Serve yourself

One casualty of the diverse restaurant scene as it’s grown over the decades is the buffet restaurant. While most were not as extravagant as those in Vegas, the idea of a mountainous plate of food appealed to those with ginormous appetites and/or a taste for variety. It was top-of-mind for any large gathering, assuring hosts that all would find something to like and no one would go home hungry.

Over time, diners became more sophisticated and more health-conscious. In weighing the cost of an average buffet against what they were being served and whether they could eat their money’s worth of food, many decided the value wasn’t there. On the restaurant side, the economics probably didn’t work out either when considering costs and the handful of big eaters who could wipe out the priciest edibles.

Up to the challenge of this seeming no-win situation is Five Star International Buffet, which recently opened its doors on the third floor of the Royal Hawaiian Center, near Forever 21.

The Hokkaido, Japan-based restaurant is betting that diners will welcome a high-end buffet that offers varied, elegant cuisine, with a price cap to your meal. Sans drinks, you know that you’ll always pay $19 per person for lunch and $48 per person for dinner. It’s always nice to go to a traditional high-end restaurant, but for that cost you’ll be limited to a single appetizer and one entree choice. Here, those with a sense of adventure can pick two, three or — if your opu is up to it — 70 selections, all worthy of a nibble or two.

It’s not a typical buffet with vast pans of plate-lunch sort of fare. I think of Five Star more as the equivalent of a daily food festival, with dishes beautifully plated in small portions. That ensures that at peak times hot dishes don’t sit long. Managers and staffers are extremely vigilant in keeping the selections replenished, and the chefs are also continually at work in the open kitchen, with a bird’s-eye view of what’s moving and what’s not. This vantage also allows diners to ask questions of the chefs, and when I was there some Waikiki visitors were so pleased by their meal that they walked through before leaving, ecstatically thanking all the chefs, who were elevated like gods.

Such is globalism that the “international” buffet didn’t seem overtly international to me. Most obvious, due to the restaurant’s Japanese ownership, is a segregated, dedicated Japanese section at the Diamond Head end of the buffet line. Otherwise, by now it seems perfectly natural to see green chicken curry (Thai) sitting next to a pan of fettuccine with clams (Italian), near neighboring beef stroganoff (Russian).

The spacious, contemporary room seats 150, but the food is set up in a narrow galley, so I imagine there will be traffic jams at peak times as diners jockey for position or try to pass indecisive looky-loos.

By my rough count of dishes during a dinner setup, there were 30 entrees, 11 salads, plenty of fresh fruit and 18 desserts. Plus some things I didn’t count, such as a nut and basic cheese selection of cheddar, Swiss, Boursin, brie and a few others.

Modest-size portions make it ideal for sampling, though, let’s face it, at a typical benefit food festival, my limit is about eight little plates. Here, tackling every offering was impossible, and to maximize my experience I was shaving off an inch of mashed potatoes here and picking up a single scallop there. Sampling pasta meant wrapping three noodles around a single clam.

I went back for the carbs, although most people would think it unwise to fill up on inexpensive carbs at a buffet. But I couldn’t resist another bite when I found out those mashed potatoes were splashed with truffle oil. Continuing my carbfest, I also gravitated to the vichyssoise, breaking another rule of buffets: Don’t fill up on soup! It was just so rich and creamy I polished off the whole bowl.

Other things I went back for or would have wanted to go back for were the king salmon gravlax with mustard-dill sauce and onion mignonette, teppanyaki rib eye, baked salmon in a light cream sauce with shrimp and asparagus, miso­yaki butterfish on turnip, and chilled eggplant salad. There’s no set menu and dishes change frequently, so there’s no guarantee you’ll find some of your favorite dishes every time you show up, but you should find equivalent quality.

Even so, it’s still a buffet, so some dryness is a given, as with coquilles St. Jacques, a dish of short ribs, and Jidori chicken marsala, of which I enjoyed the Hama­kua mushrooms much more than the trademarked free-range chicken, which I found dry.

Given the quantity of food available, I passed on most of the sushi as well as the poke. I also didn’t get to try the Kurobuta pork kakuni or the chawanmushi; the first I forgot, the latter I figured would be too filling. I still had to get to dessert, and the ones I tried were too sugary for my taste, such as an artificial-tasting crème brûlée, apple crisp with more sugar and cinnamon on top than crisp, and pots de creme that wasn’t chocolaty enough. On the other hand, bread pudding was nice and custardy. I didn’t even get to the cakes, cheesecakes and panna cottas.

Accordingly, the pricier evening menu has many more seafood, meat and dessert selections than the lunch buffet, and for those who want to stop by during happy hour between 2 and 5:30 p.m. daily, they are currently offering five items at $5 each: kushi katsu, daily pasta, yaki-soba, California rolls and chicken karaage, subject to change.

A full bar features such signature cocktails as Lava Rocks (bananas, strawberries, pineapple, coconut crème and Bacardi), Coconut and Pineapple Caipirinha, and a Cucumber Cosmopolitan. If water is all you can handle, that’s special, too, triple-filtered and zapped with UV light.

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