The Weekly Eater
GEORGE F. LEE / GLEE@STARBULLETIN.COM
From left, Meghan Goldman, David Buck and Natalie
Parker enjoy food and company at Zazou.
LEST YOU FORGET what a small town Honolulu is, consider the restaurant Zazou. On Day 1 of its opening, my phone line was buzzing with the question, "What's Zazou?" Now the restaurant looks as if it had always been at home on Monsarrat, cozy and casual, with a packed dining room and patrons patiently waiting outside, precious wine bottles in hand, for a table to open up. From nothing to known in all of five days. New Zazou starts
off with a simple but
excellent menuWith such a cutesy name, I had doubts about how good the food might be. What's in a name? Zazou struck me as the sort of name that's slick, eminently marketable and bordering on the superficial because of those flash-and-no-substance connotations. Yet it also read fun and lively, and we could all use a little more of that. Indeed, the customers so far have been young (or at least young at heart), attractive and thin, the sort of people who understand completely the beauty of Zazou's Moroccan/Mediterranean diet.
It was with a great sense of relief that I spotted co-owner Sergio Mitrotti behind the deli counter. He's been called a renaissance man, a name that's stuck because of his culinary artistry and penchant for painting. Cafe Sistina, with its murals painted by Mitrotti, pays homage to the Sistine Chapel; Zazou's walls, too, are covered in his murals and trompe l'oeil exposed brick, all in sun-washed, earthy colors reflecting an Italian villa.
For him a menu like Zazou's is a mere trifle, a vacation from his other restaurant. While Cafe Sistina is "majestic, like a church," he said, his goals are humbler at Zazou, where the menu is one that he could create blindfolded, with one hand tied behind his back. The menu is so short, the waitresses -- unless they forgot a dish or two -- have it memorized. They were forced to do this because early customers kept pilfering copies.
ZAZOU
Food Service 
Ambience Value Address: 3046 Monsarrat Ave. (former space of Wild & Raw, across the street from complex featuring Bogart's and Paint it Pottery / 734-5530
Hours: 7 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. daily
Cost: About $20 to $25 for two for dinner, B.Y.O.B.
The menu is simple but in no way boring. And go ahead and make that first cheap date, going straight for entrees priced at $8.95 to $12.75. Portions are generous, yet without the fanfare of multiple courses and fancy settings, you can be in and out in about an hour if your date isn't working out. Just don't leave before sampling dessert of crisp, honeyed baklava.
If you need a warm-up act, you can start with the vegetarian platter ($8.25) with olives, hummus, the mellow roasted eggplant spread baba ghanouj, Tuscan beans and stewed vegetables boasting the mild curry flavors of cumin and coriander, and a small salad, served with pita. Everything was gobbled up quickly, save for the white rice in the center of the plate.
After that was a choice of shrimp and fish ($12.75) or lamb kebabs ($12.75), interspersed with tomatoes and onion slices. With the tender grilled medallions of lamb, there's only one skewer per plate, but the portion adds up to about 6 ounces of meat, which by health standards is enough for any man. At the time, the skewer also came with slices of spicy North African merguez sausage, which is now available in a $3.75 side order. This was so good that at the time, I didn't long for any type of sauce or accompaniment. It wasn't until two days later that I wondered if the sausage should have been accompanied by North Africa's harissa sauce, a fiery sauce made with tomatoes, crushed peppers, cumin, coriander and garlic.
There was also pasta twirled in a light tomato sauce with your choice of fresh Manila clams -- a dozen and a half of them -- or shrimp in the shell ($10.50). Chicken stewed with garbanzo beans in a similar light tomato sauce was the least spectacular dish, but I really enjoyed it in leftover form, once it was removed from the dazzle of the other plates.
And that's about all there is for now. Mitrotti says the dinner menu should not change much, but he'll be playing with lunch and breakfast menus. Right now, the lunch menu duplicates the dinner menu, and he plans to add deli sandwiches to make Zazou the sort of neighborhood stop where people are constantly dropping by for "an order here, a pickup there." And while standard American breakfast items such as pancakes, bacon, sausages and omelets are available now, he plans to introduce European specialties such as Spanish tortas and Italian frittatas.
Lastly, while there was nothing wrong with the food, service was spotty. There's always concern when a restaurant so new finds itself at the mercy of a reviewer, and I understand the problems involved in training people. I can usually overlook problems of waitresses -- in this case, three of them -- forgetting to deliver water to a table as a problem specific to new restaurants, but I don't know if this staff will ever rise to excellence. You can train people to recite menus, carry hot plates and pour water, but you can't teach them to be conscientious. Here, every question and request for information on site and over the phone was met with a verbal "I don't know" and an "I don't care to find out" attitude. Kiddies, try a little harder. Don't ruin a good thing.
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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:
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excellent; very good, exceeds expectations; average; below average.
