skchai
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Posts posted by skchai
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Sounds good, mongo - Spam and canned pork products around the world!
While we're talking about vienna sausage, that reminds me of the fact Masu's Massive, one of the classic plate lunch places here, sometimes offers a massive "mixed plate" that includes a whole can of vienna sausage among other things.
Oh, and another "different" processed meat that people sometimes crave when they are away from Hawai`i: radioactive scarlet-colored hotdogs, such as the "Hawaiian Winners" made by the Redondo company. Though maybe less often than in the old days.
One thing that never goes out of style, though, is Hawaiian-style "Portuguese sausage". Just like the genuine linguica except even more grease!
You can actually get Portuguese sausage or Spam with your eggs at Hawai`i McDonalds'.
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Emily, I know this has been a while, but thanks for those rankings! Very interesting, and some unusual choices, though I agree with them all, with one exception listed below. Since I had a few extra minutes, I couldn't help kibbitzing - hope you don't mind!
1. Ono Hawaiian Food: Cheap, informal dining surrounded by pictures of local celebrities. Specializes in Hawaiian favorites.Ono's is a great place, and it's right next to two other very good Hawaiian food places, Kanak Attack (Eat till you Sleep) and Kapahulu Poi Shop, on the Ewa side of Kapahulu Ave.
2. Legends Vegetarian Restaurant: Informal vegetarian Chinese dining in Chinatown. Specializes in non-meat versions on popular Chinese cuisine. There are spareribs on the menu and they really do look and almost taste like spareribs. Actual meat dishes and dim sum are available from the sister restaurant next door.Have never been there, but nearly walked in there a couple times by mistake when we intended to go to Legend Seafood Restaurant, which is just across the aisle from Legends Vegetarian in the Chinese Cultural Center. Should check it out for real next time! Wonder if they have the same owner, or if one of the restaurant owners is trying to cause deliberate confusion . . .
3. Mariposa: Resort-like upscale dining, centrally located in Ala Moana, with decent food. The trick here is that you can see Waikiki's Friday Fireworks and the ocean at sunset from the lanai (porch) seating. And, the tropically themed drinks are pretty cheap.Situated in Ala Moana Niemann-Marcus. As you know, our very own KarenS is the pastry chef for N-M and a good friend of Mariposa chef Douglas Lum.
Somehow never made it there either. Must not have had much of a romantic life. . .4. Olive Tree: Informal Greek and Mediterranean dining, BYOB, that somehow pulls off romantic seating in a parking lot. Everyone who has ever gone on a date in Honolulu has been to Olive Tree.5. The Japanese place next to Dave's Ice Cream, the name of which I will not try to spell here: Informal, but mid-range in price. Great group dining with tasty tapas style Japanese food with a wide by-the-glass sake list.Tokkuri-Tei, right? Kapahulu and the area around there have in recent years become the home of a number of neo- izakayas (Japanese-style bars), including T-T, Izakaya Nonbei, Mr. Ojisan, etc.
6. Alan Wong: The local seat of Hawaiian Regional Cuisine (HRC). While not as over the top as competitors such as recent James Beard Award winner Chef Mavro, Alan Wong's food always tastes good. It is a dependable stand-by, and a local favorite because the diner always knows what he or she is going to end up with.Dependable is the word. Unlike virtually every other celeb HRC-ers, Wong's pretty much never gets dinged by negative reviews. The consistency probably has a lot to do with it.
7. C & C Pasta: Mid-range to upscale in price, depending on what you order. Good pasta and meat dishes, but C & C really shines with their Italian cheese and meat selection available as an appetizer or to go from the small deli counter in back. Though Marabella was rather nice this weekend, so C&C might be falling off of my list.C & C is one of the stars of Kaimuki's "Restaurant Row", which is really saying something. Rustic but honest I guess is the best way to characterize it. There are a number of more upscale and arguably "authentic" regional Italian places (such as Donato's and Sistina) but C & C is more like comfort food. Marabella, whazzat?
