Pitch Sports Bar fills niche in Kakaako

The Kakaako block of shops and common space dubbed Salt by developer Kamehameha Schools has rapidly grown into a trendy place for food and fun, with residents from nearby condo developments, employees at court and federal buildings, as well as outsiders to the area finding plenty to enjoy.

Pitch Sports Bar Hawaii, on the second floor of the building cornering Coral and Auahi streets, is one of the newer additions to the scene, opening in November.

THE EXPERIENCE

No worries figuring out what kind of place this is; it doesn’t get much more straightforward than Pitch Sports Bar. You might be forgiven, though, for thinking “Pitch” refers to the strikes and balls thrown in baseball — but you’d be wrong. Instead, the sports bar’s name is an allusion to the term for the field that sports like soccer are played on. It’s a word more commonly used in the U.K.

Don’t worry that this means the place has European pretensions, though. Whatever sport is available, from baseball to American football to soccer and rugby, will be carried on one of Pitch’s seven large flat screens.

The Salt complex has an industrial-tech feel, with corrugated tin covering the roof and exterior walls of many of the buildings. Pitch takes that design theme to the max inside, with mostly unfinished brick walls, concrete floors and exposed metal framing and duct work along the ceiling. Even the underside of that corrugated tin is exposed, but painted black to give it that extra hipster touch.

There are two electronic dartboard setups along one side of the L-shaped bar, with a few long, rectangular, unpainted wood tables for groups and smaller tables for two or four. There is a covered lanai outside as well — the fake grass there adds a nice sporty touch, and, though it was crowded during my visit, I bet the tent covering helps keep it comfortable on sunny days.

A few groups were there when I first arrived, at around 5 p.m. on a Thursday, and more came in by the time I left an hour later — mostly a young urban professional crowd, as one might expect from that time and that location.

THE FOOD

Pitch only recently started offering happy-hour food items, but from the ones I tasted, they’ve got things figured out. One nice thing is that everything is the same price, $9, so you tally up your bill in your head pretty easily. And at that price each dish had a reasonable amount of food; you won’t be thinking “Is that all there is?” when it arrives.

The offerings include typical pau hana fare like fried rice, Portuguese sausage, Kalua sliders and crab cakes, in addition to some slightly more exotic things.

I asked about the Hawaiian Steak Sandwich and was intrigued by its description as a Philly Cheese Steak with teriyaki beef, so I tried it and was impressed. Served on a toasted sub roll, it also was embellished with peppers that balanced out the flavors beautifully. My only complaint was that the fries that it came with were rather limp.

Pau hana food items can rarely, if ever, be classified as healthy, so I went right ahead, succumbed to temptation and ordered the Chicken Skin Chips. Expecting something right out of the deep-fryer, this pupu surprised me by being served cold. But the chips also were nice and spicy with a pico de gallo and Sriracha sauce, which made them flavorful enough for me to eschew my normal habit of adding a lot of salt.

Given the creativity shown in those two dishes, I’d be interested in trying some of their more conventional sounding pau hana items like the fried rice and sliders, or the ChampionChips, which were described as “nachos with Portuguese sausage.”

THE DRINK

Drinks are easy. It’s $1 off draft beer (Stella Artois, Bud Lite, Big Wave and Apocalypse IPA, $4-$6 regular), $1 off house wines ($6 regular) and $1 off well spirits.

THE VERDICT

Pitch fills the bill as Salt’s sports bar. Certainly, if you have a game to watch and a bit of an appetite — I was stuffed after downing my two dishes and a beer — it’s a good place to go. The extended happy hours and validated $1 parking make it attractive, too.