In case you hadn't noticed, we — meaning those of us who call these Islands home — have a thing for beefed-up bar food. We like to eat when we go to a bar. I mean, really eat.

None of this salted-nuts-in-a-bowl business.

Even the standard platter of deep-fried food stuffs (jalapeno poppers, cheese sticks, fries and onion rings) doesn't really count. Because if you can get it at Jack in the Box, it doesn't count.

We want entree-sized pupu. But that's not all we want. We want the pupu to satisfy us with the staying power of comfort food, while impressing us with the prettiness of its culinary artistry.

Tall order, right?

It would be, except we've grown accustomed to having it all, thanks to places like Side Street Inn (and its derivatives like Uncle Bo's, Kanpai Bar & Grill and Fort Street Bar & Grill) that have set a precedent for low-brow-meets-high-brow eating that, frankly, we can no longer live without.

We want our Heineken with an order of torched hamachi sashimi finished with a three-citrus vinaigrette.

At the newly revamped, relocated and reopened Tsunami, you can get it, and you should.

The hamachi is silky, cool and firm, and where the chef takes his torch to it — the flames just barely lick the surface — it's smoky and bitter and delicious. Let the milky white slices sit in the tangy citrus juice for a few minutes for a ceviche-like finish.

While most of our bars with chefly food really adhere to low-standard bar decor (think the over-used booths and formica-topped tables of Side Street Inn or the mish-mash of wannabe styles at Uncle Bo's), Tsunami is clearly not trying to achieve a dive bar aesthetic.

The room — though too cavernous to be completely reined in stylistically — is sleek in blacks and grays, with cool stone floors, sheeny faux leather couches and polished black bar tables with matching chairs.

It's Asian-chic — or at least it would be minus the unoriginal posters of a geishaesque beauty and a live goldfish posing as sushi filling.

Tsunami, which was called Club Tsunami when it was located in Samsung Plaza on Ke'eaumoku Street, is, by the looks of it, intended to be mostly an after-dark club-slash-lounge. However, and I could be wrong about this, I suspect that it'll be as popular, if not more so, as a pau hana spot for the early crowd.

With Chef Aaron Fukuda in the kitchen, who sharpened his culinary skills as executive chef at the now-closed Sam Choy's Diamond Head restaurant, there's plenty more where the incredible torched hamachi comes from.

Tsunami's menu is what I always hope a bar menu will be: chefly, but without pretense. I can't help it. I'm spoiled. Now that I know how refined bar food can be (thanks, Colin Nishida), I expect to get it. At Tsunami, I got it.

I knew with the first bite of Fukuda's signature Poke Ball that I would come to crave it like I do pasteles or Hank's Polish dog or my grandma's vinha d'alhos.

I knew that one day (and many days thereafter), I would put out the pau hana alert looking for any members of my gang who would like to join me for a drink and a poke ball.

I think that day might be today.

Because what's not to crave about a baseball-sized ball of warm rice filled with chilled cubes of melt-in-your-mouth, red 'ahi poke, all coated in salty sea-flavored furikake and then blitz-fried until the outside is crunchy and golden? And at $10 for a ball that feeds four, it's a guiltless (financially speaking) craving.

It's one thing to make bar food taste like it's semi-gourmet, it's another thing entirely to keep it reasonably priced, and Tsunami manages to do both. My party of four ate for $26, and we left happy and sated. Could we easily have racked up a bigger bill? Yes. And we did on our second visit, which is when I discovered the 'ahi belly with wasabi soy dressing and the pork chops with chipotle aioli. Both are fried, both are $7, and both are tender, moist and meaty.

Less successful is Fukuda's pipikaula carpaccio, which amounted to thin slices of meat that tasted like corned beef (the pipikaula, I presume) topped with diced tomatoes and onions. Imagine dropping your lunch meat in your bowl of fish-less lomi salmon.

Unsuccessful, indeed.

For $10, order the sweet-and-peppery drunken chicken with mustard slaw instead, or get another poke ball.

The teriyaki fries ($6) are super-crisp, thin-cut fries drizzled with sweet teriyaki sauce, and though I prefer my french fries purely salty, the sweet fries were a table favorite.

Actually, there was little not to like about Tsunami's menu, which also includes bar staples like hamburgers, fried rice, fried noodles and chopped steak, among other dishes.

As a food destination, Tsunami is very successful, though the service isn't yet where it needs to be. But I'll take unsure and shy (as our servers were on two occasions) over entitled and arrogant (as servers tend to be these days) any day.

As a bar, Tsunami is just a bar. The draw of the place is certainly the food, but I get the impression that the owners — a crew of young guys who mill about the place looking less like business owners than patrons — might not know what they have in chef Fukuda's worthy menu.

Tsunami's might just be an accidental culinary success. If so, what a happy accident.