Slick, electronic retail center or restaurant? Let’s allow the food to decide.
It’s metal and wood inside, spartan and modern, the menu a mix of flatbreads and salads. It’s the kind of place that began as a “concept,” from the decor that should please Bjorn Borg or Elin Nordegren (Swedes!) to the pliant shingles of grains slicked with balsamic pomegranate glaze or spangled with crumbled blue cheese or dressed with a chipotle-lime vinaigrette.
Modmarket in Boulder feels like an Apple store. Fortunately, it does not taste like an Apple store.
The flatbreads, all of them larded with whole grains and fired in a stone hearth, are stiff enough to hold, without wilting when lifted, sliced tri-tip steak and chunks of free-range chicken and hillocks of goat cheese. Yet they have give, and chew, and they taste like wheat instead of white flour.
The combinations — the “Med,” with olives and pesto spread; the “Mex,” with chicken and jalapeño; and so on — are simple and juiced with flavor. The salads are big, the vegetables fresh.
Modmarket isn’t exactly comfortable. It is not trying to ape some idea of Irish coziness, it is not gunning for down-home, it shrinks from the cheap-complacent sameness of so many small restaurants going after people who want to spend less than $10, inhale the offering and skedaddle.
Could I imagine Modmarket employees appearing as holograms behind the counter, taking orders with crisp precision, their robot-soothing voices instructing me to “please find a table, Mr. Brown, and soon we shall serve you”? Yes, I could.
Would it surprise me if Modmarket offered something called “Modpods,” music playlists tethered somewhere in the restaurant’s wireless fog, with different groups of songs suggested for individual orders?
This would not surprise me one bit.
– MODMARKET –
Salads, flatbreads, etc. 1600 28th St., No. 1212, Boulder, 720-663-9440, modmarket.com. Monday-Saturday 11 a.m.-9 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m.-8 p.m.
– Douglas Brown
