Following up on the success of Lucky Belly on Hotel Street, restaurant partners Dusty Grable and chef Jesse Cruz cleaned up Amy’s Place across the street to offer a taste of rustic Americana.
"Jesse and I were always hoping for a second opportunity, but we didn’t think it would be just two years after we opened Lucky Belly," Grable said. "It came up sooner than we anticipated because our landlord owns both properties and asked if we would be interested. Even though we were not 100 percent sure we were ready, we were excited about it.
"We’re always daydreaming about restaurant concepts and always think about what would add to Chinatown’s flourishing restaurant scene."
What they came up with is a thoroughly contemporary restaurant that channels the spirit of an old-fashioned tavern. It’s not hard to imagine 19th-century Chinatown in the red brick walls, high ceiling and big picture windows.
Add the restaurant’s inaugural fall menu and the vibe is decidedly masculine, leaving me with the feeling of being in a wintery lodge, where the food is pure comfort, earthy, and the day’s hunt is on the table.
The lone feminine touch is "Grandma’s" chintz wallpaper over the bar, offered as a balancing act.
"This is one of our favorite styles of restaurants," Grable said.
Manly, yes, but I know many a woman who will also swoon over a good steak or burger, and with "comfort" as the key word here, every dish on the menu reads like a beckoning siren song.
You can ease your way into what Livestock Tavern offers with lunch. Start with the palate-pleasing venison carpaccio ($14), layered on three pieces of toast with spicy arugula and greens, capers, Pecorino and truffle aioli.
I would skip the crispy trotters ($9), which makes me think of Chinatown roast pork skin. This isn’t that. It’s a sort of pork mash rolled in breading and deep-fried, so it’s crispy on the outside only.
The Tavern Chop ($11) is a beautiful share or entree salad topped with such crowd-pleasing ingredients as crumbled bacon, diced avocado, grilled corn, bay shrimp, hearts of palm and a soft-boiled egg.
Entree plates and sandwiches might be considered heavy for lunchtime, but other downtown restaurants have set a precedent for serious options suitable for a business meeting.
The best of the sandwiches is the beef tongue ($12), which is barely recognizable as beef tongue for all its tenderness, topped with grilled onion and provolone.
In a town where Maine lobster roll ($18) is hard to come by, the one offered here is welcome, and passable, though still falling short of those offered in Maine and New York.
And on every table you’ll probably see the Tavern Burger, a third-pound hangar steak and chuck patty served on a house-made Kaiser roll, with bacon-onion marmalade, Gruyere and frisee amping up the all-American classic. In the future you might see short ribs in the mix.
To accompany your meal there is a full bar offering wine, handcrafted spirits, small-production beers and classic cocktails.
The restaurant eased its way on the scene with lunch about a month ago, introducing dinner just last week. But even this early on, service is seamless, provided you can get a table at rush hours.
Many of the lunch starters reappear in the evening. One that caught my eye was the spicy sausage and mussels ($12). I wondered what that would be like, and what arrived was a classic moules frite! It would have been much easier to understand if the menu read "Moules Frite," but I guess you can’t have French words on an all-American menu.
This is another of my favorite dishes that is basic but almost impossible to find done well in Hawaii. Livestock Tavern hits the mark. The plump mussels waded in saffron butter that was perfection, tossed with a few slivers of sausage and topped with shoestring frites. It is my favorite dish on the menu.
Running a close second was the lobster tail ($31) accompanied by a retro bourbon sauce with scalloped potatoes and bitter greens.
I would have loved to try the smoked prime rib ($28), but it was sold out both times I attempted to order it. What does that tell you? I will keep trying.
Duck breast was paired with duck confit hash ($28) in another dish, served with a sweet-savory cherry sauce and fried Brussels sprouts. The hash wasn’t ducky enough for me.
If you’re in a fowl mood, it would be better to stick with the herb-roasted chicken ($23), stuffed with fontina, spinach and mushrooms, and accompanied by truffle Yukon mash.
And the belly of Lucky Belly finds its way on Livestock Tavern’s menu in a dish of porridge and pork belly. With my Chinese upbringing and memory of Lucky Belly’s Asian influence, I was thinking this might be like jook. But this restaurant is an entirely different creature from its predecessor, so this was a dry "porridge" of farro, a nutty textured mix of grains and barley. It’s turned into silky "porridge" by tapping into the sunny-side-up egg yolk that straddles the farro. And you can’t go wrong with the crispy, fatty pork belly.
I have never been hungry for dessert after a meal here. Maybe that would be too much of a girly thing for this place.
Nadine Kam’s restaurant reviews are conducted anonymously and paid for by the Star-Advertiser. Reach her at nkam@staradvertiser.com.
