Dining: Alternative Lanai

There's luxury hotel dining on Lanai, but fortunately that's not all.

After an early flight to Lanai, we stopped by the Lodge at Koele for a restorative breakfast.

The waitress arrived with a pitcher of pineapple-lilikoi juice. I took half a glass and had to ask for more. Someone in the Lodge kitchen had been up earlier than we, running pineapples through the juicer, perhaps even making fresh passion-fruit puree, turning the whole thing into a juice that made us think just how lame is all the other juice we’re ever served, most of it canned, bottled or made from concentrate.

That was before we’d even ordered.

Let me recommend the Lodge’s eggs Benedict—excellent Canadian bacon, perfectly cooked eggs and a hollandaise sauce so velvety it could only be freshly made.

Breakfast came with a view of the Lodge’s manicured grounds and Four Seasons-style service. While waiting for the eggs, I went to the gift shop to see if it sold a map.

While I was asking the clerk, a gentleman overheard and fetched me a free map. He turned out to be the hotel’s general manager, Robert Nolan, and, despite having a hotel to run, he walked me back to the table and spent 10 minutes explaining his favorite off-road adventures.

“This is quite civilized,” said my travel companion.

Civilization, as Freud pointed out, always comes at a price: eggs Benedict cost $22, each. That wonderful juice? $7, also each. Breakfast for two was $73 with tip.

The next day we ate in town, and had the $8 Lanai omelets (Portuguese sausage, bacon, fried rice) at Blue Ginger Café, where the little kid at the next table poured catsup on his pancakes.

Both the Lodge and the Manele Bay Hotel are indeed outposts of civility on the Neighbor Islands. However, should you find yourself on Lanai, here are a couple of alternatives that are priced more within a normal budget.
 

Pele’s Other Garden
8111 Houston St., Lanai City  // (808) 565-9628  // Monday through Friday 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.  // Street parking, major credit cards // www.pelesothergarden.com

You may be wondering at the name: Pele’s Other Garden. There used to be a Pele’s Garden, a health food store run by Beverly Zigmond. In 1995, Mark Zigmond and his wife, Barbara, from New Jersey, came out to visit his sister, spending two weeks at the Manele Bay Hotel.

“We impulsively decided we could live here,” says Mark. They meant at Manele, with maid service and poolside mai tais. Unfortunately, spending the rest of their days in a luxury hotel was not within their means. So back in New Jersey, riding a commuter train, the two of them, financial analysts both, scribbled a business plan on the back of an envelope. They sold everything and relocated 5,000 miles.

They started Pele’s Other Garden as an adjunct to the health food store, selling healthy sandwiches. When the original Pele’s Garden shut down, the restaurant expanded, eventually taking over the none-too-large red and yellow plantation-era building right on Lanai City’s pine-planted square.

Pele’s Other Garden still does sandwiches and pizzas at lunch, but at dinner, it’s a casual, candle-lit bistro, remarkably ambitious for its 24 seats, with more outside on a warm evening. The salads are Lanai lettuces, with so much snap to them you know they were resting comfortably in a garden only hours before. (My recommendation: Try the roasted red pepper dressing.)

Mark tried to keep us from ordering bruschetta, noting that the weekly barge from Oahu had been delayed in a storm and the tomatoes were not up to standard (Lanai giveth, and Lanai taketh away). My companion, who had fond memories from an earlier visit, insisted. It was OK, really, just not as brilliant as Zigmond would have liked.

The entrées shone. The poetically named Bowtie & Butterflies is pesto bowtie pasta with prosciutto and butterflied garlic shrimp, a solid dish.

Most enjoyable was the chicken Parmesan. You can envision it: a grilled chicken breast topped with red sauce and thick, gooey mozzarella cheese.

This came with a large side of perfectly al dente spaghetti, with an unexpected touch. It would have been simpler to slather the pasta in more of the red sauce. Instead it came with a fresh tomato and basil concassé.

Not luxury resort stuff, perhaps, but far better than home cooking.

“What do you want to drink with that?” asked Zigmond. “How about an Amarone?”

Zigmond’s wine list is remarkable for a place where you can also get a pizza and a Bud Light. But an Amarone della Valpolicella? That wondrous Italian red is made from grapes allowed to dry, so the sugars concentrate. Usually the grapes were turned into a sweet wine, but in the 1930s, a winemaker forgot a batch and the sugars fermented entirely into alcohol. One of the most powerful Italian dry red wines was born.

There’s not a lot of Amarone produced, it’s expensive, and you might expect a $125 bottle or two in a high-end Honolulu Italian restaurant. But on Lanai?

Turns out Zigmond had to go to the doctor’s in Honolulu, and in an Oahu version of Lanai neighborliness, his wine broker, Josh Trowbridge, of Johnson Brothers, picked him up at the airport and drove him. Along the way, Trowbridge offered him a deal on Tommasi Amarone. “It’s cheap enough I can sell it for $18 a glass,” says Mark. “For us, it’s a recession buster.”

The whole restaurant is. Lanai is the most expensive of the Neighbor Islands. But at Pele’s, the chicken Parmesan and bowties and butterflies are both $18.99, which, I might remind you, is cheaper than the eggs Benedict at the Lodge.

Pele’s is renowned on Lanai for its desserts, especially its “Big Chocolate Cake.” But if you want me to order a six-layer chocolate cake, you’re going to have to do a worse job on the spaghetti, because I was full after eating it all.
 

