DINING SCENE
Kit n' Kitchen's Japanese-style Italian short on pizazz

By Matthew Gray
Advertiser Restaurant Critic

The spicy ground beef eggplant spaghetti dish, at $6.95, has a pleasant flavor, but it's not really spicy although it's advertised that way. Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser Kit n' Kitchen 1010 University Ave. 11a.m.-10 p.m. daily 942-7622 Good

It's headed by a chef, Kit Yiu, from Hong Kong, trained in Japan in Italian-style cooking (for the Angelo Pietro chain), who spent part of his early career in Hawai'i's multicultural atmosphere. All this shows. The menu is quirky at first glance, but easily figured out: It's composed of a small assortment of spaghetti plates and a lot of baked dishes (seafood, prawns, fish, chicken, pork chops and short ribs), any of which is served over your choice of rice or spaghetti. An odd configuration, but at least it's different.

After a pair of visits during which we tried quite a number of dishes, I have concluded that Yiu and I have very different palates. My preference is for dishes with bright, assertive flavors, and when something says "spicy" on the menu, I think it ought to wake up your tongue. Yiu appears to prefer the restrained, muted approach often encountered in Japanese versions of Western dishes (as at Angelo Pietro, for instance) and I found most dishes unexciting. If you prefer a light hand with flavorings, you might like this place.

Here's a look at the menu.

Kit n' Kitchen does not have an appetizer menu. However, you could start with the Malaysian satay ($2.50) or the sandy wings ($4.75). If you order the satay, however, skip the peanut sauce. This sauce, often the best part of satay, here lacks authentic flavor. The three small skewers of grilled beef had a nice flavor, but this dish is handled much better elsewhere. Sandy wings are chicken wings topped with chopped garlic.

They offer a house salad ($4.50) and a raw potato salad ($4.75). They weren't selling many of these on my two visits.

The spaghetti part of the menu includes a carbonara ($5.75), usually a wonderfully rich and creamy sauce accented with bacon or pancetta. This one was dryish and on the bland side, with a few pieces of bacon and a couple of vegetables to round out the plate. The spicy ground beef eggplant ($6.95) has a pleasant flavor, but is not as spicy as advertised. The pesto ($8.75) wasn't perky enough, either.

Garlic prawns ($8.70) in cream sauce were just OK; sake prawns ($8.95) about the same. Here, as elsewhere, the word prawn is a misnomer. Prawns have come to mean shrimps that are large enough to count 15 or fewer to the pound. The word prawn seems to be used on menus to convey something extra special, as if a great shrimp dish wasn't good enough.

We did enjoy the Black Sand Bay Fish ($8.75), which was mahimahi on this day, grilled and topped with a black bean and cream sauce combination. The bell pepper fish ($7.95) takes the fresh catch and drapes it with cream sauce and green bell peppers. Crazy Red Seafood ($9.75) combines shrimp, squid, scallops and mussels beneath a tomato sauce that is supposed to be fiery but was not.

The roast garlic chicken ($6.25) is accented with fried garlic slices instead of fresh garlic, and it tastes quite different from what you might be expecting, delivering a sort of burnt taste. Fried garlic is used on several dishes (pizzas included), so be sure to ask before ordering. We did find all the chicken dishes grilled nicely (blackened in black pepper sauce, $5.25; in hot marinara sauce, $6.25; with button mushrooms, $5.95).

Pork chop side dishes here involve a grilled, sliced pork chop topped with a choice of sauces. The Hawaiian ($6.25) combines pineapple and marinara; the Camp Fire Chop ($6.25) is a barbeque sauce and marinara combo; the black pepper pork chop ($5.95) has a seriously peppery sauce, almost gravy-like. This one I enjoyed. Thinly sliced short ribs in these same sauces are priced $6.25-$7.95.

Finally, the menu includes small pizzas, customizable by way of a create-your-own list of ingredients. You can get a plain cheese pie for $3.25, or you can load it up with vegetables (at 65 cents each) and/or meats (bacon, Portuguese sausage, chicken, salami) for $1 each, and seafood (tuna, shrimp, squid) at $1.25 each.

This restaurant has a very different concept, but the operators need to get a bit more saucy. The preparations hinge on the sauces, and the flavors were not singing as they could have been. Nor was there quite enough sauce in most cases. Everything seemed a bit tame.

Reach Matthew Gray at mgray@honoluluadvertiser.com.