Looking for the Magic in Four New Honolulu Restaurants
Can any of these four new restaurants pull a rabbit out of the hat?
I love new restaurants. Someone is always trying to pull a rabbit out of the hat, that is, put together an eatery where something—the food, the atmosphere, the service, or some combination of all three—makes the experience magical. Having tried what must be hundreds of new restaurants by now, I know full well that in most cases the magician will reach in the hat—and nothing. But I remain hopeful.
Aria Restaurant and Lounge
I knew dinner at Aria wasn’t going to go well when the first thing the waiter announced was that the restaurant—at 7 p.m. on a Saturday night—was out of seven menu items.
Oh dear. I was hopeful about Aria, because the restaurant had inherited much wealth. It not only had gotten the location and most of the beautiful Old School interior from the late, lamented Bistro at Century Center—fireplace, serpentine marble bar, wood and leather booths. But it also acquired chef Nick Sayada, who presided over the kitchen at Black Orchid, Duc’s Bistro, Maharaja, Cascada and Tulips before becoming a personal chef to Carolyn Berry.
His tendency to kitchen-hop aside, Sayada is an accomplished chef. His signature items tend to stay on the menu even after he leaves, dishes like his Portobello Wellington, his amazing gnocchi, his eggplant and zucchini soufflé, or his black and blue ‘ahi, the last of which migrated from the Black Orchid to the menus of all the Ruth’s Chris Steak Houses in the country.
Many of these are on Aria’s menu. We just couldn’t have any, except for the black and blue ‘ahi. It was as I remembered it, a little too hot with its coating of spices, but perfectly seared around the edge, each little slice of ‘ahi soft and brilliantly red in the center. The plate had the familiar crosshatching of hot mustard sauce and shoyu-touched vinaigrette, but the Aria version had an inexplicable side mound of bean sprouts and shredded red cabbage, which diminished the magic of the presentation considerably.
There were three of us at dinner, and we also shared a soupy pappardelle with what were billed as “wild” mushrooms, well, fresh shiitakes anyway, dotted with a few bits of asparagus and cherry tomato. The results were reasonably tasty.
The last of the appetizers sounded dull—someone else ordered it, because I am fatigued by standard greens-fruit-cheese-nut salads. However, this one turned out to be the best of the lot—a mound of arugula in a pleasant balsamic vinaigrette, nicely caramelized slices of pear, dots of mild goat cheese and walnuts.
Nobody was trying for magic on the entrée plates: a protein, a swirl of whipped potatoes, a vegetable—my mom’s idea of dinner. With the small rack of three New Zealand chops (a bit lamb-y for many tastes, though I liked it), there were characteristic Sayada touches—a round of ratatouille, a slightly acid undersauce flavored, though not distinctly, with olive tapenade.
Of the entrées, the star was the onaga, a sizeable fillet atop asparagus spears and Parmesan whipped potatoes, topped with a scatter of arugula. There were not one, but two undersauces—one a vinaigrette, the other roasted red bell peppers, both of which worked with the fish.
For a restaurant with a 16-bottle Cruvinet, the wine by the glass list proved unexciting. With the fish, the waiter suggested the Rusack sauvignon blanc, a pleasant enough white from Santa Ynez Valley. It retails for about $17 a bottle. It was $12 a glass.
If the fish was the most exciting of the entrées, the most disappointing was the $42.95 ribeye steak. Ordered medium rare, it arrived medium well, slathered in hotel butter, but still somehow dry and dense—a texture I could duplicate by not freezing a steak carefully and then thawing it too fast. My friend, a serious meat eater, finished half and declined to take the rest home.
Given the splendor of the surroundings, this was at best a yawn of a culinary experience. We soldiered on to dessert. The molten chocolate cake did not melt very well, but my friend, perhaps hungry from skipping half her steak, did it justice. I’d ordered another Sayada classic, his pear melba, which I remembered from Cascada, though this time the pear seemed less spoonable and the raspberry sauce lacked zing. If only Sayada was still doing his white chocolate cheesecake with caramelized apples.
Dinner for three, with a little wine, cocktails and tip, $265, no magic included.
Century Center third floor, 1750 Kalakaua Ave., (808) 955-9300, Dinner Thursday through Saturday 5 to 10 p.m., lounge menu until 12:30 a.m., validated parking, major credit cards, ariahonolulu.com
Wolfgang’s Steakhouse
“You’re taking me to Wolfgang Puck’s?!” said my wife. Not quite. The Wolfgang behind the new Wolfgang’s Steakhouse in Waikīkī is not Puck. He’s a dapper German gentleman named Wolfgang Zweiner, who for 40 years was headwaiter at the legendary Peter Luger Steakhouse in Brooklyn, N.Y. When he retired, Zweiner opened steakhouses of his own—first in Manhattan, then in Beverly Hills.
