GARLIC may give vampires the heebie-jeebies, but budding restaurateurs, take a tip from Ninniku-ya: Put garlic on the menu and the rest of the world will beat a path to your door. Ninniku-ya lures
with taste of garlicDiners will definitely need reservations to get into the restaurant, even on traditionally slow evenings like Monday and Tuesday. The dining room is rather small, set in the charming house on Waialae Avenue vacated recently by Baci Due.
There's seating inside and out, and if you call early, try to reserve a table outdoors. Otherwise you may suffocate from smoke rising off sizzling "hot stone" platters delivering juicy filet mignon to almost every table.
Ninniku-ya bills itself as a Euro-Asian garlic restaurant, the first of its kind in America. It could be argued that just across the ocean, The Stinking Rose in San Francisco also pays homage to the pungent bulb, with a little more finesse. The Stinking Rose's emphasis is more Amer-Italian, but a glance at Ninniku-ya's menu will turn up steaks and pastas with just a nod to Asian ingredients that get lost anyway in the odoriferous deluge.
The menu doesn't seem particularly pricey, with entrees running from $9 for a Three Pepper Garlic Pasta to $21 for the Filet Mignon, slathered with pesto butter. But curiosity may lure you to order more than you can handle, just to get a taste of, say, Cold Pumpkin Soup ($6) with garlic.
Just because every dish has garlic in it doesn't mean they go overboard. The Pumpkin Soup was heavier on cream than garlic or pumpkin. A salad of Onaga and Avocado ($10) also could have used a boost of garlic. This "salad" could better be described as a scoop of guacamole with a few small pieces of sashimi tossed in.ALTHOUGH the wait staff moved briskly about the restaurant, dishes were slow to arrive from the small kitchen. In addition, dishes arrived haphazardly. It's not unusual to receive entree before appetizer. The staff tries to promote family-style dining, so supposedly, anything goes and every dish is meant to be shared.
An appetizer of Grilled Herb Chicken ($9) features two rosemary-studded, crispy skin-on breasts whose bite-size chunks you have to slice into; usually, only entrees demand this much work. Garlic dominates an accompanying Thai-inspired peanut-chile paste. This one-dimensional paste also came with the steaks and Three-Sauce Grilled Tiger Prawns ($12). One of the other prawn sauces featured coconut milk, but the last was a mystery. It doesn't matter. After sampling the paste, your taste buds will be pretty much shot. All that's left to enjoy are the textures of smooth roasted garlic accompanying tender steak and the chewiness of pasta topped with tender lengths of king crab ($18) lifted easily from the shell.
Beyond flavor, garlic has its charms. It contains allyl sulfide, an antibiotic, and allicin, which has been proven to lower blood cholesterol levels, though only if you consume seven to 28 fresh cloves a day. Sorry, you won't get that many with your steak.
Besides the filet mignon, the highlight here is the Okinawan Sweet Potato ice cream ($3.50) with garlic. If you can imagine it, it was as rich and creamy as a steamed taro cake, only cold.
After a meal like that, the only thing left to put on the menu is a Binaca blast.
Ninniku-ya Garlic Restaurant
Where: 3196 Waialae Ave. (valet parking)
Nadine Kam's restaurant reviews run on Thursdays. Reviews are conducted anonymously and paid for by the Star-Bulletin. Star ratings are based on comparisons of similar restaurants:
To recommend a restaurant, write: The Weekly Eater, P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, Hawaii 96802. Or send e-mail to features@starbulletin.com-- excellent;
