THE DAY THE DINER STOOD STILL: Flying Star Café
By Nouf Al-Qasimi, for The New Mexican
Flying Star Café
500 Market St., Suite 110, in the Railyard, 216-3939
6 a.m.-10 p.m. Sunday-Thursday,
6 a.m.- midnight Friday-Saturday
Breakfast served until close
Beer & wine
Takeout
Noise level: extreme
Handicapped-accessible
Credit cards, no local checks
The Short Order
With most of Santa Fe's late-serving restaurants and nightlife already peppered along Guadalupe Street, the Railyard District is changing the city's center of gravity. So far, Flying Star Café is not twinkling. Overall, the food and baked goods are impressive in girth but not much else. Recommended: stick to the basics -- pot pie, coffee, and BLT -- and adjust your expectations.
REVIEW:
Despite having beamed into town from a neighboring mothership (Albuquerque has seven locations, Bernalillo hosts one) Santa Fe's newest visitor, Flying Star Café, is alien around here. Still, its style is well suited to the similarly spare, otherworldly landscape of the new Railyard Park and Railyard Plaza. Inside, Flying Star Café is a caricature of generic, '50s-era science-fiction aesthetics: manufactured, but upbeat.
In the sci-fi classic Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, a close encounter with a huge extraterrestrial causes the protagonist to grow into a giantess. Upon leaving Flying Star Café after dinner one night, I, too, felt that I had experienced a harrowing encounter with an enormous alien -- in this case, a slice of lemon meringue pie: tough, leaden crust filled with pale lemon curd and crowned with a bloated mantle of meringue as sweet and stiff as marshmallow fluff.
Those of you craving a dinner of French toast or a breakfast of lo mein can order either or both here; anything on the menu can be had at any time. The Rise & Shine Sandwich sounded like a winner, something difficult to mess up and easy to enjoy: scrambled eggs and melted cheddar on a "crisp homemade English muffin." As it turns out, Flying Star's has difficulties delivering on its promises. My breakfast sandwich was just a taste of disappointments to come.
There was nothing remotely crisp about the English "muffin, " which was closer to a flabby ciabatta roll. And the cheese was an orange travesty; its greater half adhered to the plate like a molten slug. An anemic wisp of bacon perched atop the dish. Most remarkably, the eggs -- not scrambled as described, but a sort of half-committed omelette -- were extremely oversalted. The turkey-sausage-bacon-green-chile gravy was similarly brackish. It's a problem I don't often encounter. I ordered a pancake on the side, and at $5.48 plus tax, I expected it to be served hot (it wasn't) or, at the very least, to be served with real maple syrup (it wasn't). The turkey sausage that accompanied this dish, however, was delicious.
The Moroccan Medley and the Acapulco salads were OK but bland. The Mediterranean Nosh comes with a tasty yet unorthodox hummus. Oddly, it's served with triangles of toasted nine-grain sandwich bread rather than pita, which I found noteworthy for a café that promotes making everything from scratch, including bagels. The Greek Goddess salad lacked snap, wearing an avocado vinaigrette that was simultaneously dull and hyperacidic. An inexplicable smattering of battered and fried feta balls are the featured ingredient here, but from a technical standpoint, the golden tots are a flop; the feta's firm texture remains unaltered by its bath in hot oil, and the nuggets are too small to stay warm once they've been plated.
Indeed, when it comes to knowing when to gild the lily and when to show restraint, Flying Star seems to have its wires crossed. A universally applied insistence on unwarranted excess defines the eating experience here. Cases in point: the only available pancakes also contain blueberries, and all of the teas offered are perfumed with fruit juices.
And speaking of excess, the overstated "MOO-ve Over Meat" veggie burger presented all the delicacy of a hockey puck; the patty was overcooked and grainy and was missing its promised Cajun dressing. Since I'd already tried Flying Star's sourdough bread (on the Californian sandwich) and nine-grain sandwich bread (on the BLT), I ordered the chicken salad sandwich on honey-wheat baguette. It's a disastrous combination destined to end up in diners' laps: the "baguette" was too firm and unyielding to hold its soupy contents, which cascaded out of the bread in a wet, dill-flecked mess. As for choice of sides: the coleslaw is bland; the fries are fine; and the homemade BBQ potato chips are excellent. You can also choose various buttered veggies, tubers, and a regional interpretation of dirty rice, which is nothing like the Cajun specialty enhanced with liver and giblets, merely rice mixed with red chile.
The Southwest corn pudding with carne adovada and calabacitas was a plateful of obscure shapes suffocating beneath a Day-Glo orange chile con queso; there were no calabacitas in sight. As for the mac and cheese (with added broccoli), for which Flying Star is often lauded, if Velveeta evokes a certain nostalgia that warms your heart, or at the very least your sense of irony, go for it. It left me cold, and I returned the favor. The best thing I tasted was a bite of a friend's BBQ pulled-pork sandwich. He offered me a bite; I took four.