If Honolulu is slightly fuzzy about its Wolfgangs, you can imagine the problem in Beverly Hills—where Wolfgang’s Steakhouse [in very small letters] by Wolfgang Zweiner is only half a mile from Wolfgang Puck’s steakhouse, called Cut, and even closer to Spago. Puck sued, Zweiner won. Wolfgang’s it is.
Apparently four decades in the business taught Mr. Zweiner a thing or two. The third floor space in the Royal Hawaiian Center has been done intelligently. There are just enough touches—ceiling tiles, wood accents, leather chairs, waiters in bowties and aprons—to give a flavor of old New York, and just enough openness and friendliness to feel like Honolulu.
“Plus,” said my wife, perusing the menu, “you have to love a restaurant that thinks onion rings are a vegetable.”
The specialty at Wolfgang’s, as at Peter Luger’s before him, is a porterhouse steak, for two, for three, for four—“and we’ll do even more,” said the waitress. Two will do.
Fearful of the quantity of meat we’d just ordered for $94.95, we ordered to start only one salad to split. And one slice of Canadian bacon. I’ve never been in a restaurant that sold slices of bacon, but Stephanie the waitress waxed so lyrical about its thickness, its juiciness, its deliciousness, we decided to try just one.
Next time, I’m going to have a stack. She wasn’t kidding. The long, curved slice was a perhaps 3/8-inch thick, not greasy, but, richly marbled, the edges slightly burned and crispy. It was soft to the bite, salty, smoky, and as rich as someone who shorted Lehman Brothers last August.
The salad turned out to be fun as well. In a lettuce cup was a mix of chopped tomatoes, green beans, roasted peppers, scallops, shrimp and a few touches of that fabulous bacon, all in a deft and peppery vinaigrette. “I love salads with stuff in them,” said my wife.
Finally, the steak. It arrived sliced pūpū-style, complete with the T-shaped bone just in case you felt like gnawing, on a large platter messy with melted butter, the platter hot enough to warm your hands over.
A porterhouse is two steaks in one, separated by a bone. On one side, it’s essentially a sirloin strip. On the other, it’s pure tenderloin—in other words, filet mignon.
Cooked perfectly medium rare, the edges all caramelized, this was a serious steak. The tenderloin was, of course, the most delicate in texture, near velvet on the tongue. The strip side was chewier, but beefier. We ate about two-thirds of it, which struck me as a gargantuan accomplishment.
But we stopped. Dessert beckoned. Real New York cheesecake, the kind that when you stick a fork into it, the fork stays upright. And apfel strudel—allow me the German spelling here, because I wish my grandmother was still with us, so I could order her a slice. Flaky folds of pastry, with chunks of apples still with texture, raisins, cinnamon, not too sweet, so perfect that you, too, would want to learn German, if only to hear my grandmother explain your faults in her mother tongue.
Here’s the real New York touch. Each dessert came with a massive mound of schlag, slammed on the plate with thoughts only of giving you enough, not aesthetics. Schlag is whipped cream: thick in texture, with just a slight sourness, almost dry on the tongue, melting away into total pleasure. Magic.
Dinner for two was $245 with tip. “I don’t know how they did it. It’s a perfect restaurant,” said my wife, who admittedly thinks onion rings are vegetables. We ordered them, by the way, thoroughly covered in a herb batter, but not too heavily battered, very nice indeed. The only thing that wasn’t perfect was the “German” potatoes, which were sautéed with some burned-tasting onion and otherwise bland.
“Can I get some rice?” said my wife to the waitress. Of course, immediately, because sometimes doing all the details right adds up to magic.
Royal Hawaiian Center, 2201 Kalakaua Ave., (808) 922-3600, Lunch daily 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., dinner nightly 3:30 to 11 p.m., brunch Saturday and Sunday 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., validated parking, major credit cards, wolfgangsteakhouse.com
Twist
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Photo: Olivier Koning |
I took a friend from Maui with me to Twist. “Wow, this is cool!” she said as we walked in. I thought Twist looked like the Sheraton’s Hanohano Room cleaned up and contemporized—which it is. It was helpful to see it through fresh eyes, especially as we slid into a banquette with a view of the sunset. I tried not to notice that all the other guests were Japanese visitors.
I liked Twist’s new menu concept. You can order three courses for $65, four for $80 or five for $105.
Four courses meant the two of us could order four different appetizers. Two of them worked. Two tried hard.
The lemon-roasted asparagus came tricked out with roasted beets, Marcona almonds, cherry tomatoes and a smear of fig balsamic syrup—all of which added up to less than a good plate of asparagus.
