Me and Mrs. Malik recently dined at Little Secret, a new restaurant in the City View neighborhood of Greenville, and were enjoying a plate of fried boneless chicken thigh served over a cold salad of thinly sliced cucumbers, red onion, jalapeno and cilantro.
The chicken had been simmered in broth with soy sauce and fresh ginger, chilled, then deep fried. Chef and owner Conner Hinderks came by our table, and I asked him about the chicken’s coating. Was it rice flour with a little corn starch?
“Nope. Just corn starch. I wanted to be reminiscent of Chinese takeout chicken.”
“The kind served in the white box? With those sticky sweet sauces?”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
Hinderks moved to another table and I looked at my wife and laughed: “What other chef in our town is serving such amazing dishes influenced by cheap fast food?”
Conner fills up his (kind of) small plates with more punchy, bright flavors courtesy of a love for Far East spices, a technique our town hasn’t experienced since the dearly departed Mekong. Now that he and his better half Christina have settled into the space at 1112 Woodside Ave. – formerly home to Comal 864 – we Greenvillians need not have to consult the ‘gram to find them.
Conner’s home runs like his Szechuan steak, manchego and mushroom dumplings, ramp and crayfish pasta and those gloriously sticky ribs tossed in nuoc cham sauce and finished with cilantro and fried garlic all keep regular hours now. Judging by the jammed parking lot, they are secret no more. When the restaurant settled down, I asked Conner what was the most important lesson he learned from opening a brick-and-mortar location.
“The amount of tiny things that one has to manage,” he said. “So many times we had an issue crop up and I just wanted to throw ten thousand dollars at it. But that was money we didn’t have so we had to be plumbers, audio techs, jacks of all trades. We didn’t want a bunch of investors so we did a lot on the cheap. In fact while getting open our motto was we won’t buy the cheapest thing, but we will buy the second cheapest. And our community of friends really came around and made it all work.”
Conner pointed out a banquette style bench that was built by a retired master carpenter, a friend of a friend that offered up their services, gratis.
“What about your next restaurant?” I asked. “Have y’all thought about that?”
“Oh sure. Christina and I have those conversations often. I had two grandmothers and both lived into their 90s. One kept busy, always learning, always doing new things and she had a much more vibrant life than the one that just sat at home. So we plan on working and cooking and doing until we can’t.”
Little Secret, at 1112 Woodside Ave., serves dinner Thursday through Monday.
