One of San Francisco’s hottest restaurants brings a taste of Hawaii to the menu.

Liholiho Yacht Club opened in February to accolades. When I mentioned to another Bay Area chef who knows all the industry buzz that it was “OK,” he said, “Wow, yours is the only negative review I’ve heard.”

My three-word “review,” “It was OK,” could hardly be construed as negative, and my response was, “Hey, I’m from Hawaii.” Meaning: What looks new, novel and audacious to San Francisco foodies isn’t groundbreaking to anyone from the islands. Doing some simple arithmetic, an equal amount of hits and misses adds up to OK.

In a city where dining can seem overly precious — at Sons and Daughters we were privy to the source of every item in front of us, just shy of knowing the name of the bantam that laid the egg on our plate — Liholiho’s hearty, family-style portions are a bold and perhaps long-due step in the opposite direction.

This is no delicate flower of a restaurant. It’s sort of Pacific Rim on steroids. Just as Spam our way is gaining buzz across the nation, chef and co-owner Ravi Kapur finds himself in the right place at the right time with offerings such as house-made Spam fried rice and an Ohana Table for bringing family and friends together for a no-brainer evening. Just tell them how many in your party, and they’ll prepare 10 to 12 shareable dishes at $55 per person, with a minimum $440 booking.

Bon Appetit recently featured Kapur and the restaurant in a Spam roundup, and he made the cover of the summer 2015 edition of Edible San Francisco magazine.

Kapur’s cred hails from having grown up on Oahu, then working at San Francisco’s Boulevard and Prospect restaurants before launching his popular LYC pop-up events in 2012. His Nob Hill bricks-and-mortar location became a reality with the help of Allyson Jossel and Jeff Hanak of Nopa.

You can sense the Hawaii connection at the door, where floor tiles spell “aloha” in blue against a white backdrop, and staffers look like people you saw every day in high school. Enhancing the bar area is a black-and-white portrait of a young, beautiful, smiling wahine, who turns out to be Kapur’s mom, circa 1975.

It’s a pleasant place to hang out, so it’s packed every night. For me the best seats in the house are toward the back of the room, with an overview of the open kitchen where the multicultural alchemy happens.

Like most chefs in Hawaii, Kapur draws from his chop suey experience, growing up eating Asian, Southeast Asian, Hawaiian, Indian and Portuguese cuisine. Those influences have made their way into his creations, starting with an appetizer of poke ($15.50) with sesame oil and radish served over nori crackers. It was … OK.

In the birthplace of poke, this was nothing out of the ordinary. The crackers were thick, more jaw breaker than delicate or brittle-crisp, as I was expecting.

My guests and I were more enamored of duck liver toast ($9.75) topped with jalapeno and pickled pineapple. In the land of pineapple, I’d never seen this combination, but savory-meets-sweet is perfect chemistry.

We couldn’t resist trying one of the specials of the day, a salmon tail made to serve three to four. The salmon tail swimming in a red pool of chili sauce and smothered with black bean-sauced green beans was a strange vision, but it was so delicious, and worth raving about and sharing snaps for days to come.

Following this, two pork dishes, a country roast ($28.75) and belly, were misses, both dry, although the twice-cooked pork belly ($29.50) with pineapple, Thai basil, fennel and a hint of char siu flavor was the better of the two.

We were on the right track again with a dish of short ribs with escargot-filled marrow bone, mushrooms, spring onions and horseradish ($36).

All of this was filling stuff, so I did a pass on the Spam fried rice ($14.75), which I imagined to be like typical island fried rice, the spam cut up into an itty-bitty mince. Only after we left did I think to do an Instagram search, and the large slabs of pork over rice looked delish. I’m pretty sure this would have ended up on the plus side of my scoring.

For dessert, Baked Hawaii caramelized pineapple ice cream ($10) is Kapur’s 50th State nod to Baked Alaska. The ice cream is encased in a beehive-shaped meringue and torched before it arrives at the table, lighting up eyes in the process.

It was a fun evening, and exciting to see a taste of Hawaii gaining so much attention. A visit to Liholiho Yacht Club to see what’s going on there firsthand satisfied my curiosity. But while some people seek familiarity for a measure of comfort when they travel, I’m not one of them. I don’t need to travel nearly 2,400 miles to get a taste of home.

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

BITE SIZE

A taste of home, in the Big Apple

Not to be outdone by the West side, in NYC’s East Village, Hawaii-raised chef de cuisine Chung Chow — who paid his dues at Per Se — also brings a taste of home to Noreetuh.

I’ve never had the pleasure of visiting this restaurant, which opened in spring, but have been reading as writers dissect the 50th State’s love affair with food such as poke and Spam, The New York Times reporting that the chef “goes out of his way to treat Hormel’s arrestingly pink canned meat product as if it were an heirloom ingredient.”

Kalua pork, poke, taro chips and King’s Hawaiian sweet bread also find their way into dishes, which in photographs look quite refined.

The Times writer goes on to say that the sweet bread paired with monkfish liver torchon and jellied passion fruit is “one of the most exciting tastes to wash up on Manhattan’s shores this year.”

The restaurant is at 128 First St. near St. Marks Place. Visit noreetuh.com.

"Bite Size" documents the new, the small, the unsung.