That was nothing compared to the Kona kampachi sashimi. The fish arrived submerged beneath a riot of color—green sea asparagus, purple sage, bright pink pickled radishes, golden pumpkin, white shaved fennel. The presentation looked like a teenage girl’s first overdone try with makeup, obscuring her natural charm.
This was no way to make magic. All these ingredients were good in isolation, but nothing worked together and you couldn’t taste the fish.
The other two appetizers were at least coherent. The single day-boat scallop was cooked perfectly, underscored by a cream sauce with morels and fava beans, topped with a tomato-fennel marmalade and chervil. The only mistake was the large scatter of lemon zest on top. I ate a bite with a strand of lemon zest and it tasted like—well, imagine a car alarm going off in the dead of night.
The last was the best—grilled-eggplant-wrapped, lemon-flavored goat cheese, more of the fig balsamic, which worked better this time, and more of that tomato-fennel marmalade, which I would have liked better if I hadn’t just eaten it on the scallop. Still, as a whole, this worked, exactly the right weight and flavor profile for a pre-entrée course.
The steak (all tenderloin) was a solid performance, topped with sliced mushrooms in jus, sitting atop butter-braised bok choy. Someone in the kitchen had read a book on putting color on the plate—hence, two bright red roasted cherry tomatoes and some vibrantly green Parmesan-chive mashed potatoes. I suppose the green could have been the chives, somehow liquefied and whipped in, but green potatoes? “I was worried it was broccoli,” said my friend.
You could sprinkle bites of the steak with the array of sea salts on the table. ‘Alae salt, pink salt (‘alae and sea salt mixed), black salt (which contained charcoal from coconut husks), a salt mix with Szechuan pepper, and if that wasn’t enough, smoked paprika and bell pepper pods (which did fabulous things in tiny quantities).
My entrée was the single most coherent dish we’d gotten all evening. My duck was Christmas on a plate—sliced duck breast, just slightly pink in the center, heavily spiced around the edge, topped with a ginger-cranberry sauce and sitting on a mound of honey pumpkin purée. With every bite, I felt all Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men.
What more could I want? Well, wine. We’d started with cocktails, so our ever-helpful waiter suggested he would only charge us for wine with three courses, a reasonable $20 apiece for three glasses of wine, not stunning wines, but drinkable, both from Mendocino, a creamy Paul Dolan chardonnay, an adequate cherry-berry pinot noir from Parducci. There was supposed to be wine with the dessert course, but since we both were skeptical about dessert wines, we just drank another glass of pinot while we waited.
The desserts were worth waiting for. A chocolate cream with a touch of red pepper, topped with Bing cherries cooked in something that tasted good. A spiced cabernet gelee with poached pears—not a perfect dessert, but the spicy wine jelly, an extension of the Christmas Day theme kicked off from the duck.
There wasn’t magic in the air—more the air of poor Japanese visitors uptight at having to knife and fork their way through Western food—unless you count the hint of Christmas. Plus, we got attentive, friendly service.
When my tall, blond friend headed to the ladies’ room, the waiter asked, “She’s on TV, right?” No. But whatever gets a waiter’s attention.
Sheraton Waikīkī, 2255 Kalakaua Ave., (808) 922-4422, Dinner nightly, 5:30 to 9:30 p.m., valet and validated parking, major credit cards, sheraton-waikiki.com/de_hano.htm
Azure
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If Twist is a step up from the Hanohano Room, then Azure is a giant leap forward from the Royal Hawaiian’s old Surf Room.
It’s enclosed, for one thing, high-ceilinged and beautiful for another, simple black and white, mainly white, billowy draperies, flickering candles and Middle Eastern-style lanterns—which makes sense since the Pink Palace was originally designed to look like a Moorish castle.
The only negative: Even if you sit along the oceanside glass wall, you cannot, as in the old restaurant, see the ocean, because between you and the beach are luxury cabanas that hotel guests can rent for $500 a day.
I was hopeful about the food, since the Royal hired Jon Matsubara, who cooked at a host of Manhattan eateries before taking over the kitchen at Stage. He lasted less than a year at Stage, but while he was there, his food was astonishing, sometimes literally, and I knew that the young chef must still have a few magic tricks up his sleeve.
There are 10—count them—small plates on the menu at Azure, so with a glass of Champagne in hand, that seemed the place to start. First out was Matsubara’s sashimi, a preparation held over from Stage, alternate layers of yellowfin tuna and kāhala shaped over a mound of avocado, which adds softness to the texture and richness to the fish flavors. This striped critter swims in a bowl of a ginger vinaigrette, accompanied by a few slices of watermelon radish.