Flying Star's desserts embody the generosity and charms of classic edible Americana. Sadly, making bad desserts bigger doesn't make them better, and almost everything we tasted was oppressively sweet, including Italian cream cake with apricots, pecans, coconut and mascarpone frosting; pecan tart with caramel and chocolate; dense-as-concrete bread pudding; raspberry blackout cake; tiramisu; marjolaines; and éclairs. The Key lime pie was curiously devoid of any detectable citrus flavor, and the berries-and-cream cake (which looked especially promising) was a huge disappointment: sweetened whipped cream and berries sandwiched between fingers of mushy white cake doused with orange syrup. The fruit in the peach-raspberry and strawberry-rhubarb pies had thickened to a starchy glue, and the crust was forgettable. On the upside, I loved the almond petits fours and could have eaten them all day long with the cafe's bottomless supply of bitter black coffee. Of the breakfast pastries, avoid the "ugly" muffin unless you enjoy gumming your food like a teething toddler.
The staff is pleasant though not particularly helpful, and there appears to be an information black hole somewhere between kitchen and counter. Everything ordered required some sort of modification: forgotten sauces, dressings, incorrect or missing sides -- and when I phoned in to ask if all baked goods were made on the premises, I got a different answer each time: yes, no, and "I don't know."
Santa Fe maintains a high benchmark for great comfort food and desserts. We have the option of dining at local favorites that currently do these things better -- and less expensively -- than Flying Star Café. As it stands, there is nothing that I've tasted there that I'd pay to eat again. Maybe Flying Star will improve, and I hope that it does, especially given its attractive late-night hours.
Check, please
Dinner for two at Flying Star Café:
Southwestern corn pudding $ 12.99
Chicken salad sandwich $ 10.59
Mac and cheese $ 6.99
Key lime pie $ 5.99
Berries-and-cream cake $ 5.99
Pot of tea $ 3.19
TOTAL $ 45.74
(before tax and tip)
Lunch for two at Flying Star Café:
Rise & Shine Sandwich $ 6.99
Mediterranean Nosh $ 6.99
Veggie burger $ 8.99
Iced tea $ 2.39
Ugly muffin $ 2.39
TOTAL $ 27.75
(before tax and tip)
Flying Star Café
500 Market St., Suite 110, in the Railyard, 216-3939
6 a.m.-10 p.m. Sunday-Thursday,
6 a.m.- midnight Friday-Saturday
Breakfast served until close
Beer & wine
Takeout
Noise level: extreme
Handicapped-accessible
Credit cards, no local checks
The Short Order
With most of Santa Fe's late-serving restaurants and nightlife already peppered along Guadalupe Street, the Railyard District is changing the city's center of gravity. So far, Flying Star Café is not twinkling. Overall, the food and baked goods are impressive in girth but not much else. Recommended: stick to the basics -- pot pie, coffee, and BLT -- and adjust your expectations.
REVIEW:
Despite having beamed into town from a neighboring mothership (Albuquerque has seven locations, Bernalillo hosts one) Santa Fe's newest visitor, Flying Star Café, is alien around here. Still, its style is well suited to the similarly spare, otherworldly landscape of the new Railyard Park and Railyard Plaza. Inside, Flying Star Café is a caricature of generic, '50s-era science-fiction aesthetics: manufactured, but upbeat.
In the sci-fi classic Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, a close encounter with a huge extraterrestrial causes the protagonist to grow into a giantess. Upon leaving Flying Star Café after dinner one night, I, too, felt that I had experienced a harrowing encounter with an enormous alien -- in this case, a slice of lemon meringue pie: tough, leaden crust filled with pale lemon curd and crowned with a bloated mantle of meringue as sweet and stiff as marshmallow fluff.
Those of you craving a dinner of French toast or a breakfast of lo mein can order either or both here; anything on the menu can be had at any time. The Rise & Shine Sandwich sounded like a winner, something difficult to mess up and easy to enjoy: scrambled eggs and melted cheddar on a "crisp homemade English muffin." As it turns out, Flying Star's has difficulties delivering on its promises. My breakfast sandwich was just a taste of disappointments to come.
There was nothing remotely crisp about the English "muffin, " which was closer to a flabby ciabatta roll. And the cheese was an orange travesty; its greater half adhered to the plate like a molten slug. An anemic wisp of bacon perched atop the dish. Most remarkably, the eggs -- not scrambled as described, but a sort of half-committed omelette -- were extremely oversalted. The turkey-sausage-bacon-green-chile gravy was similarly brackish. It's a problem I don't often encounter. I ordered a pancake on the side, and at $5.48 plus tax, I expected it to be served hot (it wasn't) or, at the very least, to be served with real maple syrup (it wasn't). The turkey sausage that accompanied this dish, however, was delicious.
