It's 7,500 miles from Hawaii to the Czech capital, but that hasn't stopped the Aloha Wave Lounge from attempting to transport a taste of the South Pacific to the shores of Old Town. Regrettably, however, the cuisine survives the journey with all the success of Greg Brady on a tiki-cursed surfboard.

Tucked into a side street on Dušní, just across from the Spanish Synagogue, Aloha sits near the edge of Josefov, one of the neighborhoods submerged by the flood waters in 2002. The quality of the cuisine doesn't quite match that level of catastrophe, but the catch-a-wave motif of the café can't help but invoke the metaphor.

There are redeeming qualities: the eclectic menu, which ranges from watermelon soup (38 Kč/$1.60) to pork with mango (140 Kč) and the truly exceptional presentation of the dishes, flourished with pineapple fronds, floral vegetable displays and a variety of other clever tropical touches. The décor adds a kitschy touch, with fernlike trees growing through the heart of the tables and a somewhat tacky tiki display of faux-flower lei on sale for 270 Kč nearby.

But like a Michael Bay Pearl Harbor epic of surface flash and story failure, the food's visual appeal only serves to undermine the café's efforts once the taste hits the tongue. After cultivating such exotic expectations, the utterly routine flavors of each dish, one after another, actually fall below the standards of most pub fare in any Prague neighborhood.

The watermelon soup taste like ... watermelon. The pork and mangos taste like ... pork. The Hawaiian chicken tastes like ... chicken. There's nothing venally wrong with such transgressions, but there's nothing special about them, either. Ultimately, most dishes seem to have been prepared as generically heated meats, simply dressed with fruits and sauces almost as an afterthought.

We started with two appetizers — the watermelon soup and a sampling of deep-fried mahi mahi. The soup, to its credit, arrived as a work of art: sliced star fruit, fresh pineapple on the rind, a swirl of white cream and a sea-fan garnish of golden-spun sugar. But there was precious little difference between the taste of the soup and the stout watermelon chunks that accompanied, as if the preparation involved little more than pulping the fruit into a bowl.

The mahi mahi, a much pricier alternative (155 Kč), came as it should — crisp, flaky and not too fishy. Though we once had the good fortune to savor fresh mahi mahi in Hawaii, it would be unfair to make a comparison here. As a starter this is adequate, but by no means anything to shake a grass skirt at.

Less fortunately, the main courses that followed ranked only comparatively ahead of a bowl of poi, the mashed Hawaiian root paste sometimes likened to the taste and consistency of wallpaper glue.

The pork with mango arrived as an optical delight, grilled fruit wedges interleaved with splayed cuts of meat. The flavor itself, however, distinctly lacked the spirit of the islands. While the meat was tender and moist, it carried only the faintest essence of spices; the mango, meanwhile, suffered considerably in the grilling, which drained the life out of this normally vibrant fruit. For a dish inspired by a volcanic island, there is not, shall we say, an eruption of taste. Had the mango juices been left intact, they might have proven a delightful counterpart to the meat, more akin to a chutney. Instead, they merely shared its real estate.

On the strength of its enticing name, we opted for the Hawaiian Delight chicken (115 Kč) as a second entrée. But there's no island inspiration in this dish. Instead, it offers tender, spiceless chicken smothered in a sauce of tomatoes, carrots, zucchini, onions and other veggies. No real native flavor here — this dish can be easily be found on menus throughout the city, usually under names like chicken-vegetable ragout, without the hula pretensions.

Aloha sits just around the corner from Elišky Krásnohorské, a small block fronted by the Intercontinental Hotel that has seen a renaissance of restaurants since the floods, including a rebuilt Cafe La Veranda. While they may serve better food, none offer competition to Aloha Wave's downstairs lounge, which features a drinks menu that does true credit to its name.