About a second after I sat down at the bar I knew I was in trouble. Same old story: I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to eat. I’d seen the menu at the Dog & Duck Pub in Kihei before—a few times, in fact—but I just couldn’t decide on what to order. I ordered a beer, sighed, and just stared at the menu.
“That’s really good,” a pretty blonde sitting next to me eventually said, pointing to the words “Rosemary Chicken Pie.”
“I was looking at that,” I said, which was true, though in all honesty I was looking at everything on the menu.
I’ve been led astray before by listening to pretty blondes, but this one was on the money. The chicken pie perfectly filled a deep glass bowl. The crust was firm, but not thick, and held more than enough chicken, carrots, peas and that wonderful chicken pie ooze to satisfy any appetite for such olde worlde pub fare. The dish also came with a small salad made from some greens topped with a dark vinaigrette dressing.
Dog & Duck is a fairly close approximation to an Irish pub. It’s built out of the old Mexican restaurant Ramon’s in the Kihei Triangle, and it still shows off that place’s faux brick walls and Spanish arches. But it does offer a good number of bar stools, lots of beer choices, plenty of football on the telly as well as what looks to be a strict adherence to the local tavern tradition of ensuring that the bartenders and servers look as though they posed in last month’s Maxim.
Where Dog & Duck breaks with its Irish and U.K. cousins is in food selection—it’s far tastier and more substantial than the traditional crap pubs offer.
For instance, Dog & Duck’s take on Bangers & Mash is quite appealing. The sausage is tasty, the mashed potatoes creamy and the green peas are excellent. It’s not quite as overwhelming as Mulligan’s on the Blue in Wailea, but as far as bar food is concerned, it’s hard to find better.
Their chicken sandwich—which comes with salad or chips (what those across the pond call “crisps”)—is more than decent, especially when slathered in mustard. The potato wedges will put more than enough fried starchy goodness in your stomach to soak up that Guinness, and their Irish-style bruschetta—served with asparagus spears instead of tomatoes—is uncommonly tasty.
They also serve daily specials that seem too good for the place—seared ahi over rice and pasta, most notably, though they once offered a very good ham and cheese melt.
“You thinking about dessert?” bartender Katie Healy asked me when I finished my Rosemary chicken pie. The choices for the evening were Chocolate Decadence Cake and Bailey’s Cheesecake, which was topped with your choice of chocolate sauce or blueberries and whipped cream.
Had to go with the cheesecake topped with blueberries. Though I told her to leave the whipped cream off the cheesecake. What arrived a few minutes later was a trim slice of sweet heaven.
“You know, all our desserts are fat-free and calorie-free,” Healy said just before I dug in. If only it were true. MTW
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