First Impression: New Menu at Duo in Wailea
When is a salad not just a salad?
When it is made with tender, compassionate love.
When is a steak not just a steak? When it’s thoughtfully dressed in a truffle merlot sauce.
The new menu at Duo features — thank you, thank you — actual dishes. The menu used to be a butcher and fishmonger list of meats and fish, followed by a list of sauces that read like the curriculum at culinary school. To order, you picked your protein and your method of preparation and your sauce, which was more exhausting than freeing. Why, we wondered, didn’t the chef want to tell us what he thought was best?
When we heard the menu had changed a month ago, we had to check it out. Our server mentioned the new menu first thing, and called it “more composed.” We also noticed the Kobe beef has fled back to Japan, leaving some nice American versions of the tender beef on the menu.
We had a lovely dinner (venison for me, filet for Jim), and we recommend checking out the new menu if you’re in Wailea. Although we are still digesting all of our thoughts (that’s a clumsy way of telling you that we’re not ready to revise our review of the restaurant in public), we will give you a taste by talking about the chop salad.
Salads are often an afterthought, but this edition was not. A medium-sized salad split on two plates for us to share, it was both fresh and hearty. Spicy arugula and endive dominated the flavor profile, punctuated by a raft of spiced pecans that had to be broken up into bits. There was just enough fine-crumbled blue cheese to smooth and mellow the greens, but our favorite bits were the impossibly tiny pieces of bacon and the gorgeous, finely chopped pineapple. The salt and the sweet were little surprises in each bite, and the papaya seed dressing was not too sweet, and very light. A fine salad, made with love–thank you!