a meal or two and recapping the experience to the reader - they often require considerable research before, during and after the meal.
And that’s when the review process is going well.
Which was not the case with Hillcrest’s Next! Bistro & Bar.
Our review of Next! is a tale of frustration, though not futility; of dogged persistence in the face of unpredictable obstacles (on the part of the restaurant and the reviewer); and finally, of at least partial, though possibly temporary, triumph.
Christy Smiley-France and Ashlee Long, a former bartender at Diversion, which is what occupied the Kavanaugh Boulevard storefront before Next! (and after Lemon, A Crepe & Coffee Company), opened Next! last fall.
They’ve redone the decor - the large bar dominates the entranceway; toward the back there are black-lacquer tables and hardwood chairs with white vinyl seats,all dimly lighted by pin spots (which somebody kept lowering throughout at least one of our meals), plus a sort of conversation pit with a flatscreen TV, with total restaurant seating of about 40, plus a party-slash-private back dining room.
It’s now a nice little neighborhood bar, which is something that neighborhood certainly needs, with a small kitchen that, when we finally got to sample it, turns out some pretty decent food.
But getting even to that point was more than half the fun. A few months ago, we popped in and sampled a tapa/appetizer (a black bean pico de gallo , still on the menu) and sandwich (a very different so-called Philly Cheese Steak sandwich, no longer on the menu, which came with a kicky, kinky Southwest-Cajun-spiced mayo that made it more like something from Philadelphia, Miss., thanPhiladelphia, Pa.). We also had a charcuterie (meat and cheese) plate for “dessert” left over from a failed-to-arrive participant in a wine-tasting going on in the back party room.
We learned then that chef Matthew Gatlin, a protege of Donny Ferneau Jr. (and an alumnus of his kitchen when it used to be Ferneau, just a couple of doors down), was redoing the menu and changing the focus from tapas to more of a full-service kitchen. Sigh.
A couple of weeks later, the establishment got walloped very hard by the Christmas snowstorm - power was out for a few days, food in the fridge and freezer had to be tossed, and a combination of post-storm cash flow difficulties and the difficulty of getting restocked from area food service suppliers.
So we dropped in on Next! on a couple of occasions over a period of a couple of weeks, and found that while the bar part was open, they weren’t serving food.
On a subsequent Wednesday night we once again sidled into Next!
Were they serving food?
Yes!
Except … Gatlin , who also does all the cooking in Next!’s tiny one-man kitchen, was out sick.
NOOooo!!!
Luckily, General ManagerPeter Webre, who was also tending bar and waiting tables that night (the place is chronically understaffed, by the way; regardless of how many or how few customers were on the premises, there was always one less employee than need demanded), also cooked our dinner.
Which, though it took a total of three hours from sit-down to exit, was superb. (Webre, another Ferneau alumnus, is the nephew and protege of Peter Brave, so we shouldn’t have been surprised.)
But … how were we supposed to know whether it was in any way typical?
Sure, we thoroughly enjoyed our Shrimp Pasta ($18), a half-dozen firm, tasty grilled shrimp on practically al dente bowtie pasta in a to-die-for gouda-cream sauce. We enjoyed even more Webre’s appetizer-amuse-bouche version; he threw together a couple of those shrimp with some garlic, a splash of citrus and some red onions in a dill cream sauce (one member of our party initially wanted it substituted for the Shrimp Pasta entree, but settled instead for taking some home.
Webre also turned out a pretty decent Pesto Chicken Parmesan ($18) entree, a good-size chicken breast, moderately moist, with a thick pesto-Parmesan coating-crust and served over sauteed red onions and excellent, plump mushroom slices.
He also made our zippy basil hummus ($6.50) with some of that pesto, not just from scratch (as the menu promises), but at our order, so it was pretty darn fresh.The black bean pico ($6.50), listed on the menu as Black Bean Salsa, consists of firm blackbeans, corn and chopped onions, and accompanying chips that aren’t really the best tool for getting it out of the bowl.
So it took yet another visit to get our food from Gatlin, who, we are happy to say, finally fulfilled Next!’s long-unfulfilled promise.
From his hands - yes, he brought us our food out of the kitchen himself, because there wasn’t anybody else to wait on us - we took a goodsize bowl of Next!’s thick, rich cheese dip ($6.50), with bits of basil that added some texture and which we just caught the edge of in the flavor; a top-notch smoked-salmon bruschetta with gouda on toast points ($5.75, a vestige from an old menu); and a pair of soft-tortilla Salmon Tacos ($14.50 was a bit steep, but they were fabulous) made with the black-bean pico heavily drizzled with the Southwest-Cajun-mayonnaise.
To complete the evening’s “salmon sweep,” we ordered Gatlin’s nightly special, a good-size grilled salmon plank served over edamame in a Dijon-Cajun sauce that was equally delicious as cold leftovers.
We also snapped up the last steak in the kitchen, a 6-ounce tenderloin filet ($25) topped with sauteed red onions and mushrooms that really made it worthwhile (Gatlin, working hard to fulfill a request that the steak not be bloody, turned it out closer to medium than the medium rare we requested, but it was still fairly tender). The Down South Mac & Cheese on the side turned out to be more gouda-cream-sauced bowtie pasta, and the seasonal vegetables were zucchini and squash, which Gatlin, rather than turning them into the ubiquitous medley, instead stacked prettily and accentedthe stacks with black pepper.
Let’s hope that whatever’s next for Next!, the folks who run it can build on what they have. Webre says he’s leaving Next! and heading for Destin, Fla., to work for Louis Petit, father and son, at Louis Louis. That won’t help the staffing problem. For the place to survive even in the short run, there’s going to have to be enough personnel on hand to cover the customers - at the very least, somebody behind the bar, somebody in the kitchen and somebody on the floor.
Next! Bistro & Bar
Address: 2611 Kavanaugh
Blvd., Little Rock
Hours: 5 p.m.-2 a.m. Tues
day-Friday, 5 p.m.-1 a.m.
Saturday; kitchen closes
a lot earlier than the bar
does
Cuisine: Eclectic
Credit cards: V, MC, AE, D
Alcoholic beverages: Full
bar
Reservations: No
Wheelchair accessible: Yes
Carryout: Yes
(501) 663-6398
Weekend, Pages 31 on 02/14/2013