Auntie Pasto’s owner sells remaining eatery

Prolific Hawaii restaurateur Ed Wary has sold his last remaining Auntie Pasto’s Italian restaurant, relinquishing all connection with a concept he created some 32 years ago and for which his mother’s recipes were the foundation.

Wary’s efforts now are leading to opening a new restaurant in addition to running the new Dixie Grill Express on the first floor of the Navy Marine Golf Course clubhouse on Valkenburgh Street, which is open to the public.

Wary sold Auntie Pasto’s Kunia for undisclosed terms, after selling the flagship Beretania Street store in 2011.

"We started having issues with the trade name," Wary said, noting continuing customer confusion between the locations, resulting from the separately owned locations’ identical name but differing menus and operational styles.

He had been planning to change the restaurant’s name to APK, which was sort of an internal nickname for the store, and then he got an offer from businessman Kenneth Kim. "He made me one of those offers I really couldn’t refuse," Wary said. Kim plans to keep the well-established name, with which Wary now has no association.

In the late 1970s Wary ran an unbranded Italian restaurant as part of the International Kitchen in what was the precursor to the food court at Pearlridge Center.

In the early 1980s Wary opened Auntie Pasto’s first location because, he said, the only Italian restaurant options were the white-tablecloth Matteo’s and Trattoria restaurants in Wai­kiki.

The first Auntie Pasto’s opened at Pensacola and Beretania streets in 1983, and lines of eager diners snaked out the Pensacola Street doors, around the corner and down Beretania Street toward the Capitol.

There was a joke invoking the old Yogi Berra malapropism, that the restaurant was so busy nobody went there anymore, Wary chuckled.

On a record night the 84-seat restaurant sold 564 dinners, he said.

Three other restaurants have borne the Auntie Pasto’s name, food and brand in the days since, including a second store in Kapahulu that opened in 2000; the third, the just-sold Kunia store; and a fourth on Maui that opened in August 2008 and closed the following summer. The Kapahulu store, along with Wary’s Eddie’s Burgers and Frozen Custard shop on Wai­alae Avenue, were sold in 2003.

Another of Wary’s concepts, Dixie Grill, has opened in smaller form on the ground floor of the Navy Marine Golf Course clubhouse, at 943 Valkenburgh St., across from Moana­lua Shopping Center.

"We opened in mid-February," said Wary. "We’re barbecuing, serving pulled pork and brisket, as well as fried chicken, fried okra" and other items on an abbreviated form of the menu at Dixie Grill in Aiea. Unlike Dixie Grill Aiea, the express location does not have a Whiskey Dix upstairs.

It will, however, have a brand-new restaurant concept on the second floor, following renovations.

Wary will open Irons Table & Tavern, a 200-seat, upscale-cas­ual steak, chop and fish house that will not just be a "freezer-to-fryer" affair. Rather, it will be an on-trend, farm-to-table, snout-to-tail restaurant serving organic ingredients when possible, he said.

The irons reference in the name is not about golf clubs, but about the old steelworker method of preparing steaks, in an oven that would cook meat at up to 1,800 degrees, said Wary. The farmhouse tables allow for family-style presentation of salad and baskets of cornbread, as well as individual or family-style main dishes.

Military hail-and-farewell parties often are done buffet style, "but our theory is, if you’re in the military you spend half your life standing in line. We want military members to be able to sit, and be served and treated with respect, the way they deserve," Wary said.

While sure to be popular with the area’s military population, the clubhouse is open to the public; military ID is not required.

When it opens, likely in early 2016, it will serve lunch, dinner and weekend brunch, and will be available for group functions.

Customers’ experiences on the tavern, or bar side, also will be on-trend with house-made syrups and freshly squeezed juices. "I’m having fun" planning for the opening, Wary said.