Courtney Shay
Google
Ooooof. This place was a huge miss.
We spent $510 for 2 people on the special Polynesian night menu, and it was easily the worst value for money I have ever spent on a meal. Each culture was entirely misrepresented, and not a single innovative or memorable flavor.
Six uninspired (bordering on inedible) dishes were served with six FULL cocktails, all overbearingly sweet and unbalanced. I’m not sure if their goal was to get us so drunk that we wouldn’t notice how mediocre the food was, or if it was to justify the $250 price tag, but that is a wild amount of sugar and alcohol to expect us to consume in 1.5 hours on a Tuesday night. You can only have 2 drinks in front of you, so if you couldn’t drink at a rate of 1 old fashion per 15 minutes, it was taken away.
Chefs were clearly hoping we lacked any knowledge of Polynesian food, or even basic ingredients for that matter, as we were consistently lied to about the name and authenticity of the ingredients.
It started with an unknown white fish swimming in one-note coconut broth. Too large a portion with no textural contrast whatsoever, with a spoon to eat the ceviche like a soup? The odd sweet “broth” was overpowered by an even sweeter ube cocktail.
The next dish was yet another poorly executed ceviche-style dish. Lomi lomi, a traditional Hawaiian dish that usually resembles a pico de gallo dip with salmon, was a textural nightmare. King salmon was mealy and mushy, as if it was old and had been marinating in lime juice for far too long, ruining the integrity of the flesh. We were told it was topped with micro cilantro (it was mature cilantro), tomato confit (which is tomato slow cooked in fat, this was clearly just a marinated raw cherry tomato), and Maui onion (we got a very poorly cut red onion…Maui onions are yellow). Sesame oil was above and behind the dominating flavor, which we were told this was the “traditional Hawaiian style”. I LOVE sesame oil, but lomi lomi doesn’t even have sesame in it. Maybe they were thinking of tuna poke???
Pork belly tasted of jarred hoisin sauce, and lacked any of the qualities you seek out in pork belly…no crispy skin, no melt-in-the-mouth rendered fat, no fall-apart tender meat.
Basic cold grilled shrimp with a very average papaya salad was one of the better dishes - at least it had a savory component to cut through all the sugar. Fried rice with wagyu was good….garlic confit was an actual confit this time, wagyu was far from top grade (lack of marbling) and had been sitting under a heat lamp for a bit (congealed fried egg, cut surface of meat dried out), but at least the flavors were more balanced, even if I have eaten this exact same dish a dozen times since chili crisp first went into style ten years ago.
Dessert was good. Halo halo had texture and flavor, but when I tried to decipher the menu to see what the coconut cake was at the bottom, my heart sank once again when I saw that it was supposed to be flan…this had neither the texture nor flavor of flan.
Servers were nice enough, but we were sat at the very end of the chefs “tasting table” and treated as an afterthought. A thick glass display case of dried out (was this supposed to be Peking??) duck acted as barrier between us and the kitchen. We could hardly hear any of the dishes being described to us, and we certainly could not see them being prepared. The chef couldn’t even reach us to hand us dishes, so we were served separately after the other 6 guests were served personally by the chef. Far from the level of service I would expect for an automatic 20% gratuity (which is added prior to calculating tax so we also pay the tax for the 20% service charge 🤯).
For $255 per person, please assume your guests understand food well enough to know when they are being lied to about the authenticity of the recipes and ingredients. $250 was literally how much I spent on my last round trip plane ticket to Hawaii.
It is too late for us, but if I can save at least one diner’s wallet and stomach from a similarly disappointing experience, then I will not have dined in vain.