Two Waikiki cocktail lounges reaching out to locals as well as visitors. Two warm-hued, shadowy rooms, but with very different moods. New, sophisticated menus in each.

Lewers Lounge at Halekulani, long a place for listening to live jazz, nibbling at pistachio nuts and daintily dabbing your lips with monogrammed linen napkins, quietly made over its bar menu in a sort of international tapas mode recently under the direction of new executive chef Vikram Gorg and Orchids chef de cuisine Darryl Fujita.

And at RumFire at the Sheraton Waikiki hotel, which debuted in 2007 as both a bar and a foodie destination, chef Colin Hazama recently traded out dishes on his not-so-small plates menu, (though retaining some of the more popular items).

Both offer validated valet parking (does not include tip), an important plus. And, while neither is exactly budget dining, both offer dishes so well-chosen and well-prepared that one or two per person suffices, leaving a tab no larger than you'd pay for more food, but less good taste (in every sense of the word), at many family restaurants.

LEWERS LOUNGE

In Lewers Lounge, you can converse, even when the music is playing. You can linger, savor, exhale, sip and smile.

And you can have a foie gras sandwich with riesling-poached mango on brioche ($18), a savory creation so drop-dead delicious, with the freshly seared goose liver contrasting beautifully with the cold mango, that my husband said, "I'd come back just for this."

But he said that, too, of his Maui onion soup with melted gruyere, a generous, filling bowl of hearty simplicity (and a bargain, too, at $9, particularly considering that the cheese is real, nutty gruyere, not the usual plastic-chewy swiss). If you're feeling peckish and want something substantial, the steak frites ($14.50) is another bargain — a perfectly prepared filet that practically cleaves itself apart under a fork and thread-thin fries, attractively presented.

Other offerings include the predictable trio of poke ($18), crisp Kahuku shrimp fritters ($15) and BBQ pulled pork samosas ($12) with blue cheese dip (sort of buffalo wings by way of India). Or you can get a sampler including the foie gras, the fritters and the samosas ($22).

I never thought I'd say this, but if you stop by for dessert — there is a quintet of choices and this is a great place to cap off a Waikiki evening — skip the Halekulani Coconut Cake (with raspberry coulis and vanilla custard, $9), as revered as it is. Have the frozen treats: housemade ice cream sandwiches, a cassata (gelato cake) and a cone-shaped raspberry popsicle that's like being let loose in a fresh raspberry field ($9) or the strawberry swirl (layered vanilla panna cotta, strawberry gelée, strawberry granite with a pistachio biscotti, $9). The treats made us feel like children again, and the swirl sent us into a dream of Italy.

The liquid menu at Lewers, overseen by head bartender Tim Rita, extends to handmade cocktails, fine wines, a vodka showcase, port, sake, after-dinner drinks, single malt scotches and after-dinner liqueurs of all description.

RUMFIRE

The cross-cultural fried rice (kalbi, Portuguese sausage, kim chee and there might even have been some lup cheong, $13) remains on the menu, as do the inside-out musubis made with smoked 'ahi and togarashi beef ($17 for four pieces), the melting baby back ribs with hoisin barbecue sauce ($14) and the summer rolls filled with lemongrass beef ($12).

But our mission one weeknight was to check out some of the newcomers to the RumFire menu, which is divided into tapas, tastings (cheese plate, salads) and sear, grill, wok, which includes citrus rum-rubbed hamachi ($18), multicolored cauliflower crisps ($9) and filet mignon with Sichuan peppercorns and garlic fries ($30).

We brought our appetites, but unfortunately forgot our earplugs. We needed these because we arrived a little after 7 p.m., while guitarist Makana and his band were playing a happy hour gig loud — enough to force us to shriek our choices at each other and the waitress, even sitting as far away from the performers as we could get within the central bar confines. (No offense to Makana, who is an awesome performer; it's just that my girlfriend and I had foolishly planned to talk.)

We found out later that there are a couple of ways to avoid this pitfall: Go out to the firepit lanai, or take a right before you enter the restaurant's main doors and eat in the cafe area, where a lone Hawaiian slack-key guitarist was entertaining at a much more civilized decibel level. And, while offering helpful tips, you should know that reservations aren't required and it's a seat-yourself proposition. We hovered at the podium near the door for some time, waiting for the oblivious hostess to stop solving a computer problem and tell us to go right in. (Couldn't she have just looked up and waved us through?)

While my companion sipped a Brazilian caipirinha (cachaca, lime, sugar), made nontraditional with the addition of club soda — the bar stocks more than 100 kinds of rum, in addition to all manner of other cocktails, wines and such — we luxuriated in two of the most silky-textured seafood dishes I've ever eaten. The aforementioned hamachi sashimi with hokkaido shoots, candied yuzu (citrus) and a soy-yuzu vinaigrette was so thinly sliced it was translucent and so delicately flavored it was like breathing in a light seafood mist while sitting under a lime tree. And the "Fiery Chili Calamari" ($17), composed of shards of squid steak, sharply cross-hatched to defeat the chewiness, and then stir-fried with bell peppers, snow peas and onions, soy, lime and chilies, was pillowy rather than fiery. Both memorable.

Cauliflower crisps proved to be chunky little poppers of that much-maligned vegetable, wrapped in a golden batter flavored with Indian spices and pork rind bits. If you drink, order this one with a cold lager, a pairing made in paradise, I'm sure. We had to force ourselves to stop eating them though, and we swiftly stopped eating the jalape—o dill cream with which the dish is served because the chili heat battles the spices. Something creamy or sweet would work better.

After this, we ought to have slowed down, but we didn't. Although we considered chef Colin Hazama's version of misoyaki butterfish (with Kahuku corn puree and tomato sea asparagus relish, $24), or the shichimi-dusted glazed prawns ($20), we decided we just had to have the steak and fries and the garlic wok fried rice ($13), even though it isn't new to the menu. Is the fried rice better than that at Side Street? You be the judge.

The excellent steak was ultra-tender, rich and slightly smoky, and was served with two sauces, neither of which make much sense (pallid edamame puree with steak?), but just skip 'em, the steak is great on its own. The fragrant garlic fries, served in an upright cone of paper in a stand, come with three dips, of which the tangy mango ketchup is the one to choose (the barbecue sauce tastes like someone ran amok with the Liquid Smoke and the wasabi mayo was uninteresting). Still, $30 seems awfully steep for this relatively simple fare.

RumFire is a bit of a puzzlement: Both the hip and chic decor (floor-to-ceiling windows offering Diamond Head views, contemporary wall sculptures, orange-is-the-new-black color scheme) and Hazama's esoteric menu seem almost too sophisticated for what is, after all, a bar. But perhaps because it contrasts so sharply to the pseudo-Polynesian kitsch of most other oceanfront Waikiki properties, it's obviously working — even on a weeknight amid a recession, they were pumpin'.