8. India House: It is slightly expensive, but can be quite good. Avoid the meat--or, just see my review in the Honolulu Weekly from January of 2003.This one puzzles me, at least based on the last time I ate there. India House was as far as I know the first Indian restaurant to open in Hawai`i. Owner Ram Arora took the risk, leaving his job as head chef at the long-gone Third Floor restaurant and starting his own casual but well-kept Mughlai-style place on University Ave. in the early 1980s, in a city where virtually no one was familiar with Indian Food. I ate there fairly often during a period more than a decade ago, and I remember particularly liking his mild but complex lamb shahi korma (with green grapes). I was beginning to become interested in Indian food at that time, and I even developed somehwat of an emotional attachment to the restaurant, hoping that it could stay in business. After than, I was away from Hawai`i for several years, and didn't really have a chance to go back. In the meantime it closed, then reopened across the street from its old locaiton. Finally checked it out about a year ago: The waiters just sat around reading newspapers, barely looking up to notice that some guests had just walked in. The menu seemed a lot less imaginative than I remembered, with very little other than the typical Northern tandoori-curry dishes, and the food quite a bit more expensive. The shahi korma, as far as I could tell, was no longer available. We reluctantly shelled out $25 for a dish of butter chicken with pullao, raita, etc. on the side, hoping for the best. The pullao was actually quite good, with bright highlights of cardomon. But the butter chicken was lousy - lukewarm, rubbery, you name it. We also got a mixed tandoori plate - the chicken was dry and the seafood actually was slightly rank. Overall, the atmosphere was tired and somewhat depressing. I saw Chef Arora in the kitchen but was too shy to go in and ask what had happened! I hope I just caught them on a bad night.
P.S. Is there some way to access your review online?
9. W & M BBQ Burger: Cheap, burger joint that only has two things on the menu both of which are BBQ Burgers. There is no seating, but this place has one of the best burgers in town. Either W & M or Teddy's. I flip-flop daily.W & M's founder, Wilfred Kawamura, passed away just about month ago, but I believe after a short period of mourning they've reopened. Kua'aina Sandwich is another well-known local burger place (it even has branch in Shibuya, Tokyo).
Would that be Chef Shane Sutton's mom, Leilani? Thought of Le Guignol as more of a bistro-type place - didn't realize it had gone into the HRC direction. . .10. Le Guignol: Upscale French with an HRC flair. BYOB, with outdoor seating overlooking a park and the home of the Honolulu Symphony. The hostess/owner is occasionally barefoot.EmilyAnyway Emily, I hope I haven't ruined your great list with my pointless annotations. But it was so interesting I couldn't resist. . .
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Hey, no laugh.
Actually, while Spam may be the same on the mainland and Hawai`i, the Tulip company (Denmarks' processed meat behemoth), in an attempt to nose in on Hormel's territory, markets a special can of its trademark canned pork product in Hawai`i, with a picture of a musubi on the cover. It turns out that while love of canned meat products seems universal to Pacific island nations, Tulip holds supremacy over Okinawa in the same way Spam does in Hawaii. Here's the story.
As mongo_jones mentioned, Spam in well-loved in South Korea. It was until very recently considered a quite fine foreign food - you could even buy beautifually wrapped gift packs for New Year's.
Edited to fix busted link.
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Great, even profound, choices, Tad. And some unusual ones - I miss apple bananas and Hayden mangose a lot too, when I'm on the mainland. You can sometimes find kukui nuts on sale at Southeast Asian grocery stores, under their Indonesian name - kemiri. But they're usually dried - ugh.
I notice you're not a "junk food junkie". You didn't mention li hing anything, kakimochi, nibbits, "one ton", Maui potato chips, etc.!
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Some of the books mentioned in these posts are normally not sold outside of Hawai`i, but many of them can ordered from the cookbook pages of local online booksellers such as Native Books Hawai`i and Booklines Hawai`i. However, Kristin, the shipping costs to Japan may be enormous!
If you're looking for a particular recipe, let me know and I'll try to PM it to you. . .
Edited because I mispelled your name, sorry!
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Rlivings, if you're reading this, could you comment on Soon's meatjun? I've never had a chance to try it myself.
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Welcome to Egullet, Lopaka! Thanks for your comments, and hope to hear more from you.
