Two in a Row:

Spices and Bistro Sun

It
piqued my curiosity: Two new restaurants with the same street address, 2671 S.
King St.

The address belongs to the Mo’ili’ili Market, a rapidly fading,
one-story building just Diamond Head of Kokua Market. The 1931 building is now
subdivided into a shave ice store, a beauty parlor and two small restaurants,
one called Spices and another called Bistro Sun.

Both restaurants seat
only 30 to 40, with tiny kitchens partitioned off in the back. Both share an eight-stall
parking lot and an outdoor restroom. Both lack a liquor license, so they are byob.

The
most remarkable thing they share? Both are far better than they have any reason
to be. They are real restaurants, with personality and passion.

I
knocked on the closed door of Spices to get the attention of the thin Asian man
wearing shorts and slippers. Without my realizing it, he was the chef, Somphong
Norindr, who everyone calls Pony. “What time do you open?” I asked.

“Five,
no, five-thirty,” said Norindr, a look of near woe spreading over his face. “You
better come early. There are lines. Can you believe it? Lines.”

“You must
be working hard,” I said.

“So hard,” he said. “And can you believe it? My
partners are in Thailand. They’re on a buying trip, though, so that’s all right.”

Norindr
wasn’t kidding about the lines. Spices may be at the moment the hottest little
restaurant in Honolulu. When I returned at 5:30, there were eight or nine people
outside, waiting for a table. Why? I wondered.

Because Norindr is an amazing
chef, turning out his entire Pan-Southeast Asian menu from scratch. Spices replaced
Monthien Thai and wanted to keep some familiar Thai menu items. But Norindr himself
is from Laos, and grew up in France. He went to school in Switzerland-originally
to become an architect to please his father. Hotel school was more his speed and,
after a long journey, including stops in Washington, D.C., and California, he
ended up in the tiny kitchen of Spices.

Many Thai chefs in Hawai’i are Laotian,
but Norindr was different, because he wanted to cook Laotian as well as Thai food.

The Laotian curry at Spices. It’s the dill and tiny, bitter eggplants that make it Laotian. Photo: Olivier Koning

The
food, wherever it’s from, bears Norindr’s own stamp. Against my advice, my 16-year-old
daughter insisted on ordering that tired Thai restaurant appetizer, stuffed chicken
wings. These arrived, five propped up into a little pyramid. They were stuffed
with chicken, not the usual pork mix, deep-fried but not greasy, far better than
the usual.

I liked the less common appetizers even better. The light, simple,
grilled eggplants, slathered in a sweet chili sauce, had a vibrant lemongrass
front end and a nice chili afterburn.

I’d never seen Laotian sausage on
a menu, so I had to order it. Norindr makes his own pork sausage, with that same
one-two punch of lemongrass and chili pepper, plus a surprising shot of dill.
The dipping sauce packed a blast of pungent saltiness that seemed to really set
off the heat of the sausage. Lime juice, chilies, fish sauce-a Laotian peasant
sauce designed to add protein and flavor to a restricted diet.

We’d already
had three appetizers for three people. I suggested one curry, but since we couldn’t
agree on which one, we ended up with two. I’d argued against the pork Penang because
Penang curries in Honolulu always taste like peanut butter. But the Spices version
was a heady mix of lemongrass, shallots, garlic, ginger, kaffir lime peel, coriander,
cumin, pepper, maybe a little fish sauce-and was sweetened ever so slightly with
brown sugar and topped with holy basil. It wasn’t until I drank the remaining
sauce-it was that good-that I discovered the few chopped peanuts.

Even
more unexpected was the pale-yellow Laotian curry. It was filled with startling
flavors-the sharp citrus edge of kaffir lime, the bitterness of tiny Laotian eggplants
and more than a little dill, even a whole bouquet of it as garnish.

“It’s
the dill that makes it Laotian,” Norindr told me later. “Everyone in Laos eats
dill, it’s the Laotian coriander or basil.” I said that, because of the dill,
I’d ordered the curry made with seafood. “It goes with meat, vegetarian. Dill
goes with everything!” he insisted.

We’d already gotten too much food. My
daughter-who is not about to be bullied in her food choices by her father-wanted
a platter of tofu fried rice. Fried rice is often leaden and oily. Norindr’s was
light, almost fluffy, and redolent with garlic, onion, fresh mint, edged with
fresh cucumber and tomato. Full as I was, I ate some. She ate some, extolling
its virtues, but most went home in a take-out container, which she kapu’d until
she could eat it for breakfast.

