TIFFANY HERVEY Growing up in Peru’s rich and colorful culture, Diana Delgado DesRoches’s favorite pastime was helping her mother in the kitchen. DesRoches says Peru’s geography plays an important role in their cuisine, providing a variety of ingredients and styles–native foods such as quinoa, 3,800 different types of potatoes, mate, maize, goji berries and chili peppers such as aji amarillo and panca.
If you don’t care about food, you’ll be mouth-open asleep within the first 10 minutes of Jiro Dreams of Sushi. If food is your thing, you’ll be open-mouthed, too.
A friend of mine once said, “Okonomiyaki is just a Japanese pancake.” The sizzle of pork on the grill, dancing flakes of bonito and generous drizzles of mayonnaise and okonomiyaki sauce (a syrupy shoyu-based mixture). “Just a pancake?” Not!
Eu nao posso. It means, in Portuguese, “I can’t.” Those words occurred to me as I sat in Chinatown’s new Adega Portuguesa bar and restaurant the other night.
Poet Bill Holm writes about food that “sing[s] inside you after eating / for a long time,” food makes you feel every bone in your body, food that knows where it’s been and where it’s going. I also want food that has life in it.
Sing Cheong Yuan Bakery 1027 Maunakea St., 7am–5:30pm daily, 531-6688 RAINBOW TEA STOP & BAKERY 1120 Maunakea St., 5:30am–4pm (on vacation till April 13) 386-3388 LEE’S DRIVE-IN 46-026 Kamehameha Hwy., Kaneohe, 9am–6pm daily 235-1067 FOOK LAM SEAFOOD RESTAURANT 100 N. Beretania Street, Suite 110-112, 8am-3pm daily 523-9168 When I was young, I used to visit my grandpa, who sold Chinese sweets from an old cart.
Everyone agrees. Eating at home is best: most healthful because you control the ingredients, a pleasurable activity that pulls together relationships.
They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It’s also, perhaps, the most versatile.
If you eat at Pupukea Grill, the lunchwagon nestled next to the service station and across the street from Shark’s Cove on Oahu’s infamous North Shore, you are there because someone told you to go there, or because you were lucky enough to stumble upon it. The remote wagon’s bustling business has been growing strictly by word of mouth since they reopened last summer.
Heeia Kea Pier General Store & Deli “Try the fried moi–makes you go moemoe right aftah,” a fisherman at a nearby picnic table said with a chuckle as he examined a shirtless local boy soaking in the newly spruced-up Heeia Pier. The boy’s eyes circled around the freshly written chalkboard specials with an indecisive gaze.
Watch her. The woman at the next table.
YuZu is the sort of place where you wouldn’t be surprised to see anyone: a couple of Harajuku Barbies iPhoning their food, rail-thin vegans in yoga pants nibbling vegetarian sushi, a tableful of locals slurping udon and beer. It has a peaceful yet playful vibe, reflecting the personalities of its charming owners, Isamu “Sam” and Motoko “Moco” Kubota, whose past endeavors were equally edgy for relatively staid Honolulu: Kai (okonomiyaki omelette-pancakes), Hale (macrobiotic), Kaiwa (contemporary Japanese).
Food & Drink / If you still have room for sweets since the Chocopocalypse known as Valentine’s Day, you’ll want to stop by one of chocoholics’ most exciting events of the year, The Hawaii Chocolate Festival. The 2nd annual festival, which culminates on Saturday, Feb.
Queen’s Surf Café & Lanai 2699 Kalakaua Ave. 924-2233 Mon.-Sun., 7am-4pm Thu.-Sat., 7am-9pm, Sun 7am- 8pm Breakfast, about $6-10 Lunch, $7-$11 (shrimp or ahi salads) Dinner, $12.95-29.95, includes salad and rice No alcohol When people ask what will bring local people back to Waikiki, forget gambling.
Food & Drink / Settled in at Alan Wong’s, Passion-Fruit Mojitos and Loca-Vore Mai Tais on the way, the four of us chattered with wild abandon–much to catch up on, much to celebrate. Then we opened our menus.
Thirty years ago, in the middle of sleepy Haleiwa Town, a surfer diner was opened by Duncan Campbell, a board shaper, and his wife Jacqueline, a good cook. The Campbells liked this excellent location for their lifestyle.
Aunty Mai’s CUISINE Open Sun-Wed 11am–2am, Thurs-Sat, 11am–3am 730 Kapahulu Ave., 737-8887 BYOB, credit cards except Amex One evening last December, while I waited outside Ono Hawaiian Foods for dinner, a small family came bustling out of the empty store next door. An older little lady was obviously running the show, waving her arms energetically as she envisioned a sign at the storefront.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, Opal Thai was a food truck on the edge of Haleiwa. The food, like the winter waves, was epic, with a perfect blend of colorful and fresh flavors.
