Flaps Down Grill Offers Smooth Landing For Lunch (Lunch Review)

When we, as the restaurant reviewers and fans of local cuisine, were told the Springdale Municipal Airport housed a good lunch spot, we had to check it out.

We were pleasantly surprised once we found our way to the second floor of the main building at the airport and landed in an open, airy gastropub with wall-to-wall windows that offered plenty of natural light and a nice, clear view of the runway and the hangars that contain both single-engine planes and private jets.

The interior of Flaps Down Grill was fun and comfortable — appearing to be recently renovated and featuring several nods to its location with plane memorabilia — but we opted to sit on the patio.

It was windy enough that we had to weigh down our menus — probably not ideal for a working lunch with notes, but for our needs you couldn’t ask for a better dining atmosphere.

The service staff was friendly but disorganized. We sat several minutes before our waiter hurriedly took our drink orders, bringing coffee with no cream or sugar.

We liked the variety of the menu with salads, sandwiches, flatbreads and burgers. Beer cheddar dip seemed to be a staple, making its way into several of the appetizers and lunch entrees. This made sense, as the restaurant also offers a variety of drafts from local brewer Saddlebock Brewery.

One diner ordered the $250 Burger ($13), an Angus chuck and brisket patty on a pretzel bun with apple bacon, avocado and pepper jack cheese; and the other ordered the Roasted Turkey Panini ($8) with Swiss cheese and avocado on toasted Italian bread.

The food came out pretty quickly. However, the server dropped it off and left quickly as well, before we realized we had no sauce or condiments for our sandwiches and also no napkins.

One diner ate her burger anyway and said it was good because of the quality of each ingredient, but thought it might have been better with the sauce — which, it turns out, was the beer cheddar dip.

The other diner waited several minutes before tracking down the server to ask for the remoulade sauce that was supposed to accompany the panini. Once it arrived, the meal was delicious.

Overall, it seems the service is hit and miss, depending on how busy it is, but the atmosphere and the food, with its fresh ingredients and tasty flavor combinations, more than made up for it.