Thai restaurants aren’t big on desserts.
There’s only so much tapioca with coconut milk Westerners can eat happily. Norindr
decided he’d make his own ice cream. Now, even with four Cuisinart ice cream makers,
he can hardly keep up with the demand for his Southeast Asian flavors. There’s
green apple-curry, ginger, durian. His best may be his lemongrass-chili pepper,
the burn of the chilies mellowed by the sweetness and creaminess of the ice cream.
Equally remarkable is the bright-green pandan. Pandan is often called the Vietnamese
vanilla, but doesn’t taste the least bit like vanilla. The taste is poised somewhere
between green leaf and toasted coconut. Still, it makes for a remarkable, perfume-y
ice cream.

Dinner for three cost $95, including the tip and $2.50 corkage
for the unimpressive bottle of Washington state riesling I’d bought at Costco.
Next time I think I’ll bring an Italian dry rosé.

Two
doors down from Spices is another, even newer restaurant. It doesn’t have the
lines out the door that Spices does. But sooner or later, people looking for Spices
are likely to stumble upon Bistro Sun.

Bistro Sun is in its own way as cross-cultural
as Spices. It’s a Japanese restaurant to the extent that it answers its phone
in Japanese. On the other hand, it’s the offshoot of a 35-year-old Osaka restaurant,
which, like many restaurants in Japan, serves a Japanese version of Italian food.

Italian
food belongs to the world, Japan included. But after eating at what seems like
dozens of Italo-Japanese outlets in Hawai’i, many since departed, I’ve decided
that Italian food should taste like Italy, or, at the very least, like a good
Italian neighborhood in New Jersey.

However, the food at Bistro Sun startled
me. It doesn’t pretend to be doing straight Italian food, though its chef, Hitoshi
Shibaraki, trained in Italy as well as Osaka. The restaurant waited patiently
until he could get immigration clearance to be the long-term mainstay of its King
Street kitchen.

It’s just very good food, with some interesting cross-cultural
switcheroos. For instance, consider two of the appetizers. In the first, Bistro
Sun serves ‘ahi as a carpaccio-which is originally, of course, a preparation for
raw beef, pounded flat and seasoned with garlic vinaigrette. At Bistro Sun, ‘ahi
gets the same treatment, adding a little tomato and basil.

If, in the first
appetizer, ‘ahi gets treated like raw beef, in the second, raw beef gets treated
like ‘ahi. The beef is served tataki-that is, lightly seared around the edges
and sliced. Like a tataki made from ‘ahi, the beef is served with a citrus-y ponzu
sauce. Bistro Sun’s ‘ahi carpaccio is respectable, but it’s the beef tataki that’s
the star, a huge pile of extremely rare beef served with lettuce and watercress,
and slices of toasted garlic.

The Sicilian pilaf at Bistro Sun: Part risotto, part paella, part ishiyaki. Photo: Olivier Koning

The portion is so large that
you’re better off ordering the beef tataki as a small meal or to split among a
table full of people. There were only two of us, but fortunately, one was my friend,
the famished blonde. She not only polished off both appetizers, but also demanded
a bowl of Italian onion soup before proceeding to the entrées.

At Bistro
Sun, onion soup becomes Italian by using chicken rather than beef stock and by
not covering the soup in that sometimes difficult-to-get-through crust of bread
and cheese. There’s cheese in the Bistro Sun version, a discreet amount in among
the onions.

We finally got to the entrées. First a rice dish, Sicilian pilaf,
Sicily being the first place in Europe to cultivate rice. This is a first cousin
to a risotto, begun by cooking the rice first in a little oil or butter, then
working in broth and other ingredients. It’s like paella as well, topped with
seafood-squid, octopus and a couple of garlic-butter mussels. And there’s a little
hint of ishiyaki as well, since it’s sizzled in a paella pan until the rice gets
cooked just enough to make it crusty and crunchy. We ate every bite.

Then
came the pasta of the day, topped with a sauce made of fresh tuna and fresh tomatoes.
It didn’t look like much, a bit watery. But the pasta was al dente, clearly cooked
to order, and the sauce much better than it looked. I took one bite, then another,
then another, and soon I was fighting over it with the famished blonde. “Why is
this so good?” she asked. I didn’t know. Because someone in the back could cook.

We
were, by this time, too full for dessert, but quite happy. We’d had a good time
in the little, oddly decorated restaurant, with diaphanous fabric draped over
the track lights and a weirdly ornate clock on the wall. We got attentive service
from the manager, Michael Franzen, who, like the menu, is bilingual. The outgoing
Franzen worked a few years in Japan as a computer programmer, and then switched
careers because he liked restaurants better. “Fun kine,” he says, in the pidgin
accent he acquired growing up in Phoenix, Ariz.

The bill for this rather
large dinner for two was $81, including tip and $3 corkage for the bottle of Sonoma-Cutrer
Russian River chardonnay the famished blonde had thoughtfully provided. It didn’t
particularly go with the food, but it sure was good.