Yes, there is such a thing as a watermelon radish, which looks like a (small) watermelon slice, green rind and all, and tastes like a daikon. It’s good-looking for a root vegetable, though I’m not sure God intended it to accompany sashimi.
The coriander prawns reminded me of the kampachi appetizer at Twist. Prawns in coriander and lime chili sauce can stand up to overkill better than kampachi, but there was still Too! Much! Going! On! A pile of purple basil leaves, cilantro, chiffonaded basil, sage, plus watermelon balls (real watermelon this time). The whole thing sprinkled with popcorn tossed in a hot pepper-spice mix. Sound, color and fury, but no magic.
The carpaccio was the opposite, a near classic recipe. The menu said the Kobe beef was “torched”—and, of course, you knew Matsubara literally had a torch in the kitchen to sear the edges. The nearly raw slices were topped with arugula, thin slices of green apple and generous shavings of Manchego, Spain’s answer to Parmesan. The only real departure? Instead of a mustard aioli this was dressed with a wasabi aioli, but it’s Kobe beef and Matsubara apparently wanted it to feel at home.
But magic? asked my friend. Ah, here came the magic. The bowl of baby back ribs came to the table under a glass bell. When the server lifted the bell, it released a swirl of kiawe smoke. Matsubara has a little smoke gun in the kitchen that shoots kiawe smoke under the bell at the last minute—after dinner, I made him show it to me. “We all need our toys,” he said.
If you are going to make ribs appear in a puff of smoke, they’d better be good ribs. These were so tender the meat—marinated, grilled, chilled, roasted—seemed to leap off the bone into your mouth, where it lit up all your taste buds simultaneously.
The ribs were served atop a kind of succotash of black beans, edamame and corn. I have no idea what the magic was here, but it got me to eat succotash, something I promised myself at age 8 I would never do again.
The last of the Azure small plates was at once the most elaborate and the simplest. It’s called Pier 38, which is the address of the Honolulu Fish Auction. It comes with its own menu, a mock Fish Auction invoice, in which the day’s offerings are checked off by hand and the prices written in.
It’s also simplest because among the kitchen’s other toys is a high-temperature ceramic oven—so that our onaga arrived golden crispy on the skin side, soft and moist in the middle, unadorned except for a puddle of olive oil, one clove of roasted garlic and sprig of thyme. Of course, that couldn’t be all, so the server whipped out a little perfume-like sprayer from her pocket and gave it a spritz of Meyer lemon mist.
Good as it was, for $28 all you got was a small piece of fish. Azure sells sides like a steak house. In a burst of enthusiasm, we ordered three. One, amazing spinach braised in sake and sprinkled with garlic chips. Two, roasted Waialua asparagus, plain, simple, with a side dish of smoked citrus aioli. (Don’t ask me how you smoke either a citrus fruit or an aioli). Finally, best of all, a buttery mélange of Kahuku corn and Hāmākua mushrooms that was more serious eating than a side dish deserves to be.
You may note that we never got around to ordering an entrée. Thinking that you might be disappointed in us, the two of us made up for it by ordering three desserts.
We said we needed a short rest before dessert, so the waitress brought a little intermezzo—an hibiscus lime sorbet that exploded in your mouth. That’s not a metaphor. Matsubara had sprinkled the top with sake gelee and strawberry Pop Rocks, the retro candy that does in fact explode as it dissolves in your mouth. “Somebody had to drive all over town to find some,” said the waitress, giggling.
The desserts themselves were long on flavor, short on tricks.
Silky chocolate wrapped round peanut butter cream, sort of an upscale Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, drizzled with kiawe honey. The accompanying vanilla ice cream was surrounded by raspberry purée, the real stuff, not the raspberry syrup out of a squirt bottle.
Great, you think. Ah, wait until you see the banana split, a giant gooey mound of overindulgence: caramelized apple bananas, mac-nut ice cream, the whole thing surrounded not by whipped cream, but by whipped coconut cream, all drenched in a caramel sauce made with Myers’s rum, with, of course, several cherries on top, real cherries, not maraschino.
Remarkably, we had to conclude our favorite dessert was the quietest—mangoes from Hāna, with mascarpone cheese, wrapped in phyllo and cooked like spring rolls. Not too sweet, not too heavy, all flavor.
Dinner was $260 with tip. But Azure’s the sort of place that makes you wish you weren’t so full after dinner, so you could ask for a menu and start over again. That’s magic.
Royal Hawaiian Hotel, 2259 Kalakaua Ave. (808) 923-7311, Dinner nightly 6 to 10 p.m. (last seating 9:45 p.m.), free valet parking, major credit cards, royal-hawaiian.com
John Heckathorn has been writing award-winning restaurant reviews for HONOLULU Magazine since 1984.
