If given the choice, I'd rather review a restaurant than a nightclub. I tend to approach cuisine with a much more open mind than I do nightclubs.

Nightclubs and I, we go together like rain and a good hair day.

What to make of a restaurant that is co-owned and operated by Flash Hansen and Matty Boy Hazelgrove, a couple of Honolulu's most successful club and event promoters?

Do I rush in, hoping to discover some epiphanous dish that will finally give me reason to mingle among clubbers? Or do I hang back, reluctant to walk in on night creatures wrecked by bad cocktails (anything with Red Bull), and that silly beguiling lighting that makes everyone go home with the wrong someone.

I decided to rush in, with hopes high for one good dish, maybe more.

What I found there, at the newly flipped Apartm3nt (pronounced "apartment three") — on the third floor of the awfully ossified Century Center, a space once occupied by the restaurant Aria — was this: A baby restaurant and a veteran nightclub.

With walls striped in thick black and silver, sitting in Apartm3nt, whose third owning partner is Chip Jewitt, former owner of Pipeline Café and Aria, is like hanging out in Beetlejuice's pants (that is good or bad, depending on how fond you are of Beetlejuice).

The black lounge furniture and the tables dressed in black cloth only serve to instigate the Tim Burton analogies. But the animals-in-nature footage looping on the flatscreens and the démodé tchotchkes — cherubs in bird cages, bunches of grapes replicated in green glass — do nothing to further the pop-goth (or maybe it's boudoir nouveau) theme.

But I went for the food, not the ambience (the after-hours set can claim that part), and as a restaurant, Apartm3nt does some things very well, and other things less so. With a short menu of ramped-up comfort foods (and a few stray Mediterranean-inflected dishes like hummus, a version of baba ghanoush and chicken kebabs), Apartm3nt has vast potential to be more than just a restaurant-slash-lounge. It could be a place where fond, old-food memories are called to mind, and where new ones are made.

I already have a favorite new-old memory: my childhood, and ever present, love of hot dogs, and the first time I tried Apartm3nt's caprese hot dog. One of four gourmet dogs — the others are a Chicago-style, a chicken spinach and an Angus beef — the caprese dog is an Italian-style sausage with flecks of melted mozzarella running through it, topped with a chopped caprese salad of fresh mozzarella, grape tomatoes and basil, all nestled into a toasted potato bun. It's childhood nostalgia times 10. And it's my new addiction. At $4 per dog, it's affordable comfort, which is where Apartm3nt gets it very right: There's nothing on the menu more than $21.

The owners' resolve to keep things easy on the pocketbook also seeps into the nightclub realm of Apartm3nt, with an inexpensive cocktail menu that goes beyond happy hour (5-7 p.m. every day but Thursday), and a happy hour that every Tuesday turns into an all-nighter, with half-priced drinks and appetizers until the 2 a.m. closing. That's when the well-crafted, thin-crust, Sicilian-style pizzas sell for $5, and beer for $3 a bottle. That's also when the food crowd and nightclub crowd enjoy a rare common affinity, since there's no more equalizing a force than cheap pizza and beer.

On three separate dinner visits to Apartm3nt, the service and food varied wildly. One night, everything was right: The helpful and kind server saw us through our discovery of — and resulting addiction to — the hot dogs and the lobster macaroni and cheese ($15). The mac and cheese, rich and creamy with tender chunks of lobster, it is every bit the one-pot comfort meal it should be, plus some. On visits two and three, the service was slow and harried, and the food — especially the grilled New York steak ($21) — came overdone and bland. The four sliders ($4 each, three for $10) — barbecue kalua pork, blue crab salad, grilled chicken pesto and cheeseburger — were all satisfying and appetizing one night, and uneven the next. When they're on point, the sliders are perfect four-bite sandwiches, the kalua pork smoky and savory, the chicken pesto tender and moist, the cheeseburger pink and juicy, the crab salad savory and fresh. On off days, the sliders are just ... little sandwiches. They become victims of overcooking, underseasoning and a kitchen that sometimes finds itself, as one server said, "totally slammed."

But those are all missteps that are easily corrected. And, thanks to all the things that the place gets right, the imperfections are easy to overlook. Not that I'm making excuses for them, but we already know what first-time restaurateurs Hansen and Hazelgrove are capable of. Big parties. Sell-out concerts. Hugely popular social events. Why then shouldn't we expect them to get this one right, too? Wait for it. It'll come.