While many of us have already jumped on the “Go Local” bandwagon, shopping at farmers’ markets or being gobsmacked by fresh kale from our CSA, Outstanding in the Field (OitF) takes it just a little bit, well, dirtier. Dedicated to serving meals at their source, connecting diners to the land and farmers, the table-to-farm dinner series holds its first Hawaii events this month.
Up here in pre-planned, suburban Central Oahu, where the sky seems closer to the ground and the weather is a few degrees cooler, we do our fine dining at strip malls and chain restaurants. I should explain that it’s tough out here for foodies, so I was disbelieving when my father claimed he’d found an authentic Mexican restaurant in Waipio Shopping Center, home of the likes of Outback Steakhouse and Big City Diner.
New year, new pounds. They go together like fat-, salt- and carb-heavy rice and gravy, saimin and char siu–a problem for lovers of Hawaii local food.
While Champagne may be the go-to for ringing in the new year at home, prices have some reaching for that 12-pack of Heineken. When I first started working in the beverage industry, I noticed all my co-workers’ drink of choice was Champagne.
Alas, hurray, ‘tis the season once again! The planning and execution of holiday feasts can be overwhelming (even if it may have seemed like a good idea two weeks ago).
Food & Drink / The dim little foyer is silent and unpopulated, but the sign says “Open.” Following the arrow, we slide open a wooden door and here are the people, in a room splashed with sun through the big front window. Walls encrusted with tchotchkes, from red devil masks to a big black fish to jolly tip-jar Buddhas, lend a flea market, Mad Hatter air, but the dining space, though not large, feels spacious, airy and uncluttered.
This is a story about five Irish bars, and it begins at the end, with a man named Mitch sleeping on Lewers street. That’s because “all endings are beginnings,” as Mitch says to me.
Given the city’s crumbling infrastructure and rail controversy, it’s hard to believe anyone would want to be the next mayor of Honolulu. But a few do want the job, including the incumbent, Mayor Peter Carlisle, the former Honolulu Prosecuting Attorney who won a 2010 special election to fill the remainder of Mufi Hannemann’s term.
I’d never been to a Honolulu City Council meeting until a few weeks ago. Features, not politics, was my beat.
Victoria Holt Takamine is a kumu hula, a cultural activist and a teacher and has an impeccable pedigree to back up all these titles. Born of an alii family whose kuleana was in Moanalua, she graduated as a hula teacher under the legendary Auntie Maiki Aiu Lake and taught hundreds of students in her own halau (Pua Alii ‘Ilima) and at the University of Hawaii.
On April 25, a state judge dismissed trespassing charges against a Kauai man after finding that he had been exercising traditional native Hawaiian rights hunting wild pigs on private land. Kui Palama, 28, was arrested on Jan.
The city plans to dish out $3.5 million from its Affordable Housing Fund and either purchase or renovate a structure to provide transitional housing for Honolulu’s special needs homeless population. “Our community has invested considerable effort and resources in addressing homelessness,” Mayor Peter Carlisle said in a statement, “but there remains a population whose disabilities or chronic conditions make it difficult for them to participate in traditional shelter programs.” Carlisle is referring to those homeless with mental illnesses, addictions and physical disabilities.
Makaweli Poi faces an uncertain future after its owner, a corporate subsidiary of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA) ordered the West Kauai mill to suspend operations May 23. Mona Bernardino, chief operating officer of the corporation, Hiipoi LLC, says the move to shut down Makaweli Poi was prompted mainly by financial concerns.
A resolution adopted by the City Council will solidify an agreement between the City and County of Honolulu and the University of Hawaii Water Resources Research Center (UH-WRRC) to conduct an analysis of impacts from ocean sewer outfalls on the marine environments off of Oahu. The city will pay UH-WRRC as much as $2.5 million for biological and sediment studies in portions between now and June 30, 2017 .
Along with the deep, verdant growth of spring sprouts an unyielding desire to spend more time in the open air. That’s why it should come as no surprise that National Bike Month falls in the sun-drenched time of May.
Of the many letters you publish against rail, how many offer an alternative that won’t send us into further economic demise? Billions of gallons of oil are imported for us from every oil-producing nation on this planet so that we can buy billions of gallons of gasoline.
TheBus is taking a back seat to rail. At the May 3 Downtown Neighborhood Board meeting, an audience member asked city Transportation Director Wayne Yoshioka when we could expect the bus route cancellations and changes to be reversed.
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