Totally Stockholm 1
GASTRO Whip it good It’s very rare these days tha
t you go out for a meal and are surprised. That’s both good and bad of course, sometimes predictability can be a good thing – when you know what you’re getting. But if it’s something you can’t accuse Whippet Lab of, it’s being predictable. The restaurant is as easy to get a grip of as a sausage covered in soap. The full name of the restaurant hints towards a certain political ambition, and the restaurant’s expressed objective is to gather science about food, beer, cocktails plus justice activism, all under the same roof. Add a hint of Devo’s 80s hit and you have the basic ingredients of Whippet Lab. We enter an almost-empty restaurant on a Saturday night, and can take our pick among the free tables in the restaurant that also houses a brewery. In one corner a pile of furniture shares space with a tangle of cables and some moving boxes from IKEA. We carefully choose the other corner. The menu sticks to the same theme. Is it dinner, snacks, mid-sized bites or tapas? Noone knows. We order mac n’ cheese, a grilled sandwich with cheddar and sauerkraut plus hummus. The gnocchi that we have hankered for since we browsed the menu online has sadly been removed, so we have to make do with a Vietnamese raw vegetable salad. All the dishes are tolerably-priced, around a hundred kronor each. Whippet Lab & Social Justice Club Rutger Fuchsgatan 5 whippetlab.se While we wait for the food, we are provided with drinks from an impressive beer menu, with offerings from over ten carefullychosen craft breweries on tap. We have great brews from both Hop Notch as well as Pax Brygghus. So far so good. Unfortunately the standard isn’t as high when it comes to the food. The grilled sandwich is probably on-par with what you can expect at any of the lunch restaurants in the same neighbourhood, the macaroni and cheese you could probably do better at home, and the raw vegetable salad would have benefited from a little more sting to it. The highlight is the well-balanced hummus with endives salad, but even that is not something that makes us shiver with joy. After we finish our meal we say thank you and leave the premises thinking “well... ok”. It is what it is. 18