Third try: Oishi getting it right

Thai Sate Sticks come in a sweet peanut dipping sauce at Oishi.
Thai Sate Sticks come in a sweet peanut dipping sauce at Oishi.

Lulu Chi is going to grumble at us for saying this, but the third time might be the charm.

Oishi Hibachi & Thai Cuisine is the third attempt Chi and protege Robert Tju have made at making a restaurant work in the triple storefront at 5501 Kavanaugh Blvd. in Little Rock's Pulaski Heights.

Oishi Hibachi & Thai Cuisine

Address: 5501 Kavanaugh Blvd., Little Rock

Hours: 11 a.m.-2 p.m. and 5-10 p.m. daily

Cuisine: Pan-Asian with Japanese and Thai accents

Credit cards: V, MC, AE, D

Alcoholic beverages: Full bar

Reservations: Really big parties

Wheelchair accessible: Yes

Carryout: Yes

(501) 603-0080

Tju's, er, visionary RJ Tao Restaurant & Ultra Lounge was just too far ahead of the curve for this still fairly conservative market. It worked, sort of, as a hipster bar, but it didn't draw diners; maybe it was the slightly weird vibe -- "a temple crossed with a Las Vegas club," as our reviewer Jennifer Christman put it, with a huge Buddha almost threateningly dominating the upscale decor. Maybe it was the menu, which featured, among other oddities to the area, three preparations of kangaroo.

Its successor, Cafe 5501, probably wasn't visionary enough; what Tju called a "casual cafe featuring Southern/New American cuisine" with a "fusion spin" lacked independent identity -- just another eclectic menu with a slight Asian-fusion accent.

Now comes Oishi, a hybrid between a Japanese teppanyaki restaurant with hibachi grills, and an Asian-fusion sit-down restaurant with a sushi bar and a menu primarily focused on Thai cuisine with some Japanese, Chinese and even Korean items on the flank.

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Teppanyaki restaurants with hibachi grills cover the landscape, although this is the first one in the Heights. (The closest competitor is Shogun, down Cantrell Road a piece in Riverdale.) As far as sushi goes, Chi is actually competing with herself -- her Sushi Cafe is just a few blocks away; the Chi's in Riverdale is closer to Oishi than Shogun is.

Thai food, however, has long been thin upon the ground in this market, even before the demise of Lemongrass on the eastern edge of North Little Rock. That left the Bangkok Thai kiosk in the River Market, Chang's Thai & Asian on the northern side of Sherwood and Thai Taste in Jacksonville. Unless you live nearby, those latter places represent quite a trek for Thai.

So Oishi has this going for it, at least: It's close by for a lot of potential diners.

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You might notice, if you patronized the previous two establishments at this address, that Tju is less "present" on the premises. Chi and her management team, which includes a couple of her sons and another protege who has moved uphill from the Riverdale Chi's, have taken over to better insure that, at least during the initial operating period, things hold together.

A lot of the decor elements have been tweaked but not changed, starting with the twice-life-size dining room Buddha, which, no matter what becomes of the space, will be there until the Taliban blow it up or the building is demolished. The new setup has integrated it into the decor as the previous two did not -- it now seems to smile instead of glower, surrounded, as it is, with a small bamboo grove and with a changing light pattern above and behind.

The 10 standing Buddhas guarding the entrance are still there; so are the three "Aladdin's cave" booths with the round, hobbit-hole-door entrances, where customers who aren't claustrophobic can segregate themselves from the rest of the somewhat noisy dining room. On the west side, the can-be-opened-to-the-outside lounge space has been gussied up with more comfortable seating, while the edgy cityscape mural has been replaced with a patterned backdrop.

Half the dining room has been given over to four hibachi tables, yellow-lit from underneath and using the latest exhaust technology. Putting in overhead vent-a-hoods would have been difficult, even if it wasn't prohibitively expensive, so each table has its own built-in smoke-sucking system (we're told that there are fewer than a dozen restaurants around the country that have these installed).

