Flower Shop Winter '26 Menu

hints of butter leather and nubuck

When I think of the winter, I think of the below meme:

Thus when I was writing this menu, the feeling of butter leather, the sounds of YKK zippers, and scents of Nubuck were at the forefront of my mind.

Starting Tuesday Jan 6, this will be the new menu at The Flower Shop.

In November when I took over as exec chef here, the idea was to create a bar menu retaining the Australian identity of the restaurant. I obviously struggled with the limitations and wrote about it at length, but thanks to everyone who’s been coming to the restaurant ordering the specials and freeky deeky dishes, I’ve been able to push the menu and I’m really excited about what we’re launching this week.

Besides the sights and sounds of Burlington Coat Factory, the other thing at the forefront of my mind writing this menu was the idea that this bar no longer needed to adhere to Australian, American, or Chinese cooking. When we project identity onto restaurants in that way, there’s an element of expectation that becomes burden and performance and eventually identity cosplay. That shit just feels wack to me since it’s happening all around us in so many other ways.

My goal here was to create a menu using techniques from various cuisines that TASTED cohesive. If you forget that the tortilla pie is Spanish or that the peppercorns are Szechuan, the cooking just makes sense. I think when we cook certain dishes like lemon pepper wings or bread pudding or potato salad there are so many regional expectations that are limiting.

I simply want to shatter those expectations and see what happens.

I think menus and restaurants should create a world and transport you to it.

As a writer, I always think about it with language first so when writing this menu I chose a few ingredients to appear in several dishes like a consistent slang or patois. One of things I notice with kids is the repeating of words or inside jokes that bring the whole family together. When you walk out of the house and start saying things like “rolly-rooster-man” it doesn’t make sense to anyone else, but it makes so much sense to you and your kid and your family.

So with the menu, I wanted to cook in that inside joke kind of way.

The ingredients I see as our inside jokes for this menu are pickled peppadews, castelvetrano olives, pickled mustard greens, miché sourdough, our proprietary Szechuan chili oil, a Xinjiang spice mix, duck fat, and chicken schmaltz.

Every dish on this menu has one of those ingredients in some shape or form so even though there are vechicles like bread pudding, bread salad, spanish tortilla, fried rice, potato salad, slaw, or confit that seem disparate and don’t belong together, when you eat it together it feels like these things should have been together all along.

In testing, the dish that the cooks liked the most was the brisket bread pudding, but mine is this Potato Egg Salad that feels Spanish, American, Chinese, and fucked up all in one. It contains Taiwanese Rice Vinegar, garlic chives, fried garlic, eggs, potatoes, olive brine, peppadew juice, and some Szechuan chili oil. It sounds crazy but again tastes like it should have been like this for a very long time and all of the ingredients were in front of me because of bar prep.

When we made some personnel changes at the restaurant, bar prep started to fall on the kitchen and through that process I got into the things they were using for cocktails and they’ve made it onto the menu as well.

The Duck Fat Spanish Tortilla is fly too. It has garlic chives, sesame oil, and generally tastes like a pot sticker through the pov of a spanish tortilla. I forgot to take a photo, but I will post in the future.

Here’s an early version of the duck confit we fired. It’s changed a bit and now comes with fries but it’s marinated in a Taiwanese Night Market brine that is reminiscent of Hot Star Chicken and various other 5 spice boiled items you’d get in a night market. We marinate the duck then confit it and create a jus with that duck fat that sits underneath the duck, some fries, and comes with a sauerkraut as well as Taiwanese Rice Vinegar for the fries.

This is an early version of our Szechuan Chicken Bread Salad, which now comes with pomegranates, cilantro, frisee, radicchio, and a schmaltzy dressing fitting for chicken liver toast Passover. It’s obviously inspired by Zuni Chicken, a legendary dish that I never got the opportunity to try, but I was aware of and adapted the recipe for our flavors.

Besides Zuni Chicken, I have to shout out Ari Kolender. He’s the chef that created Found Oyster Bar as well as Queen Street and he sent me his cookbook years ago.

After spending more time in New England with Natashia’s family, I got into that kind of cooking and Ari’s book is a great place to start for anyone getting into New England or Southern seafood. He found a savory Southern bread pudding recipe that he adapted with anchovies for this book that eventually inspired my brown braised brisket bread pudding so shout out Ari.

The other book I spent a lot of time reading was this Basque cookbook.

I wanted to shout out these books because I noticed that a lot of cooks don’t read. They follow recipes to a T, but you have to UNDERSTAND a dish to make it. You have to know who/what/when/where/why/how something is done so that when things inevitably go wrong you can pivot, adapt, and problem solve because that’s what professional cooking is at times: problem solving.

On any given day, the purveyor may send the wrong potatoes, different chives, or the oven is broken and you need to figure out another way to cook the dish. If you can only follow recipe, you’re fucked, but if you UNDERSTAND the dish you can problem solve.

Whenever I’m working on menus or recipes, I sit at the book store with a pile of cookbooks and read because seeing food through someone else’s eyes opens the possibilities in your own. It feels like such a simple and basic thing to say, but a cook asked me the other day, “Yo Chef, did you go to school for this? How do you know these recipes?” And I told him that I just read books and he looked at me like I was crazy. It was wild to him that someone didn’t tell me to do this or teach me to do this, but you have to understand the dish for yourself if you ever hope to actually cook it.