I'm always curious about vintage Hawai`i cookbooks. What kind of recipes do you recall there being in the "Michener" cookbook?
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Maybe you guys have seen this already, but JETanuki (a great - and that's no exaggeration - blog and resource guide by a JET teacher) has a lot of pictures of izakaya food that you wouldn't normally find in the U.S.
It's referenced from John Thorne's website for Simple Cooking, so many of you may have seen it already.
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Thanks Shiewie! I think the CyberKuali article gives me enough of an idea of how it's used, but I appreciate the offer.
According to the article, budu is a Kelantanese specialty. I presume it would be reasonable to assume that budu was adapted from Thai fish sauce, nam pla?
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Linda, I'm glad you have such a positive image of ethnic relations in Hawai`i, as well as of the role of cuisine in preserving harmony. And to risk sounding like someone blind to the very real social problems of the islands, I have to agree with a lot of what you say!
Part of what keeps ethnic relations less polarized than they may be in other parts of the world is their sheer complexity. The huge number of national groups that have made their home in a relatively small space have led to mixing and cross-cutting alliances that make any clear-cut definition of "us" and "them" very difficult. And the food, in its most distinctive manifestations, reflects that mixing and cross-cutting.
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Whereever you eat, looking forward to your report!
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Not sure I'm willing to go so far as the red food coloring route, but perhaps a small amount of paprika or kashmiri chili might bring the orangeness back?
Not sure about why your moong dal is so hard to cook, but moong is one of the most "glutinous" of the dals and therefore may need more water to cook properly - just a speculation. Or you may try presoaking, as one might with other legumes.
Incidentally, you may know from your wife that moong dal is the basis for the Korean bindaetteok savory fritter / pancake. I've tried to make Korean-style pakoras out of moong dal and Indian-style bindaetteok out of besan, both with very limited success. Interestingly enough moong dal is used in Vietnamese and Thai cuisine primarily in making sweets!
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No need for apologies, clearly, but interestingly, dongchimi doesn't usually have cucumbers in it, so yours seems to have been an unusual version!
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Mongo, while we're on the topic, is there any way to retain the attractive orange color of the mushoor dal after it's been cooked? It normally turns to a less yellow - I know this has no effect on the taste, but . . .
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Kicap (or kecap) manis is most common only in Indonesia, not Malaysia, and fish sauce is indeed used often enough (though not as often as shrimp sauce, which is called belacan or terasi). Fish sauce is called budu in Malaysia.
Thanks for the clarification! Unsweetened kecap / ketjap is used quite a bit in Malaysian cookery, particularly in Chinese and Nonya dishes. Kecap Manis is rarer but is used in things like Malaysian satay marinade.
Regarding budu - I'm curious - could you provide more information on it? Is it hard like blachan / trassi? Or thin like the fish sauces of the rest of SE Asia? Or pasty like bago`ong from the Philippines? Any recipes? Thanks.
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Michael,
HRC is "Hawaiian Regional Cuisine", a upscale, highly influential, self-consciously "nouvelle" culinary movement that started in the late 1980s.
"Sovereignty" in the Hawaiian context doesn't necessarily mean political independence, though that is one version. More broadly, the term has become a catch-all phrase to refer to greater self-determination and empowerment for native Hawaiians. Part of the debate has centered around who gets included and excluded within the boundaries of Hawaiian sovereignty.
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We have a local branch of the Osaka-based Okonomiyaki Chibo chain here at the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center in Waikiki. Good but EXPENSIVE for okonomiyaki.
Here's a nice set of pictures by our wonderful local blogger, Donna (champuru.com).
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Another interesting side-fact is that "ketjap" without any qualifiers nowadays refers to "soy sauce" in Malay / Indonesian. Fish sauce isn't really used that often any more. "Ketjap manis" refers to sweet spiced soy sauce, and is the most common type.
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Welcome to egullet, rlivings. Hope to hear more from you in the future.
For those not familiar with it, meat jun is a standard Korean-Hawaiian dish that is rarely found, at least in the same form, in Korea itself. It consists of thinly pounded pieces of beef (usually sirloin) dipped in an egg batter, and either shallow or deep fried. It is often served with a mixture of soy and tabasco-like sauce.