Each hibachi table seats eight, and as usual, unless you are part of a big party, you're likely to sit with strangers. Each pair of back-to-back hibachi tables has a small "bridge" allowing two extra seats on each side. Above them all is a pastel-lighted "halo" that you don't really see while you're sitting there but that gives patrons elsewhere in the restaurant something to look at besides the several distracting big-screen TVs that mostly show sports programming.

The other half of the dining room, labeled "Thai" on the check/ticket, is given over to mostly four-top, black granite-topped tables with sturdy chairs. There you can order off either the Thai menu or the hibachi menu -- a brace of hibachi grills sits in a corner where a hibachi chef, without the usual flashy show, preps food a little more quickly for seated diners and to-go orders.

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We don't normally review places that are still in the process of getting their acts together, but sometimes circumstances force our hand. We did get good service, and by and large we enjoyed what we ate.

Oishi's full menu may finally be in place by the time you read this, but the restaurant has been going through an extended soft opening, slowly rolling out a few menu items a week, making sure the kitchen has those down before adding more.

Yes, we sat down at a hibachi table and had a hibachi chef prepare us the Land & Sea ($23), a sliced-and-diced New York strip and a selection of "sea prawns" not immediately distinguishable from "shrimp," and yes, the hibachi chef put on the usual show with a few additions to please the juvenile members of the family sitting with us -- the onion "volcano" is always a big hit, but the chef did some neat things with eggs, too.

The steak was medium rare as we'd ordered it, a big plus, and there was actually some flavor to the shrimp -- sorry, "sea prawns" -- and we got more than our fair share of sliced-and-diced vegetables. All hibachi meals come with a cup of gentle Oshumashi onion soup ($2 a la carte), a clear broth with no obvious onion flavor floating a meager couple of mushroom slices and a scallion slice or two. The $2.50 we spent on adding a generous portion of hibachi-fried rice was well worth it.

We also ordered the Oishi Beef Bulgogi BBQ ($18), more Korean than Thai or Japanese, to be delivered to our "Thai" table, a decent portion of marinated beef with, not the pineapple the menu promised us, unless that was the element that sweetened the sauce, but rather a lot of onions. We didn't immediately make the connection until Lulu Chi mentioned it, but the similarity to Chinese-restaurant Mongolian Beef was unmistakable, so if you like that dish, you'll like this one.

On the Thai side of the menu, we can recommend for an opener the Thai Green Papaya Salad ($6), especially if you have an asbestos tongue. Not all Thai food is automatically hot (see below on the choice of spice level for the entrees), but this certainly was -- tasty, but fiery and, now that we're prepared for it, we'd order it again.

We were less impressed by the Thai Sate Sticks ($7), curry-marinated chicken on skewers in a tasty, sweet peanut dipping sauce that, though there were plenty of peanuts sprinkled over the top, didn't particularly have a peanut flavor. The chicken was slightly overcooked, to the point where it was a little dry and in some cases difficult to extract off the skewer.

The Haurmaki ($4), crispy spring rolls filled with "soothing mixed vegetables," were so soothing they were dull, even with the red-pepper-charged sweet-hot dipping sauce.

Oishi does well by its Thai noodle dishes. The Chicken Pad Thai ($11), made with thinner rice noodles (think linguine) stir-fried and tossed with egg, bean sprouts, green onions and topped with ground peanuts, needed the juice from the supplied lime slice to really come alive, but it was spiced just right and the portion was absolutely huge.

We were also pleased with our Drunken Noodles With Chicken ($11), aka Pad Kee Mao, wider, flatter noodles (more like Chinese chow fun) with a just enough red pepper to enliven the dish, scrambled egg and "Holy Thai basil."

Our Panang Chicken Curry ($13) was the real prize: chicken chunks simmered in a Panang curry (we asked for it between mild and medium and got it just right, enough spice to create a tingle without engendering flame), coconut milk, Thai basil and lime leaves.

You can stay put for dessert if you want -- the Thai Sticky Rice With Fresh Mango and Coconut Cream Sauce ($6) is worth trying, once, though, the mango aside, it's definitely an acquired taste we haven't yet acquired.

Weekend on 10/02/2014

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