Another Restaurant Goes Global Tapas

Flight Bistro

​Susan Feniger, what hast thou wrought?

After one-half of the Too Hot Tamales, of Border Grill fame, opened the nearly un-Googleable Street in Hollywood as a restaurant specializing in street foods from around the world, it seems like everyone has started jumping on the bandwagon.

Edwin reported six weeks ago that K'Ya in Anaheim had changed from a normal restaurant to a global street-food place, with a lot of small plates arranged by country.

Now Flight Bistro in Huntington Beach, under the direction of new executive chef Derrick Hamilton, has revamped its menu to include a long list of "Global Tapas." The ethnic origins of some of the small plates are unclear (scallops and oxtail with orange segments?), which leads us to the dreaded F word--fusion.

For those of you who prefer to sit down to a meal instead of trying to cobble one together out of a series of tapas and being stunned by the size of the bill at the end, Flight Bistro, unlike K'Ya, has not completely abandoned large plates, though fusion has crept into the dinner menu as well (e.g., bacon-wrapped scallops with mashed potatoes, asparagus and lime-lychee beurre blanc).

A bold prediction: We haven't seen the last of these conversions to "global street food." Whether they actually do attempt to be global, like Feniger's Street, or whether it's just a marketing attempt, only time will tell.

Flight Bistro, 8082 Adams Ave., Huntington Beach.  (714) 374-8300