While jun (pan frying) is common in Korea and egg batters are often used, steak meat is very expensive and is rarely cooked in this way, being reserved for bulgogi or in some cases for "sanjeok" which is a high-class skewered dish. Fish is much more common in jun. Also, the level of oil used in the frying tends to be much less than in Hawai`i. Finally, Korean jun is usually served with "yangnyeomjang", a mixture of soy sauce, minced garlic, and red pepper flakes.
I'm not sure exactly how Hawai`i-style meat jun originated, though it seems to have arisen with the early Korean plate lunch places such as Ted's and Kim Chee (the latter still in business though on a somewhat reduced scale) about 20 years ago.
Glad you liked Gina's version - I'd be nice to do a side-by-side comparison between it, and the versions presented by Yummy's, Kim Chee, etc.!
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Emily, you're definitely right in saying that one's definition of "Hawaiian Food" depends in large part on how one wants to define what it means to be "Hawaiian", which in turn impacts on views of what sovereignty will eventually mean and to whom it will apply. Those who want to restrict Hawaiian identity to people with blood ties to the pre-Western contact population will likely also seek a more restricted view of Hawaiian Food as well. I am not suggesting, of course, that Hawaiian cuisine has any huge causal role in generating a particular conception of Hawaiian identity. However, it is nonetheless not irrelevant, and is useful as an indicator of where a person or group stands.
Given this, it's not taking it too far to view Hawaiian Regional Cuisine has having a subtle political undercurrent, deliberate or not. By attaching the label "Hawaiian" to something that is essentially East-West fusion cuisine, it promotes a "bridge" concept of Hawai`i, as a meeting place of Asian and European / North American cultures, with the Pacific being merely the inert expanse spanned by the bridge. Indeed, other than the use of local fish species, there is very little about HRC that links to pre-contact indigenous Hawaiian or Pacific cuisine. However, as you point out Tad, it's not the mere neglect of pre-contact ingredients or cooking techniques that makes HRC an affront to certain notions of Hawaiian cuisine and identity, it's the aesthetic that HRC embodies. This just provides a another reason for those with a fairly strict conception of Hawaiian-ness to view HRC as just another invasive import rather than an element of any local cultural renaissance.
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Here is a nice webpage on Hiroshima-style Okonomiyaki, complete with number-coded "21 separations eating method" by Bunpei Yanagi, an "okonomi-yaki analyst". Here is the Japanese page.
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. . .This piece came in the Times of India a year or so back, before the Times stopped this excellent "In Search Of The Perfect..." column which many writers contributed to. . .
Vikram, didn't know you were one of the contributors to the much-missed "In Search of the Perfect" i.e. "Food Fetish" column. I still remember your article (though I didn't know you were the author at the time) and the one about Mumbai sandwichwallahs.
Until its demise, the "In Search of the Perfect" column was one of a handful of featured links in John Thorne's Simple Cooking homepage. Thorne publishes probably the best-known food newsletter in U.S.
Why did TOI decide to discontinue it? It was my all-time favorite food column in the web indiatimes.com setup. Now all they seem to have available on the web is Femina-related stuff which is not really what I'm looking for.
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This is particularly for you guys who are now away from the islands, temporarily or for a longer periods. Is there anything that you can't get there that you really want?
If you could think of a dream CARE package, what would it contain?
When you visit Hawai`i after a long time away, what is the first thing you want to eat?
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Star-Bulletin:
WEEKLY EATER: Moi is king of a special kaiseki dinner at Kacho, by Nadine Kam
Kacho's "Ali`i Kaiseki" gets reviewed positively by both Star-Bulletin and Advertiser within a week of each other. . . that's about as much hype as is humanly possible in our little island.
Keeping it together, compiled by Betty Shimabukuro.
More Thanksgiving stuff.
ELECTRIC KITCHEN: Mama's Lasagna Sauce, with Peter Rappa.
HAWAII'S KITCHEN: Bread pudding, with Warren Uchida of The Royal Hawaiian Hotel.
