I've long been remiss in stopping into Cafe Hula Girl. The name is intriguing, for sure, and I'd pass it every now and then as I drove on Kalakaua Avenue toward some Waikiki destination. But the residential Waikiki Landmark, which houses the cafe, doesn't look like the kind of place people are welcome to stop and look around.

Then there's the puzzle of how to get to the parking. It actually turns out to be easy if you're westbound on Ala Wai Boulevard, and considering its location, parking is ridiculously cheap, at $1 an hour, with, I believe, a two-hour minimum. (The pay machine doesn't work properly, but I imagine if you're smart enough to find this place, you're smart enough to figure this out. Just have dollar bills handy.)

In such a location, manager George Huffman has had to be nimble in making it work, but with its arty interior — part tiki moderne, part gallery that is currently home to two figures sculpted from newspapers — creativity is a given.

For starters, in dealing with the economy, the cafe is in a shared space, with a different owner running the lunch business. To be very clear, Cafe Hula Girl is a night-only operation, for now anyway. Then there are guest chef series and monthly special dinners to augment the cafe's small regular menu.

The restaurant started life in another part of Waikiki as Hula Girl Cafe. Then and now, Cafe Hula Girl's cuisine is most easily described with the word “;fusion,”; though I feel I have to qualify that because fusion has developed some negative connotations over time. Where once it was perceived as a creative way of introducing flavors of Asia to Western cuisine, it rapidly gave way to an attention-grabbing free-for-all of throwing any old ingredient into the pot for novelty or shock value, rather than flavor compatibility or enhancement.

That's not the case here. Yes, there is the blending of East and West, but in a more measured way in which taste still matters. And, for those who don't like globalization, there are menu entries that keep the two worlds apart, starting with a wonderful rough-textured tomato bisque ($7) with the crunch of summer vegetables that go into it. There's more vegetables than cream in it, so I'd be more likely to describe it as a warm gazpacho. There's also a crab bisque ($9), but in case you're debating which one to try, this is the same tomato bisque, with some blue-crab meat stirred in.

Move on to salads such as a classic Caesar ($9); organic spring greens ($9); an Asian salad of Napa cabbage, daikon, edamame, carrots and cucumbers topped with blue crab and miso-soy vinaigrette ($12); or a simple salad of spinach, bacon and balsamic vinaigrette ($10).

Crab cakes in this town are universally bad, so I have given up ordering them, but as Huffman carted one off to another table, he made a show of telling us how good it is. It looked like every other crab cake to me, only bigger and not as desiccated as most. So I switched my plan to order baked clams in black-bean sauce in favor of the crab cake ($8). It turned out to be the best thing on the menu, dense, moist, handmade from blue crab plus finely minced vegetables, with the barest coating of bread crumbs. It's served with basil oil and mustard seed aioli on the side for a bit of zing.

A little less successful was the kalua pork croquette ($7), if only because there's so little pork at the center of a large croquette of mashed russet potatoes. Even so, the smoky perfume of the pork permeates the dish.

There is a trio of pastas on the menu, Cajun ($10) and Asian themed ($11), one with a hoisin sauce, the other with black bean sauce, all on spaghetti noodles. You can add chicken, clams, seafood or shrimp to the various pastas for $3 to $6, but otherwise, you'd better love pasta because there's a lot of it.

The short list of entrees include miso-marinated sauteed portabello mushroom ($13) and panko-crusted chicken breast ($15) stuffed with bacon, mushrooms, spinach and mozzarella. The signature dish is a fork-tender braised short rib ($16) the color of molasses, flavored with Chinese five spice and anise.

Baked mahimahi ($17) turned out a bit overcooked and the only dish I tried that didn't balance the flavors. Chopped ginger shouted its presence from the midst of a saute of Hamakua mushrooms sandwiched between pieces of fish.

Head to the restaurant's website, cafehulagirl.com, to keep up with special dinners, like a recent Zen dinner that featured chicken satay, seafood bouillabaisse, sugar cane-roasted prawns with Asian spice-rubbed petite fillet, and dessert of star anise and ginger creme brulee. At $36 per person, that's a good deal.

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Nadine Kam's restaurant reviews are conducted anonymously and paid for by the Star-Bulletin.