Skye's has little limit on food options

The Rustic Italian panini comes with three meats and locally produced cheese between slices of sourdough, plus a side of French-style roasted potatoes at Skye’s Little Bistro.
The Rustic Italian panini comes with three meats and locally produced cheese between slices of sourdough, plus a side of French-style roasted potatoes at Skye’s Little Bistro.

The 300-400 blocks of East Third Street are rapidly becoming a small-scale foodie paradise, adding a couple of recently opened taprooms (one centered on Tex-Mex, the other on hot dogs, German and Polish sausages) and the widely anticipated resurrection of a barbecue legend to anchor eateries Dugan's Pub and Andina Cafe.

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The Duck Confit entree comes with gnocchi and seasonal, local vegetables at Skye’s Little Bistro.

Wedged most appropriately between Dugan's and Stratton's Market, a high-end small grocery and liquor store, is the new Skye's Little Bistro, whose namesake, Skye Stratton-Ward, is appropriately wedged between Dugan Pub's Don Dugan and Stratton's Market's Tasha Stratton, whose daughter she is.

Skye’s Little Bistro

Address: 405 E. Third St., Little Rock

Hours: 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday

Cuisine: Sandwiches, charcuterie plates, bistro entrees with a distinct French accent

Credit cards: V, MC, AE, DC

Alcohol: No license; wine “tastings” available with meals

Reservations: No

Wheelchair accessible: Yes, through next-door grocery

Carryout: Yes

(501) 791-6700

Stratton-Ward therefore brings a lifetime of at least in-house kitchen experience to the table -- actually half a dozen or so small, cute, glass-topped indoor wicker tables, plus a couple outside in the bistro space that briefly housed the Clean Eatery (which a ways back moved to the former Damgoode Pies to-go/delivery operation space on Rodney Parham Road). It's all very cozy, with seating for about 16 at those indoor tables plus bar seating for nearly another dozen.

Stratton-Ward sort of achieves the street-side cafe atmosphere for which she's striving -- absent the zillion-horsepower, four-barrel vent-a-hood over the stove and oven (which reminds us intensely of Terry Gilliam's dystopian, duct-work-dominated movie Brazil). Luckily, nobody turned that on while we were on the premises; the sonic disturbance we encountered involved a little device that beeped every time somebody came through the doors, not just of the bistro but of next-door Dugan's, which went off early, often and annoyingly. Perhaps if you sit around long enough, you get used to it.

Skye's short but surprisingly broad Mediterranean menu has a distinct French accent and features a lot of local ingredients. It's divided into "Panini" -- half a dozen grilled sandwiches with a range of fillings; "Planchettes (Tapas)," four cheese and/or charcuterie boards; and "Bistro Plates," a trio of large-portion, decently priced entrees.

We suspect we made the wrong choice, panini-wise, between the Croque Monsieur ($9.99), ham and Gruyere layered on toasted sourdough, and the Rustic Italian ($9.99) -- a pleasant sandwich, but we weren't looking for pleasant. We wanted the zip we expected from the menu description: shaved prosciutto di Parma, pistachio mortadella and Finocchiona (a Tuscan fennel-centered variety of salami), plus Kent Walker's Garlic Montasio cheese, ricotta horseradish spread and roasted peppers on toasted sourdough.

It was disappointingly bland. We tasted no horseradish and sensed no roasted peppers, either by flavor or mouth feel -- possibly the kitchen simply left one or both of them off. Nor did we get much garlic flavor from the cheese, certainly not as much as there was in the accompanying, nicely roasted Pomme de terre Saldaises (French-style potatoes; grilled romaine with balsamic vinaigrette is the other, regrettably unsampled, option).

We will certainly rave, however, about our entrees. The Duck Confit ($16.99) is a skin-on leg and thigh, slow-cooked in its own fat, which infuses it with additional flavor while making the meat almost melt-in-your mouth tender and also cooks out a lot of the fat you normally get with duck. We would have liked to have had more of the really melt-in-your-mouth, Parisian-style herb gnocchi that comes tossed with a mix of seasonal, local vegetables, including almost equally tender chunks of asparagus, on the side.

The same vegetable mix, minus the gnocchi, came atop the first-rate Lasagna al Forno ($12.99), more of a French or northern Italian style, blending bechamel and Arkansas-made Bonta Toscana Marinara, layered with firm noodles and a lot of mozzarella. (This and the $7.99 Caprese-like Manda's Maters panini -- mozzarella, basil and roasted tomato saute on sourdough -- are Skye's two vegetarian options.)

If you're looking for something light, go for one of the share-able Planchettes ($12.99). The Tour de France offers a wedge of Camembert (just soft enough to be spreadable with some difficulty), a trio of pickled apricots, a smear of champagne mustard, some cute little cornichons centered on a pickled pearl onion, yellow-buttered baguette slices, a few shreds of duck confit, slices of thick duck prosciutto (the texture of which Intrepid Companion found off-putting), some Gruyere slices and a little cup of not-quite-pate-like pork rillettes. In place of the menu-promised muscadine gastrique we got a small ladle of balsamic vinaigrette. There's plenty of food here; order it as an appetizer or small entree for two or a decent-size entree for one; consume from left to right, right to left or hunt-and-peck, as you prefer. Other planchette options: the more Italian-focused Mamma Mia; Arkansas Love, with fried catfish strips, pork shoulder, sweet cornbread, local cheeses and pepper jelly served with a white barbecue sauce; and the Say Cheese, a spread of Kent Walker-produced and imported cheeses.

For Saturday brunch, Skye's serves some extraordinary crepes -- two sweet (strawberry and Bananas Foster), two savory (smoked salmon and ham and Gruyere), accompanied by a couple of fresh berries. Our Smoked Salmon crepe ($8.99) was a moderately thin, moderately sweet pancake wrapped around a large quantity of two kinds of smoked salmon -- shredded mixed with bits of lox, topped lightly with a sort of cream sauce dusted with nutmeg. The Bananas Foster ($7.99) turned out to be much less sweet than we expected (a plus) but was equally filling.

One of the guys who works at Stratton's smokes a couple of dozen racks of dry-rub ribs ($25) on the weekends for customers who reserve and pick them up for home consumption. We wheedled an unclaimed rack out of him (well, actually he offered) and made two-plus meals out of it. The meat is outstandingly moist and remarkably tender (not quite falling off the bone, but close enough not to require that we just say "gnaw"), deliciously smoky and nicely spiced. (You can, if you prefer, add your own rub or barbecue sauce; Stratton's sells the now-available pre-bottled Shack sauce.)

Something to do with Stratton's being a liquor store as well as a grocery precludes Stratton-Ward from getting an on-premise liquor or wine-and-beer license, but she has developed a work-around: She offers "tastings," so diners have the option of whatever they've opened for sampling on any given day -- red, white, rose and even (shhh!) a liqueur.

At no point during our research did we encounter anything like a crowd or even a small rush at Skye's, so the very high level of friendly attention from the staff may have been due, in large part, to they're having not much else to do. Stratton-Ward served us at dinner; on a subsequent lunch visit, our waiter was an actual Parisian, a fellow one month into a family related move to Arkansas -- and a real enhancement to the bistro's French accent.

Weekend on 06/02/2016

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