Before you judge me on going to another corporate chain, give this place a try if you have not already. California Pizza Kitchen has to be one of my favorite corporate chain restaurants. From what I’ve seen, there’s five California Pizza Kitchens in Oahu: Waikiki, Kahala Mall, Ala Moana Mall, Aiea and Kailua. I’ve been to all but one and every time the food is great. This one is located at Kahala Mall.

It’s not the best picture, but you get the point.

We were asked if we wanted bread after ordering, which we all did. The bread was really nothing special, just plain white bread at room temperature on a white plate with butter. My mom use to give me sandwiches with sugar and butter when I was a little girl and that’s the only way I’ll have plain white bread now, with butter and white granulated sugar. Oh, how buttery sweetness can transform boring to spectacular.

Now I know this place isn’t really cheap, but if you want to eat out all the time, as I do, you really need to find ways to be nicer to your wallet. Ray and I do this by sharing. When we come here we share an appetizer, usually this Avocado Club Egg Rolls and we’ll get one other dish to share. It’s always enough and doesn’t break us. If you like avocado, chicken and bacon, you’ll want to try these. Avocado, chicken, and bacon just go so well together, and in these rolls you can taste each flavor so distinctly. Ray and I love these things, we could eat 8 plates each and be content.

Don’t you want to reach through the screen and grab one? My only conpaint is that we only got four pieces for $9.99, which really is two small rolls cut in half. That blows. That’s really expensive and a rip off. Why, do they have to be so good?

This time we decided to share a pizza. This one is the Wild Mushroom Pizza with cremini, shiitake, portobello, white mushrooms, fontina, mozzarella cheeses, coated with a wild mushroom pesto sauce and garnished with chopped Italian parsley, $12.99. It was available with chicken as well, but instead of that we got sausage. It was plenty and really good. We had one slice left over, which we volunteered Shane to consume.

Yeah, I know, this is a horrible picture. In my previous posts I mentioned that Shane is crazy about the Spinach and Artichoke Dip, $9.99 at CPK. Every time we come here he goes through the menu and then closes it only to order what we all knew he came here for. I had to take a picture as fast as I could since Shane wanted to devour this dish the second it landed on the table. Patience Shanie, patience.

This is suppose to be the Chocolate Souffle Cake ala mode $9.99. I hate it when restaurants loosely names their dishes just because it sounds catchy. Does this look like a souffle to anyone? It looks deflated, like a round chocolate brownie. A proper souffle is enriched with egg yolks and then folded over with whisked egg whites, baked and served in a proper ramekin. When the egg whites expand during baking, it causes the souffle to puff up. A proper souffle should be light, fluffy puffy. The word souffle is the past particle of the French verb souffler which means “to blow up” or more loosely “puff up” — an apt description of what happens to this combination of custard and egg whites.

Here are some pictures of what a proper souffle should look like.

Anyhow, it was still good.

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California Pizza Kitchen
4211 Waialae Avenue
Honolulu, HI 96816
(808) 737-9446