Early December events: Gingerbread festival at Blaisdell Exhibition Hall, "Christmas in Tuscany" at Café Sistina.
BY REQUEST: Next-day dish makes use of extra starch, by Betty Shimabukuro.
How to use up leftovers from Thanksgiving: Taro Stuffing Bake
KEY INGREDIENT: French-fried onions, by Eleanor Nakama-Mitsunaga.
BY THE GLASS: Chardonnays, merlots will work on turkey day, by Roberto Viernes.
Advertiser:
CUISINE ON A SHOESTRING: A tasty Chinese take on the cuisine of Japan, by Matthew Gray
Yusura Restaurant provides inexpensive, straightforward ramen, fried rice, and other Sino-Japanese dishes, as well as curry, in the middle of Chinatown.
EATING OUT: At the elegant Veranda, the curry is to dine for, by Matthew Gray
Rohit Prasad presents a daily curry buffet lunch at the Mandarin Oriental. Forced to check it out!
Church lu'au nets $3,100 for repairs, by Eloise Aguiar
A follow-up on the story about Kamalamalama O Keao Church's fund-raising lu`au for termite-repair. Reading about the luau caused donors to step out of the woodwork (sic).
QUICK BITES: Thanks to those who prepare turkey meals. By Wanda A. Adams
Restaurants that are serving Thanksgiving dinner this year.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Sam Choy talks story, provides lu'au how-to in new book, by Wanda A. Adams
Sam Choy's new book answers all your questions about how to prepare a luau, also talks story and features the music of the Makaha Sons.
DIGEST: Hawaii Eating News
in Hawaii: Dining
Posted
This week in the Star-Bulletin:
Kim Chee Maker Heated Up Hawai`i. By Mary Vorsino
Helen Halm, founder Halm's Kim Chee, passes away at 85.
Plenty poke and much, much more. By Lyn Danninger
Tanioka's Seafood and Catering in Waipahu celebrates its 25th anniversary
Kaimuki eateries sold. By Erika Engle.
Auntie Pasto Kapahulu Branch and Eddie's owner Ed Wary divests; units were "underperforming a little bit". Auntie Pasto bought up by family that used to own Cho Mak Korean Restaurant; will rename it La Lieto Pasta(?!).
Famed Louis XIII cognac tops the ultimate dinner, by Betty Shimabukuro
Plus half a pour of the Louis XIII. $150 a person at Halekulani's LaMer Restaurant to raise money for the James Beard Foundation.Gourmet Cooking Hawaii gives access to classes with pros
Chef Mavro, Donato's, Meritage, Morton's Steakhouse, Padovani's, Tiki's Grill & Bar and Sam Choy's.
HAWAII'S KITCHEN: Island-style BBQ Salmon prepared by Clifton Kaholokua of the Sheraton Moana Surfrider's Banyan Veranda Restaurant
THE ELECTRIC KITCHEN: Coach’s cheesecake a winner, prepared by University of Hawaii quarterback coach Dan Morrison
BY REQUEST: Making cioppino the simple way, by Betty Shimabukuro
KEY INGREDIENT: Delicata and sweet dumpling Winter squashes, by Eleanor Nakama-Mitsunaga
BY THE GLASS: 2004 promises a vintage year for wine lovers, by Chuck Furuya
BOOKS FOR COOKS: Bittersweet’ is a must for lovers of chocolate, by Barbara Burke
Alice Medrich's food autobiography.
In the Advertiser:
HOW TO BAKE: Learn the secret of sugar cookie success, by Wanda A. Adams
Tiffanie Luke of KCC Culinary Institute shows how it's done with pate sucre
Foodland cancels online shopping, by Vicki Viotti
QUICK BITES, by Wanda Adams
Ice Cream special flavors, Roy Yamaguchi in Chili Pepper magazine
FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Alu Like publishes favorite elder recipes, by Wanda Adams
All low-fat, sugar, sodium, with nutritional analysis included.I'll be away on a trip at this time next week, so it'll be a couple weeks until I update next. Ugh. . . I know you just live for this digest . . . so try to hold on till I get back!
Edited to include neglected byline.