Pau Hana Patrol: Round Table offers change of pace

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Emily Gomes, left, holds a half-order of chicken wings and a half-order of nachos while Hannah England holds a King Arthur Supreme pizza on the right and a chicken and garlic gourmet pizza. All items are $5 during happy hour. --Dennis Oda / doda@staradvertiser.com

Waikiki has been morphing in recent years, with a curious collection of nocturnal restaurant and bar options coming to the fore. There are now places worth visiting for the fun factor or simply to satiate the desire of being somewhere new, i.e., not Chinatown, especially for locals working in the vicinity who may desperately need a pau hana drink.

And so, we’re here to discuss happy hours and pizza. Yes, it is currently sacrilegious to mention pizza without bringing up V Lounge or Prima in the same sentence, but sometimes you just can’t get to those two establishments. You’re just getting off your valet shift at a hotel, or hungry from the beach, and you don’t feel like fighting gridlock. You just want to park your buns on a stool, have a few cheap beers and eats, and watch the cars go by. Round Table Pizza is ideal for this task.

Surprisingly, not much is made of the Camelot theme at Round Table. Instead of suits of armor, Arthurian crests, Excalibur or even a lady in a lake, we get football jerseys, framed on the walls by the handful, and about 10 TVs.

The afternoon this writer dined and drank at this establishment, the speakers were tuned to the Lakers battling the Spurs. Lancelot and Merlin totally got the shaft here; this is actually a sports bar. The only things really Arthurian are two items on the menu: King Arthur’s Supreme and Guinevere’s Garden.

Food specials during happy hour include $5 personal specialty pizzas. One can’t really go wrong with the King Arthur’s Supreme packed with all the crowd-pleasing toppings: pepperoni, Italian sausage, salami, linguica, mushrooms, green peppers, onions and olives on a red sauce. The Italian Garlic Supreme could be another option, topped with pepperoni, Italian sausage, tomatoes, mushrooms, green onions, garlic and a creamy garlic sauce, but it wasn’t as garlicky as expected and seemed a bit too similar to the King Arthur’s variety.

Both pizzas lean a bit on the salty side, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing if you prefer your pizzas savory. At about 7 inches they are also the right size for a light late lunch or early dinner. And most important, they go great with beer.

Other pizzas on the happy hour menu include Gourmet Veggie, Chicken Garlic Supreme, Hawaiian, Pepperoni and Three Cheese Blend.

In addition to pizzas, pupu-size buffalo wings and pupu-size nachos are also offered for $5. I tried the buffalo wings: six, with a choice of either ranch or blue cheese dressing. They were relatively spicy and otherwise not particularly unusual, but they served the purpose of satisfying hunger and stoking thirst.

If you’re more hungry, the waitress advised me that nachos are a filling option for bigger appetites.

DRAFT BEER specials included Budweiser, Bud Light and Miller Lite for $3, and Blue Moon, Red Hook and Kona Longboard for $4. So far so good, but the prices for the liquors were a little steep. Eight bucks for Patron Silver? Seven bucks for a martini made with Stoli? Whoa. That’s regular price at some clubs. Perhaps this is one of the downsides to Waikiki: tourist tax?

Though there were only one waitress and bartender staffing happy hour on a Wednesday afternoon, service was relatively quick. The waitress was friendly and informatively patient while explaining items on the happy hour menu.

The bar dominates the room, but you have a choice of stools, tables or booths in the space. There is validated parking (with a $10 purchase) in the Outrigger Ohana East hotel garage; enter on Kuhio Avenue.

Two small, open-air alcoves face Kaiulani Avenue. On a nice day, getting a table near the street lets you see all the foot traffic go by: the Japanese clutching giant shopping bags with their brand-name purchases, surfers heading to the beach with their boards, and waiters in white shirts and black pants mo-ped-ing to their dinner shift jobs. And of course, the occasional rowdy military or college guys.

If you enjoy Waikiki people-watching, happy hour in these seats at Round Table Pizza can be a Lance-a-lotta fun.