Ron Viloria took an unusual route to his new job as executive chef at Tiki's Grill & Bar. He slipped in through the bakery door.

Viloria has been pastry chef at Tiki's since its opening, working alongside founding chef Fred DeAngelo (who now owns Ola at Turtle Bay Resort). It's rare for pastry chefs to come over to the "hot side," but Viloria trained in a formal, three-year apprenticeship program in his native Guam that took him into all parts of the kitchen.

Pastry chefs are the scientists of the culinary world, forced by the strict parameters of baking and confectionary principles to be detail-oriented and thoughtful about every step they take. The new executive chef thinks this background will serve him well. "I'm very finicky and that's just as important with fish and meat as it is with other ingredients," said Viloria, 36.

Tiki's is still using the previous chef's menu, but Viloria will begin to show his stuff with the next menu change in December, as well as in nightly specials.

He said his style is heavily influenced by Asia and the Pacific. He grew up fishing in Guam and will continue to have at least six types of fish on the menu. He has traveled to Korea, Taipei and Japan, so he likes to use ingredients such as seaweed, gobo, daikon and lotus root. And now he runs a tiki-kitsch restaurant in Honolulu, so he's added a tropical flair by means of local ingredients from taro to passion fruit. A typical preparation in this mode would be sea bass wrapped in konbu with pepper and bacon and glazed in a light black-bean sauce.

One of his goals is to lighten up on the butter sauces and explore lighter but highly flavored alternatives. In a tropical climate and an indoor-outdoor restaurant, butter makes you feel too heavy, he said.

Don't be surprised to find vanilla in your entree, or fruit, or pastry. One night, he made a sort of caramel praline with toasted macadamia nuts and crushed black peppercorns and coated grilled salmon in the mixture, serving it with a citrus sauce (yuzu, orange juice, lemon, lime) to balance the sweetness of the praline and the richness of the salmon. He's toying with an idea for 'ahi marinated in olive oil and local vanilla beans with vanilla mashed potatoes.

But this isn't really a departure for him. This is a guy who sometimes put celery and tomatoes in desserts. And they worked.

All this requires some fast footwork on the part of the servers, who attend tastings of new menu items so they can aptly describe them — and assure diners that a combination may be unusual but it isn't "weird."

Viloria is thrilled that the state's focus on diversified agriculture is beginning to percolate to the consumer level. He gets a lot of ideas from wandering the Kapi'olani Community College Saturday Farmers' Market. For the pastry chef turned exec, "It's almost like being in a candy store."

Reach Wanda A. Adams at wadams@honoluluadvertiser.com.