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.
