The Weekly Eater: Honolulu Skewer House offers Beijing-style fare

Around the world, people of different cultures have reveled for centuries in the simple joy of meat on a stick. The Middle East is known for kebabs, while the Russians have their shashlik. In Southeast Asia, satays are favorite street fare, and the Japanese have yakitori, kushiage and robata.

With the abundance of Japanese and Thai restaurants here, we’re most familiar with yakitori and satays. Honolulu Skewer House introduces something new to the scene with its Chinese-style feast of skewered foods, called lu chuan.

The restaurant has roots in Beijing, where grilled, skewered meat is a favorite street fare. This marks the first time the concept is being tried on Oahu. Given the concept, the restaurant found a virtually turn-key home in the space that formerly housed Japanese Restaurant Aki, which specialized in robata. The furnishings and artwork remain the same.

Because so many yakitori restaurants have opened here in the past year, the natural inclination for aficionados of skewered chicken is to compare the two styles. This is not the place for purists or minimalists.

WITH YAKITORI, diners appreciate the spare beauty of tender morsels of chicken dressed with little more than a touch of soy sauce, salt and pepper. The Chinese are more aggressive with their sauces, full of soy, garlic and chili peppers. You’ll taste the food in your mouth long after you’ve left the premises.

Newbies may want to take a seat at the bar their first time, to watch the grill master at work. One grill is for meat that takes longest to cook and requires the most supervision to avoid charring. Smaller, quick-cook items are placed over a rotisserie-style grill. Even so, with just one chef for the large space, smaller cuts of meat — like lamb placed over the rotisserie — though still delicious, do tend to dry out.

For ease of ordering, most yakitori/robata restaurants have adopted a paper checklist for marking selections. As much as I don’t like to see paper waste, it streamlines the process immensely. It takes a minute to check items off a list. It takes 15 to relay dozens of decisions over type of ingredient, sauce and number of skewers by word of mouth.

Choices come in categories of beef and lamb, pork, chicken, seafood, vegetables, meatballs and sausages. In this culture, pork is the meat of choice, with 13 selections versus nine for chicken, which tends to be favored at Japanese restaurants. If you’re worried that all these small orders will add up, calculating cost is easy. Each skewer is $1.99, so there should be no surprises when the check comes.

If you’re in need of guidance, some dishes are marked as “chef’s recommendation” and “most popular.” Two of the most popular are also my favorites, the juicy black pork belly and pork-wrapped enoki. The thin-sliced pork wrapping dries out quickly on the grill, but gets an assist from various sauces.

Those who don’t want to choose can opt for a combo for two ($39.99), three ($59.99) or four ($79.99) people. Each strives for a balance, pulling from the various categories so you get lamb, pork, shrimp, chicken thighs, gizzards and vegetables, but personally, I’d rather put in some effort to get exactly what I want.

Note for those with allergies: Of the four sauces offered, all but the original soy-based sauce — with Guangxi star anise, Sichuan bay leaves, ginger and scallion — contain chopped peanuts. This sauce imparts the most flavor during cooking. A mild seasoning of Hunan white sesame, Xinjiang fennel, ginger and scallions barely registers. A spicy seasoning ­— not used during cooking but served for dipping — contains Sichuan and Yunnan chili peppers, but was more sweet than spicy. I didn’t order the Flaming Hot sauce, but based on the mildness of the “spicy” seasoning, I should have.

With chicken selections of wings and thighs, I missed the basic salt-and-pepper seasoning of yakitori restaurants that highlights the flavor of the chicken. Here, it’s more about the impact of sauce on the various meat selections.

The most popular sauce seems to be the one that accompanies an appetizer of Hanging Pork, thin slices of roast pork layered with thin sheets of cucumber, served on a rack over a dark pool of soy-garlic-scallion sauce. It was a perfect combination, and the sauce also worked with just about everything else ordered. I was told that other guests have asked the restaurant to bottle and sell that sauce.

IF YOU have a big appetite and small pieces of meat aren’t enough, a beef-wrapped soft-boiled egg ($2.99) will fill you up quickly. Other extras include appetizers of tofu topped with creamy sliced pidan (blackened preserved egg, $6.99) and a fiery braised beef salad ($9.99), a few pieces of thin-sliced beef tossed with cucumbers, scallions and sliced chili peppers.

Also worth considering are simmered dishes, a mushroom medley in butter ($4.99) and shrimp in beer ($6.99).

Where Skewer House misses the mark is with chicken skin that is missing that prized crackle-crisp texture. It’s not worth adding fatty content to your insides when you can’t enjoy that brittle crunch on the outside. Without that, the skin is just rubber.

Meals end with sweet or savory toast or soft Chinese buns ($1.99 per order). I opted for the sweet buns, brushed with reduced condensed milk. Yum!

If you don’t need the extra carbs, meals end naturally with a complimentary slice of candied fruit that varies. You might get a single piece of strawberry or pineapple.

Nadine Kam’s restaurant reviews are conducted anonymously and paid for by the Star-Advertiser. Reach her at nkam@staradvertiser.com.