Looking back at a few recently reviewed eateries:

BANANA LEAF PASTA CAFE

Rating: Three forks out of five (Good)

McCully Shopping Center

946-3338

Lunch and dinner daily

Straightforward Italian-style pasta at inexpensive prices

At Banana Leaf Pasta Cafe, the food is populist and straightforward, and there's nothing wrong with that.

The 45-item menu at the sleekly cozy eatery whose interior reflects Asia more than southern Europe isn't Sunday dinner at the Lombardis', but neither is it Thursday spaghetti and meat balls at the school cafeteria. It's satisfying Italian-inspired food that gets the two most important components right: the pasta and the sauce.

Skip the starters and go straight to the main pasta dishes.

Among them, I loved the chicken with anchovy spaghettini. The firm pasta — al dente, as it were — was dipped (not swimming) in a thin butter sauce and tossed with sweet slices of sauteed garlic and warm, tender capers that hadn't been thrown in as an afterthought, as capers often are. These were allowed to soften and sweeten in the sauce, which rendered the often forgettable buds a crucial addition to the simple dish. The chunks of tender chicken and the anchovies were there for substance more than taste, but they provided it nicely, and without disrupting the dish's delicate balance.

There is also a meat-ball spaghettini, in which the restaurant's biggest triumph, its marinara sauce, is at its most realized. The a light-colored tomato sauce has been seasoned until no one flavor trounces another and every flavor is a star. It is paired with fluffy Italian meat balls that were bright with parsley and fiery with garlic and chilis.

— Kawehi Haug

HINONE MIZUNONE

Rating: Three forks out of five (Good)

1345 S. King St.

942-4848

Lunch Mondays-Saturdays

Inexpensive homey Japanese food

Home cookin'.

That's what was on the mind of Masahiro Fujio when he came up with the name for his restaurant chain, Hinone Mizunone.

The words mean, roughly, the sound of fire, the sound of water, but they refer specifically to the crackling of a wood fire and the bubbling of a rice pot, recalled from the days of his childhood.

Fujio now has franchised dozens of restaurants, three quarters of them Hinone Mizunone outlets in Japan. But he hopes that the chain still delivers on the name's promise: honest home cookin' — the promise his father offered at the first family restaurant, opened in the lean post-WWII years in Tenma, Osaka. It was called Shokudo (restaurant) Maruten.

The menu of teishoku sets, curry and Japanese noodles will be familiar to most here. What is perhaps not as familiar is what Fujie starts with when he's asked why he decided to open in Hawai'i.

Gohan. Rice. He uses a high-quality rice and cooks it to tender, pillowy perfection.

While the menu is hardly groundbreaking, the prices are right, the service prompt and polite and the place is very attractively decorated in high-style contemporary Japanese mode.

The restaurant has drawn the interest not just of neighboring business lunchers, but of Japanese nationals, many no doubt aware of the Japan restaurants in town.

— Wanda Adams

GREEN DOOR CAFE

Rating: Four forks out of five (Very good)

4614 Kilauea Ave., 533-0606

Dinner daily

Malay- and Singaporeaninspired dishes

The Green Door Cafe, which once occupied the tiniest of spaces in Chinatown, is now in a bigger space in Kahala, next door to the Olive Tree Cafe.

Owner and head chef Betty Pang, and her business and culinary partner Glenn Nitta, have given up on trying to do all the cooking and serving themselves and have hired a couple of servers to shoulder some of the burden.

Start with the "very special" fried shrimp rolls, dumpling-style pockets of shrimp surrounded in a tender flaky crust and fried until extra crispy. Follow those up with a bowl of the Malaysian chicken curry and a stack of roti canai.

For a main course, try the nonya pork loin with tamarind sauce, the nonya lemongrass seabass or the mushroom chicken with black pepper and garlic wine sauce .

It's the chicken, more than the other incredible dishes, that makes Pang look like the genius she is. Tender pieces of chicken are sauteed with organic mushrooms, garlic, wine and more than a dash of black pepper to create a savory dish that's hearty but not heavy, and brimming with saturated flavors that are also perfectly balanced.

— Kawehi Haug