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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Wednesday, October 9, 2002

Meritage builds menu with 'casual elegance'

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor

Meritage co-owner Mariano Lalica, who also is the chef at the restaurant, prepares a chocolate dessert.

Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser

It's the chef's equivalent of an unfurnished house or a blank canvas: the menu in a new restaurant. You can make it anything you want it to be.

Mariano Lalica, chef-partner of the new Meritage restaurant in Restaurant Row, has been so focused on menu design in the past few weeks that he's literally lost sleep, reviewing ideas for dishes or presentations or accompaniments, then snapping the light back on to scribble them down before he forgets them.

With the restaurant's opening earlier this week, we thought it might be interesting to peek inside the process by which a menu is put together.

Of course, no menu is truly a totally blank slate. The framework is dictated by the theme of the restaurant, the kitchen and equipment available, availability of ingredients and, inevitably, budget issues. "You can't sprinkle everything with Beluga caviar," said Lalica, wryly.

Diners also expect a certain range of choices: red meat, white meat, fish and vegetarian dishes; salads, starters, soups — and dessert, naturally.

In the case of Meritage, Lalica, general managing partner Laurent Chouari and president/partner William Cheng had known from the start that the town didn't need another East-West/Pacific Rim/Ha-wai'i Regional Cuisine restaurant. Building on Lalica's background at several Bay Area restaurants, at the lamented Acqua in Waikiki and at Nick's Fishmarket, they decided to create a French-Italian hybrid. "You could call it Mediterranean, but we didn't want to use that word because a lot of people don't know what it means. 'What is that? Greek food?' " he said with a smile.

The restaurant's name, Lalica's selection, is also appropriate to the paired cuisines; it's wine talk for a blending of Bordeaux-style varietals.

The guiding principles beyond the cuisine type were "casual elegance" — celebratory but unstuffy, affordable. "In Hawai'i, it's all about value," he said.

They knew they wanted the food to be "wine-friendly," though Lalica hastens to distance himself from wine snobbery. "I don't know everything about the soil and the vineyard and all that. We've been tasting quite a bit, and we're just thinking about what works together. What makes the food taste even better?"

The partners knew their restaurant would be primarily a dinner house, with lunch introduced after they settle in.

And one other thing: "I would ask myself, what would I just love to eat?" Lalica said. After years of working for others, this was his chance to express his ideas and share his preferences.

Lalica went to work, which mainly took the form of daydreaming. (That is, in between purchasing equipment, hiring staff, selecting furnishings and all the other tasks associated with opening a restaurant.)

His daydreams played around meals and ingredients and flavors he had enjoyed: his mother's pork adobo, the seafood martini everyone loved at Acqua, a picnic meal in Napa. "I would think about where I ate and what I tried and try to capture that moment and that experience — what was perfect about it? how can I adapt that?" he said.

The adobo, with balsamic vinegar, different herbs and a twist of the technique, became a dish he expects to be a signature: Braised Balsamic Pork Spareribs Marco with Wild Mushrooms, Fennel and Asparagus Risotto. The balsamic starts out strong-tasting, he said, but slow-cooked with the other ingredients, it takes on the tangy sweetness of plums, he said.

The Meritage Seafood Martini appetizer — lobster and rock shrimp tossed with tomatoes and other ingredients, wrapped in 'ahi carpaccio and garnished with caviar before being presented in a martini glass — was a no-brainer. Acqua's been closed for years, but people still talk about that dish, and Lalica can still taste it.

Guava Grilled Prawns —Êprawns grilled with a guava-based barbecue sauce and served with a pesto potato salad — bring back to him the fun of eating outdoors in wine country. "All you're missing is the red-checked tablecloth," he said.

Lalica's food memories have sent him on some wild quests. He's been shopping all over for a certain type of stand that he saw in a Seattle restaurant, on which to serve fresh oysters. "Nobody knows what I'm talking about, but I am still trying to find it," he said.

Like most chefs, Lalica knew he couldn't do it all himself, so he tracked down a pastry chef with whom he'd worked at Acqua, when she was pretty much fresh out of Kapi'olani Community College's culinary program. "I just watched her blossom, and I knew she was going to be good," Lalica said. Her name is Ashley Nakano, and he found her working with executive pastry chef David Brown at the Hilton Waikoloa Hotel.

Nakano incorporated Lalica's Taste of Honolulu-winning Macadamia Nut Mocha Mousse Cake into the dessert menu, along with a daily sorbet and an intriguing Crispy Hot Banana Sunday, in which the banana is wrapped in kataifi (phyllo pastry strips) and fried crisp, to contrast with the rich tastes of pineapple caramel and vanilla ice cream.

One of the partners' goals for the restaurant is that it become a spot for late-night dessert, port or other dessert wine and conversation, with a background of soothing jazz from a plasma-screen TV. Lalica said: "There just are so few places to go later in the evening where the music isn't loud and you can really sit and talk in a nice environment."