Sapori / Honolulu is ready to get small. While izakayas, which pair Japanese small plates with beer and sake, remain popular, Honolulu diners have largely resisted the tapas-fication of menus popular in mainland dining cities. Even Alan Wong couldn’t make a go of small plates when he first opened Pineapple Room.

Are we ready to commit? Enter Sapori, a beer and wine bar whose menu consists solely of small plates–the Italian version of an izakaya. Donato Loperfido opened Sapori to replace ‘Elua, his joint venture with Phillippe Padovani. While the dishes and prices are more casual, the dining room remains formal, with dark wood-panelled walls and high-backed chocolate leather chairs.

Somewhere between opening and closing a string of restaurants, Loperfido started a wine and beer import business; Sapori’s wine list is 60 wines long and the uncommon beer menu reads like a Dan Brown novel. A porter is “mysteriously dark” and there’s a Trappist ale brewed in the Saint Benedictus Abbey of Achel. The menu flies from one location to the next–from Hair of the Dog brewery in Portland, Ore., to Rising Sun in Japan, with stops in Brazil and Norway. Loperfido is a self-proclaimed beer lover on a mission to prove that food can taste better with beer than wine, and he’s educated his staff accordingly.

A visit

On a recent visit, our server is knowledgeable and enthusiastic; Sapori asserts itself as one of the best places in town for a lesson on hops, different yeasts, pale ales, breakfast stouts and what it all means in relation to food. A Kapuziner Weisse Bier starts our night to “scrub the palate,” as our server says, and we end with the Achel 8 Bruin Trappist Ale, a yeasty, light-on-hops suds with 8 percent alcohol by volume (ABV) that doesn’t overpower a delicate and meaty veal chop.

The veal chop, at one-and-a-half inches thick, is decidedly not a small plate. It’s a special item, perhaps intentionally left off the menu to keep listed menu prices between $6 and $18 (the veal is $28). Though the dish and price tag sneak up on us, it’s the highlight of the night–well-seasoned and sauced with a porcini and sun-dried tomato demi glace, fortified with speck, a type of prosciutto.

The rest of the plates make their way to the table one by one–a pageant of Italian-inspired flavors. There’s a fried polenta, delicately crisped on the outside, superlatively soft and creamy on the inside. It’s served with a goat cheese fritter, the tanginess of which is rounded out by roasted beets and the sweet-and-sour drizzle of pomegranate molasses. An onaga carpaccio comes adorned with salsa verte, frisee, orange and olive for a bite that’s at once herby, briny and sweetly acidic–flavors that play against the thin, firm slices of fish. Perfectly cooked risotto yields a Goldilocks consistency–not too thick and not too thin–that’s redolent of white wine and four varieties of mushrooms (oyster, shemeji, alii and porcini).

There are only a few missteps. A tagliatelle with wild boar ragu disappoints with sparse bits of wild boar overwhelmed by a tomato-heavy sauce. Cartoccio of Island fish–monchong and mussels with fennel, potatoes and tomatoes cooked in parchment–might have been good, but the mussels, shriveled and seemingly past their prime, compromise the flavor. Also, Sapori’s pedestrian signage is incongruent to such an elegant atmosphere A graphic design professor likens the logo to those of the hostess and karaoke bars on the same stretch of Kapiolani Boulevard.

A lot to linger on

But these stumbles aren’t enough to deter us from lingering. What could have been a sober setting is convivial on a weekend night, and our server is friendly without being obtrusive. If there’s no opera to rush off to (given its location, Sapori aims to be a pre- and post-opera destinationn with long kitchen hours from 4:30pm to 1:30am), desserts are worth staying for. The lemongrass and vanilla panna cotta is decent–perhaps a touch too heavy in texture and taste, resembling more a stiff custard than a silky panna cotta, but the chocolate Saint Remon is appropriately rich. A chocolate lover’s dream is the cliché that comes to mind, but never has it been so apt. A dense, dense chocolate mousse sits atop a thin layer of cake and is draped in a sheet of chocolate. It’s excessive (in a good way)–not a saintly dessert as the name implies–rather, a fall from grace. The crème anglaise and berries are merely decorative–futile efforts to cut its sumptuousness.

It’s true that Loperfido’s track record with restaurants has been spotty. But by most accounts, it’s not the food quality that has been his downfall. Loperfido ticks off the reasons for closing his past ventures: bad partner, bad landlord, bad location, bad economy. He admits ‘Elua was too expensive given the economic downturn. With Sapori, Loperfido hopes the format change–of beer and wine pairings and small plates that are still big enough to share–will, as he puts it, “give people still great food at a great price in a good atmosphere.” Combined with beer and wine and late-night hours, we hope that this, at last, will be the winning combination.

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