The Moroccan Medley and the Acapulco salads were OK but bland. The Mediterranean Nosh comes with a tasty yet unorthodox hummus. Oddly, it's served with triangles of toasted nine-grain sandwich bread rather than pita, which I found noteworthy for a café that promotes making everything from scratch, including bagels. The Greek Goddess salad lacked snap, wearing an avocado vinaigrette that was simultaneously dull and hyperacidic. An inexplicable smattering of battered and fried feta balls are the featured ingredient here, but from a technical standpoint, the golden tots are a flop; the feta's firm texture remains unaltered by its bath in hot oil, and the nuggets are too small to stay warm once they've been plated.
Indeed, when it comes to knowing when to gild the lily and when to show restraint, Flying Star seems to have its wires crossed. A universally applied insistence on unwarranted excess defines the eating experience here. Cases in point: the only available pancakes also contain blueberries, and all of the teas offered are perfumed with fruit juices.
And speaking of excess, the overstated "MOO-ve Over Meat" veggie burger presented all the delicacy of a hockey puck; the patty was overcooked and grainy and was missing its promised Cajun dressing. Since I'd already tried Flying Star's sourdough bread (on the Californian sandwich) and nine-grain sandwich bread (on the BLT), I ordered the chicken salad sandwich on honey-wheat baguette. It's a disastrous combination destined to end up in diners' laps: the "baguette" was too firm and unyielding to hold its soupy contents, which cascaded out of the bread in a wet, dill-flecked mess. As for choice of sides: the coleslaw is bland; the fries are fine; and the homemade BBQ potato chips are excellent. You can also choose various buttered veggies, tubers, and a regional interpretation of dirty rice, which is nothing like the Cajun specialty enhanced with liver and giblets, merely rice mixed with red chile.
The Southwest corn pudding with carne adovada and calabacitas was a plateful of obscure shapes suffocating beneath a Day-Glo orange chile con queso; there were no calabacitas in sight. As for the mac and cheese (with added broccoli), for which Flying Star is often lauded, if Velveeta evokes a certain nostalgia that warms your heart, or at the very least your sense of irony, go for it. It left me cold, and I returned the favor. The best thing I tasted was a bite of a friend's BBQ pulled-pork sandwich. He offered me a bite; I took four.
Flying Star's desserts embody the generosity and charms of classic edible Americana. Sadly, making bad desserts bigger doesn't make them better, and almost everything we tasted was oppressively sweet, including Italian cream cake with apricots, pecans, coconut and mascarpone frosting; pecan tart with caramel and chocolate; dense-as-concrete bread pudding; raspberry blackout cake; tiramisu; marjolaines; and éclairs. The Key lime pie was curiously devoid of any detectable citrus flavor, and the berries-and-cream cake (which looked especially promising) was a huge disappointment: sweetened whipped cream and berries sandwiched between fingers of mushy white cake doused with orange syrup. The fruit in the peach-raspberry and strawberry-rhubarb pies had thickened to a starchy glue, and the crust was forgettable. On the upside, I loved the almond petits fours and could have eaten them all day long with the cafe's bottomless supply of bitter black coffee. Of the breakfast pastries, avoid the "ugly" muffin unless you enjoy gumming your food like a teething toddler.
The staff is pleasant though not particularly helpful, and there appears to be an information black hole somewhere between kitchen and counter. Everything ordered required some sort of modification: forgotten sauces, dressings, incorrect or missing sides -- and when I phoned in to ask if all baked goods were made on the premises, I got a different answer each time: yes, no, and "I don't know."
Santa Fe maintains a high benchmark for great comfort food and desserts. We have the option of dining at local favorites that currently do these things better -- and less expensively -- than Flying Star Café. As it stands, there is nothing that I've tasted there that I'd pay to eat again. Maybe Flying Star will improve, and I hope that it does, especially given its attractive late-night hours.
Check, please
Dinner for two at Flying Star Café:
Southwestern corn pudding $ 12.99
Chicken salad sandwich $ 10.59
Mac and cheese $ 6.99
Key lime pie $ 5.99
Berries-and-cream cake $ 5.99
Pot of tea $ 3.19
TOTAL $ 45.74
(before tax and tip)
Lunch for two at Flying Star Café:
Rise & Shine Sandwich $ 6.99
Mediterranean Nosh $ 6.99
Veggie burger $ 8.99
Iced tea $ 2.39
Ugly muffin $ 2.39
TOTAL $ 27.75
(before tax and tip)
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