By Lee Cataluna
Advertiser Columnist

Don't you love it when food makes sense; when restaurant and grocery store management figures out how to give us what we want, even if we weren't sure we wanted it?

Take for example the venerable Wisteria restaurant, an establishment where the wait staff is so friendly and familiar even with first-timers that you feel guilty for leaving any little scrap on your plate. "No, no, was good! I'm just really full. I promise." But still, they look a little wounded and you feel so bad for letting down such earnest professionals.

One of Wisteria's featured specials is "beef stew bar day." The beef stew bar includes all-you-can-eat beef stew. One vat. Unlike, say, an ice cream sundae bar or a salad bar, there aren't choices of condiments or toppings. Just beef stew, rice, iceberg lettuce and purple cabbage salad, mac salad, tsukemono and soup of the day. The "choice" part of the bar is that you get to serve yourself, so you can decide if you want carrots, don't want carrots, want extra potatoes, want only meat, want heavy gravy, whatever. It's brilliant. It's empowering.

Then, there's a most unusual dessert offering at Hong Kong Harbor View Seafood Restaurant at Aloha Tower Marketplace. It's a little plate filled with what look like eyeballs. They're Chinese dates surrounded by mochi and covered in warm honey. The plate comes with a set of wooden stakes with which to skewer the orbs. So 'ono. And so weird.

But what's really brilliant is that the wait staff pays attention. There was an equal number of the mochi-ball dates to be divided among all at the table. I love that. So junk when there's three people at lunch and four egg rolls on the plate. Or worse, three people and two egg rolls.

Then there's Koloa Big Save on Kaua'i.

Gone is the warm, soapy-sweet smell of the launderette and the syncopated rhythm of zippers and change going around in the dryers. Gone are the owners of dirty clothes who used to hang out by the gum-encrusted folding table. Gone is the little lunch counter where regulars managed to carry on conversation over the sound of the screen door slamming, the grill hissing and those dryers thumping against the adjoining wall.

Instead, all that space has been claimed inside the market. Big Save now has a bakery and deli, a Subway sandwich counter and — this one is something of a jaw-dropper — a sushi chef with his own little sushi counter where you can pick up take-out containers of fancy spicy tuna hand rolls or inside-out California rolls. The store is still full of shoppers fresh from the beach, their hair dripping down their backs, sand from their feet leaving little tracks on the floor. That's the only way you're sure you're in Koloa Big Save.

If only they had a beef stew bar.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.