Are you ready for the holidays? I don’t mean to scare you, but fall officially arrived Friday and Kevin Lee was ready. The chef/restaurateur behind Pai Honolulu recently debuted a new seasonal tasting menu sure to warm the soul with the flavors of Thanksgivings past via his evocative interpretations.

Get ready for the flavors of pumpkin and baking spices, though presented in unexpected ways. Lee is one of just a small coterie of Hawaii’s brainiac chefs, who create by intellect as much as palate. This makes him interesting from a critical standpoint, but commercially there’s a limited audience for his kind of artistry. So Pai Honolulu serves up three concepts in one space.

At the most approachable, there is a Bar+Lounge for pau hana gatherings over cocktails and an a la carte pupu. At midtier, where most foodies will find their comfort zone, is a five-course prix fixe dinner for $65, with optional $45 wine pairings. Keeping a majority of diners sated gives Lee the luxury of experimentation and play with the third concept, his Chef’s Tasting Menu, recently priced at $135, with $65 wine pairings.

He makes the most of an unconventional space on the ground floor of Harbor Court, formerly home to a number of fast and to-go dining establishments. The narrow, curvilinear space opens to the bar/lounge and flows to tables where prix fixe meals are served, parallel to a 10-seat counter where the tasting menu is presented.

The setup is comfortable from a physical standpoint but can feel psychologically awkward to tasting-menu guests, who can see every dish being prepared and exiting the open kitchen. With lulls between service, there were many times that I coveted food going out to the $65 tables or bar, thinking, “Hey, I’d rather have that.” It made me confront my own dual personality and predilections.

Yes, I can understand and appreciate artful cuisine, but cravings can be quite pedestrian. Sometimes you just want a hearty cioppino or deviled eggs.

You can actually order bar dishes to supplement the tasting menu, but as delicate as the latter’s dishes might seem, they do fill the belly, to the point where I could not finish dessert. That said, long after nouvelle cuisine taught us luxurious food often comes in miniature, Lee’s portions can sometimes appear to be tailored to Lilliputian mouths. Don’t worry, in the long run the substance is there.

My introduction to this restaurant came in June with the Bar+Lounge, where I was disappointed by the minute portions. People can’t drink on an empty stomach, and I thought it would be better to put out basic fries and chicken wings than imagine diners would be satisfied by two quarter-size mushroom puffs or two small XO cream croquettes. Nope.

One bright spot was crisp oyster mushroom tempura with umami salt that could be torn apart so four of us could get a nibble. And after also sharing two crostini topped with 45-day, dry-aged beef tartare, we deemed it good enough to order seconds. It was the most substantial of the menu offerings.

Most people will find they get the most for their money with the prix fixe menu. For fall it starts with mentaiko taramosalata, the roe blended with potato and cream for this classic Greek dip spread over lavosh. This is followed by a wonderful warm mushroom salad of confit maitake, a highlight of the meal, with pickled hon shimeji and cauliflower puree.

Cioppino has all the flavors of the Mediterranean surrounding perfectly textured Kauai shrimp, green-lip mussels and black cod. It’s served with grilled focaccia sprinkled with dried shrimp powder.

Next came three-grain risotto comprising arborio and Korean black rice, plus pearl barley. Layered over this was an assemblage of oyster mushrooms, smoked hen confit and a tangle of miniature carrot roots with notes of preserved lemon.

In the middle of the meal came the option to add a supplemental item of Australian black winter truffle served atop house-made tagliatelle with pecorino ($28) or shiitake lasagna ($32). Although they were generous with the truffles, the flavor got lost atop the tagliatelle. You might get luckier with the lasagna.

Dessert of cardamom-perfumed genoise closed the meal. The sponge cake was dry but was helped considerably by accompanying burnt-milk ice cream and lovely jasmine tea tapioca, with tangy bites of pomegranate meringue.

If you have the money and connoisseur sensibility, the chef’s tasting menu is worth a splurge, but those on a budget will find the artful menu harder to justify. The cost is higher than other tasting menus around town that deliver a wow factor with almost every course. On this seven-course menu, only two dishes elicited wows. Others were more subtly interesting. All were the result of precise, painstaking labor, but most diners are only interested in what and how much goes into their mouths, not the trials and technique it took to get there.

The tasting menu opened with an inch-and-a-half panna cotta of abalone liver with the sweetness of guava and delicate rosebud streusel. It was a question mark of a dish that piqued my interest in what might come next.

A butternut squash salad offered up the essence of autumn, accented by the crunch of pumpkin chips and pepitas, flavored with star anise, cinnamon and the nostalgic warmth of holiday baking spices, then dotted with the red of cranberries.

Agedashi XO turnip cake with a crisp rice shell was served in a ti leaf broth and would have been excellent if it hadn’t been oversalted. I hope this was a one-time accident. The final touch was a sliver of smoked akule.

Next came a truffled egg chawanmushi with a rich layer of mirada oyster puree atthe bottom of the cup. This too would have been excellent if the egg custard had been more silky than hard-set.

Grilled yam tortellini brought the wow factor as a novel nod to holiday stuffing. The lush bites of tortellini sit atop a mix of sourdough croutons, smoked hen confit, bacon and lup cheong, with sage, cranberries and flourishes of celery leaves.

Next came a foie gras cannoli sweetened with dried-cherry mascarpone, before a main course of black cod brushed with a tamarind glaze, a nice departure from standard miso. About 5 ounces of 45-day dry-aged strip loin with bordelaise sauce is also offered as a $30 supplement. The two strips of steak had a beautiful crisp sear.

As an intermezzo, butternut squash gelato delivered the holiday cheer of eggnog spices. The meal ended with petit fours and chocolate haupia, with the chocolate folded seamlessly into the coconut pudding.

Both menus will change in about a month — they’re revamped every six weeks — in time for holiday celebrations.

The restaurant’s three concepts are a lot to manage, but give the chef a venue to stay true to his vision while trying to be commercially viable. It’s the visionaries who keep dining in Honolulu interesting for the most hard-core, jaded foodies.

Nadine Kam’s restaurant reviews are conducted anonymously and paid for by the Star-Advertiser. Reach her at nkam@staradvertiser.com.