[vox] Review: Restaurant Kaikodo (Orig: May 21, 2007)

(Update: Hilo is still a small town, and Kaikodo has folded. I liked the writing for this, so I rescued it from the burning carcass of Vox before I deleted my account)

Hilo is a small town with limited culinary options. As such, I was extremely excited a few years ago by the news that an "upscale" restaurant, run by people who had successfully survived the blood-sport that is the New York food scene, were going to try their hand at operating here, in the middle of the Pacific. Grand plans were proposed: they purchased a decommissioned Masonic temple in the heart of the downtown area, and were planning on renovating the second floor to be a gallery space. The ground floor was to house their restaurant.

It's several years later now, and their grand designs have failed to materialize. After a successful opening, business tapered off as their novelty waned. The art gallery (which would have required enormous amounts of capital) never opened. Casting about, seeming at random, the management decided to open a sushi restaurant in a small annex next to the main dining room. Although the food was good (Fantastic, actually - this would be a very different review had they kept it), the space was also used as their event room. Unsurprisingly, the unpredictable hours and random event closures drove away even the most devout local diners.

Every few years, I revisit Restaurant Kaikodo to see if anything has changed. On Saturday, Miss Scotch and I decided the time had come for our biennial festival of disappointment.

I made reservations for us, as Scotch had found out that the second floor (remember the proposed art gallery space I mentioned?) was being used that night for a high school prom. We assumed that this meant that the dining room would be packed. We were wrong. Perhaps the first bad sign was that on a Saturday night, in the height of graduation season, the place was at roughly 10% capacity. The dining room itself is cavernous, and appointed with faux-Chihuly light fixtures reminiscent of psychedelic squid. I suspect the mix of occidental and oriental fixtures and furnishings is meant to provide a pacific fusion feel, but instead it highlights the lack of focus that was to be the theme of our dining experience.

At this point, I'd like to say that we didn't have a horrible dinner. Our morally ambiguous foie gras starters were nice (although the portions were quite small), as was the salad of local greens that we shared. The real problem was the main course.

Now, I understand that duck confit is meant to be somewhat salty. After all, the dish grew out of a preservative method where the target meat is cured in salt, and the poached slowly in fat. This was perhaps the saltiest meal that I have ever been served.

As I understand it, there are two main reasons why restaurants put specials on the menu. Either they have run across a nice supply of an ingredient that they don't normally have access to (ideal), or they are trying to clean up their kitchen before the ingredients they have go off (to be avoided). Sadly, our dinners fit into this latter category.

Had the duck been served with appropriate accompaniment, it would have been fine. Instead, we received: a rather dodgy looking cooked asian slaw with "well done" chunks of ahi, and fried potatoes with pancetta. I'd like to take a moment to note that regardless of how good your ahi was to start out with, if you cook it all the way through, it's just tuna. From the size and cut of the chunks, this was clearly ahi that had originally been intended for a poke.

Oh dear. Salt on salt with a side of salt. I'm still not clear on what they were trying to accomplish with the chunks of Italian bacon. This combination also did not lend itself to a good presentation. Brown and white. Even something as simple as braised bok choi in a hoisin sauce would have added some color, and a much needed sweetness (as an aside, I used the leftover duck confit in an omelet the next morning with some shitake and hoisin sauce - sadly much nicer than what we were served). The cost for this saline monstrosity? $30 a head.

Luckily for Restaurant Kaikodo, the owners are loaded, and don't seem to mind running a mediocre kitchen. It's interesting to note that they have flipped head chefs twice in the last year, and yet the menu has not changed since the day they opened. I suspect that the chef is treated as little more than a line cook by the management. If it weren't for the owners' tremendous financial reserves, I'm convinced they would have had to close the place years ago. Pretentious, overpriced food. Little local interest. A complete lack of focus.

Someone call Gordon Ramsay.