Lanai City Grille
Hotel Lanai, 828 Lanai Ave., Lanai City  // (808) 565-7211 // Dinner Wednesday through Sunday 5 p.m. to 9 p.m.  // Free parking, major credit cards // www.hotellanai.com/grille

A Lanai restaurant has to come with a story. This one starts on Thanksgiving 2006. Mary Charles and Tom Kiely, who have a Charles Dickey-style home up the hill from the 1923 Hotel Lanai, were having dinner and sat down afterward with Henry Clay, who’d been running the hotel and its restaurant for a dozen years and was ready to move on.

Kiely is CEO of Xterra, the international off-road multisport races. Charles had just sold Mary Charles and Associates, a destination-management company. For years, she handled large corporate groups coming to the Islands, doing everything from organizing theme parties to evacuating 250
FedEx executives from Kauai in the wake of Hurricane Iniki. It was probably not a good idea to let someone with Charles’ energy
retire.

The day after Thanksgiving, Kiely went for a run on Lanai, and came home with an idea. Maybe they could buy the hotel, renovate it and get Mary’s Phoenix, Ariz., nephew, Mike, and his fiancée, Michelle, to run it.

“I had the same idea 10 minutes ago,” said Charles.

So it happened. Mike and Michelle came to check it out at Christmas, and Kiely and Charles bought the hotel in May 2007. But not before a third critical ingredient fell into place. Charles’s friend, Bev Gannon, of Haliimaile General Store and Joe’s on Maui, who provided meals for Hawaiian Airlines and was one of the 12 original Hawaii regional cuisine chefs, signed on as culinary consultant for the hotel’s restaurant.

“We wouldn’t have considered it without Bev,” says Charles. “She gave us instant credibility.”

Instant credibility, but not instant personnel in the kitchen, since Gannon couldn’t run the place personally. The current, and fourth chef, however, is a find. Mike Davis, 36, cooked years ago at the Lodge under the legendary Edwin Goto (now at the Mauna Lani). Davis wandered back to his native New England, but missed Hawaii.

He came out to help Goto at the Mauna Lani over the 2007 holidays—“I owe that guy so much, his passion, his total cool in the kitchen,” he says—then hooked on again at the Lodge, eventually moving over to Charles’ renovated and reopened restaurant, Lanai City Grille.

So what’s it like working with Gannon, I asked him, knowing that the Maui chef is a sweetheart everywhere but in the kitchen. “She’s like a second Mom to me,” he says. “She made me simplify everything, which really helped. There are only two of us on the line, my menu would have been too much for us.”

The Lanai City Grille menu still has Gannon touches—the signature crab dip and the meatloaf with barbecue sauce from Joe’s in Wailea, both worth eating, but both of which we skipped, since I’d had them recently from their original Maui kitchen.

The rest of the menu is aimed at comfort food, but at a very high level. Take, for instance, the Kurobuta pork shank, brine-cured with a touch of maple syrup, braised for three or four hours, then roasted, touched with a demiglace, and served over a savory dried apple and shallot compote and potato puree.

Lanai City sits at 1,700 feet above sea level, and this is just the sort of stick-to-the-ribs dish that a chill in the air demands.

However, if it sounds too much for you, Davis does something else interesting with the shanks. He pulls the pork, adds a little pork belly, chili and cheese, and makes the whole thing into wontons as an appetizer, with a dipping sauce made of sweet chili sauce and housemade Boursin.

Similarly, the blackened ahi with coconut soy drizzle is available as an appetizer, topping a salad and on noodles as an entrée.

Good as these things are, the appetizer not to miss is the beet carpaccio, Big Island beets slow-roasted with sea salt until they are both sweet and savory. Sliced, they are topped with arugula and warm goat cheese tied up in a crispy phyllo bundle. The plate is sprinkled with pistachios.
“This is your idea of simple?” I asked.

“It’s doable,” said Davis.

Since I was on Lanai, I couldn’t order anything but the venison. However, unlike the old days, it wasn’t Lanai venison, even though the island is full of Axis deer and Davis, a bow hunter, could provision his own walk-in.

It was a mild, farm-raised venison from Colorado, because there’s no one left on Lanai to certify locally killed deer as fit for a restaurant kitchen. “It’s a technicality,” says Davis, “but why risk getting shut down over it?”

The venison may not have had that metallic tang of the homegrown variety, but it arrived arranged over one of the most deeply flavored, nicely textured risottos I’ve ever encountered. Davis makes two duxelles of mushrooms, one chopped fine to cook the rice in, the other chunkier, which he adds later for more flavor (it contains porcinis) and biteability. He hits the finished product with truffle oil, Parmesan and a little demiglace he cooks down from bones on a back burner.

This is food. There were four of us at dinner. For one of us, comfort food meant steak, a tender Angus filet and a potato cake enriched with aged cheddar. The filet was topped with a just-off-the-burner Béarnaise that reminded us Davis could have cooked at the Four Seasons if he hadn’t been handed his own small kitchen.

I don’t know how we found the room, but we ordered all the desserts, a molten German chocolate cake, a pecan pie with a touch of peppermint and, my favorite, banana lumpia, the bananas brought in by the employees, atop vanilla ice cream and a killer almond caramel.

The wine list runs heavily to California, and probably a rich cabernet works best with the food. Appetizers run $11 to $12 and entrées from $28 to $39. Since this is Lanai, where almost everything has to be flown or barged in, the meal would be a remarkable value even if the food wasn’t this fabulous.