Category Archives: Hawaiian

Bringing back the Bumbo

Day 217

Simon hated sitting in the Bumbo when he was first learning to sit up by himself. He kept on wiggling to try to get out of it. We tried to feed him in it but he would also struggle to get out. But I tried it this morning to let Simon have some puffs for breakfast and it seemed to work well. I like it better so that I don’t have to buckle him into the booster seat.

Simon went out and about all day with daddy. They went to visit Grandpa Tam and Simon was fascinated by his ID badge.

After being out all day, Simon was exhausted.

Tonight we had takeout from Hukilau.
From top left and clockwise: pele wings, taro fries, kalua pork burrito, and chicken katsu with a fried egg.
A bit too much food so we were stuffed and have plenty for the next day.

Another picture with the green mushroom. Simon likes to play with it now, trying to roll it around. Since it is strangely shaped, it doesn’t roll predictably so I think Simon is fascinated by it.

Hukilau Loco Moco

On this rainy day in SF, I met up with LT for dinner at Hukilau. I ordered from their loco moco specials, apparently the dish has been around 60 years! I ordered the mini moco since the regular size has way too much rice (3 scoops) and the mini only has 1 scoop.

I still only ate a bit of the rice but enjoyed the meat pattie, onions, sauce, and fried egg. It was served with a side of macaroni salad. Only $6!

I am looking forward to going back after baby is born so that I can try their saimin…

New Year’s Eve Lunch at Hukilau

I worked a half-day today and Ron came to pick me up from work to have lunch. We ended up at Hukilau which is a few blocks from where I work and also a few blocks from where we used to live. Even though we used to live close by, we’ve never eaten here although I have tried their catered food at a few parties.

Since it was sort of a holiday, they were kind of closed by 2:30pm but they opened the door for us to let us have lunch. Very nice of them.

I ordered the chicken katsu with a green salad (with papaya seed dressing) and macaroni salad. ($9.50) The chicken katsu was so crispy and delicious and their katsu sauce nice and tangy. I just love macaroni salad and I think this was better than when we were in Hawaii, a lot of the plate lunches you get in Hawaii always seem to be a bit oily.

Ron ordered the teriyaki short ribs with rice and macaroni salad. ($12.00) The ribs had a nice char and were sweet and sticky. The short ribs had quite a bit of fat on them, it tasted good but probably not good for your cholesterol.

These were big plate lunches so we couldn’t finish the whole thing. We had one rib left over with some rice and I had most of a piece of the chicken katsu remaining for leftovers. When you first enter the restaurant, there is a bit of an antiseptic smell (but at least that means it’s clean) but after you sit down and start listening to the music, you feel almost transported to mini vacation in Hawaii.

Next time we go (I’m sure we’ll be back), they have great weekday drink specials and we’re going to try their SPAM musubi. We saw the daughter of one of the workers carrying a delicious looking SPAM musbui in her hand so asked the father if they serve it, his reply was “what kind of Hawaiian restaurant would we be if we didn’t serve SPAM?” What an appropo answer!

Hukilau
5 Masonic Ave

Our last day in Maui

On our last day in Maui, we spent the morning sunning by the pool, soaking up some vitamin D. Went down the water slide a few times before having lunch at the resort’s Beachwalk Pantry. The bad thing about resorts is usually the cost of food, a bacon cheeseburger was $13!

We basically lounged around until we had to leave for the airport. We caught one last dinner at Da Kitchen where we had our first lunch in Maui.

Ron had the Kalua Pork sandwich. They give you the sauce on the side so you can add it to your own taste.

I ordered the chicken katsu sandwich. It’s served with TWO pieces of deep fried breaded chicken pieces. The katsu sauce is served on the side as well, so the breaded crust is super crispy and hot when they bring it to your table.

Check out my Hello Kitty tie top! I bought it in Macao but haven’t had a chance to wear it yet.

Needless to say I was stuffed and ready to sleep on our 9pm flight.

I was reminded of Singapore as we left.. although I think in Singapore, they’d say “CANNOT!!” instead of “NO CAN!!”.

14249 – 13941 … so we only drove 308 miles on this trip…

Now we’ll be flying the 2000+ miles back to SF… we’ll arrive back at 5am!

Whaler’s Village and Lahaina Grill

Ron and I wandered over to Whaler’s Village this morning. You can walk along the beach and reach the shopping center so it’s quite convenient from our hotel. We just wandered through the stores, just to mention a few of our favorites:

Crazy Shirts
David and Goliath – shirts that “play on words”
Maui Toy Works

Afterwards we went to the food court downstairs, I ordered a tuna melt from Nikki’s Pizza. Nothing too special but well priced for tourist food, ~$7 including the fries.

Ron had the fast food Chinese.

We returned to our room for a nap before heading down to our resort’s restaurant Longboards and had our complimentary drinks.

I tried some mango concoction.

Ron had some passion fruit and strawberry swirl drink while reading a magazine.

The drinks were very sweet and didn’t seem like they had much alcohol added. Maybe because they were free?

For dinner, we went to Lahaina Grill. We figured we should have at least one fabulous dinner while we were on vacation and I read good things about this restaurant. Thanks to trusty Opentable, we secured a reservation.

The restaurant is the ground floor of a (former?) inn. It’s dimly lit with lots of interesting art pieces on their walls. Although it looks like it could be a fancy restaurant, everyone seemed pretty casual… should be no surprise since Hawaiians are usually pretty laid back.

Usually if the bread is good, then the meal should be good as well. I can tell you that this bread with the chives butter was delicious. The bread was warmed and the butter was soft and easy to spread. I hate hard butter.

Our appetizer:
THE CAKE WALK
Petite servings of Kona lobster crab cake, sweet Louisiana rock shrimp cake and seared ahi cake.
The two small red dollops of hot sauce went really well with the seared ahi cake.

Our salad:
WARM PECAN CRUSTED GOAT CHEESE AND BABY ARUGULA SALAD
Pears, roasted beets, Poha berry honey-mustard.
I think we’re really starting to like fresh goat cheese. Everything went really well together in this salad.

Ron’s main course:
MACADAMIA NUT SMOKED KUROBUTA PORK CHOP
All natural, organic American pork, Poblano chile and Dungeness crab golden potato hash, pickled red cabbage and apples, pomegranate demi-glace.
Really fatty but Ron liked the pickled red cabbage and apple compote thing. Hard to taste macadamia nut flavor but still a yummy dish.

Jen’s main course:
KONA COFFEE ROASTED RACK OF LAMB
Light coffee-Cabernet demi-glace, herb infused mashed potatoes.
A bit bitter but with some sweetness, just like adding sugar to your coffee. The lamb was cooked perfectly and the sauce was divine.

We were so stuffed, we couldn’t make it to dessert… so instead, finished off our bottle of wine and headed back for the night.

The wine we had was a cabernet sauvignon from Australia, named EVIL. We picked it for it’s unusual name and it turned out to be a pretty good wine. In general I have a hard time drinking red wines but I had no problem at all with this one. I’m shocked to find that this wine is only $11 a bottle online! But I guess we were in a nice restaurant and there’s always markup… it went well with our meal so I’m glad we had it.