Random Honolulu Eating & Drinking Tips

So, before we say aloha to my Honolulu vacation posts, one more somewhat random post on the pleasant, less formal culinary experiences that we had on Oahu.

Musubi & Bento Iyasume

Iyasume Musubi & Bento: A Hole in the Wall, not to be missed! 

The one dining spot that we visited more than once on our trip was Musubi & Bento Iyasume, a small hole-in-the-wall take out place with several locations in Honolulu although the one closest to central Waikiki (or at least, the closest one we found) was across the street from Ross on Seaside Ave.  This location is open from 7 am - 7:30 pm which made it a perfect breakfast stop for us and a perfect, pre-plane flight home stop as well.  

Salmon bowl, Spam ume musubi & Ume onigiri bento

As the name suggests, Musubi & Bento Iyasume specializes in various forms of musubi & bentos.  Musubis are protein (often spam) on top of rice, wrapped with a piece of nori (seaweed) and bentos are combination boxes of various savory treats--the one pictured has an ume (plum) onigiri, sausage (these tasted like little smokies), tonkatsu (breaded fried pork) & tamago (Japanese omelet).  The shop also includes several bowls including the salmon bowl (cooked salmon flakes over rice) and various forms of onigiri (triangular rice "balls" stuffed with various fillings and wrapped in nori).  For those of you not super familiar with ume, it's a type of plum-apricot that is common in Japanese cuisine and has a sour salty flavor and a bright fuchsia color.  There are also shiso onigiri or spam-shiso musubis which contain shiso, a Japanese herb related to the mint/basil family but a little bitter when cooked.  I really loved the spam-ume & spam-shiso musubis as they helped to balance out the saltiness of the straight spam on rice of a classic musubi.  For those of you bacon & egg lovers in the morning, there are also these beauties: 

Bacon, tomago, spam musubi

Aloha Harmony Tea House

If you love tea and don't really want to settle for Lipton on your trip, I'd recommend a stop by Aloha Harmony Tea House in the Embassy Suites. The storefront is actually on Kalia Road and they also open at 7am, which is a plus if you're coming from the mainland and are not quite adjusted to the time change on the first day of your trip.  

My tea supply for the trip with plenty to take home! 

I really like green tea and since there was hot water on demand & a tea pot in our hotel room, I ended up picking up two really nice teas--jasmine pearls & first love, which is a blooming green tea.  Rather than getting the 3oz packs, I asked for just 1 oz of each (there are loose-leaf tea bins) and had more than enough for a pot of tea each day & some to take home.  It's somewhat pricey, but, frankly, good tea is pricey & it was less expensive and better than going to a fine dining establishment for tea.  Really cool to find this place across the street from the beach. 

Magoo's Burger (Food Truck) -- Diamond Head

I'm not a hiker. But, somehow I decided that hiking Diamond Head was a good idea.  We didn't know that we decided to do the hike on the same day as the Waikiki Beach triathlon, meaning an extra half mile walk from the bus stop, but hey, what's an extra half a mile walk...uphill...just to get to the park entrance (we took a cab home).  I did make it to the top and back down to the park where I was in desperate need of refreshment.  Luckily the bright yellow Magoo's Burger food truck was there waiting with shaved ice. 

Rainbow shaved ice

We decided to share a rainbow (strawberry, coconut, pineapple) shaved ice ($3.50) and the sweet, icy goodness totally hit the spot as we sat on a shady bench in the park before heading back to Waikiki.  If you're not into the rainbow, you can also choose two flavors of syrup on the shaved ice for the same price.  I am sure there is better shaved ice on the island, but honestly, location is everything, and this was amazing and refreshing--a great post-hike treat. 

Marukame Udon

Another place that was cheap and delicious was Marukame Udon.  Note--this place is highly ranked on yelp and pretty inexpensive so if you're going in the evening, expect a wait.  We went in the evening, decided the line was too long and went back the next morning where we walked through the line: 

Ontama Bukkake Udon with Green Onion, Tempura Flakes, Tempura Shrimp & Asparagus

This place is a cafeteria style restaurant where a chef behind the counter will get your udon then you proceed through various tempura & musubi offerings before arriving at the cashier. My husband got the Kake Udon, which is the most basic udon bowl, noodles with traditional broth and a spam musubi, but I decided to go with the Ontama Bukkake Udon which has the bukkake (salty, savory, probably soy based) sauce and a soft boiled egg on top.  The soft boiled egg is an amazing addition to the bowl that makes it full of creamy goodness.  The tempura was delicious and well done, although the asparagus was a little chewy. Still, overall, a great start to the day. 

House Without a Key (Cocktails)

House Without a Key is both a restaurant and a bar lounge, but is also a great place to catch some Hawaiian music and have a fantastic mai tai.  In the summer, the sun is too far west to catch the sunset there, but it's still a great time.  I wasn't sure that I wanted to do dinner at the restaurant so I had my husband call ahead to make sure that just doing drinks & pupus (appetizers) was okay.  The restaurant hostess who answered the phone was so nice--she let us know about the sunset view being obscured in summer, but also about the Hawaiian music & hula dancer, that cocktails were out on the patio, and we should arrive by 5:30pm if we wanted to be seated for the music/ dancer.  It was perfect advice.  We got a seat right by the music/ hula dancer: 

House without a Key: Live Music & Hula Dancer

And, we also had some great drinks, including the signature Mai Tai which I highly recommend: 

House Without a Key Mai Tai

There are other places to get cheaper drinks on the island, but for tasty drinks, tasty appetizers (we had the coconut shrimp which was yum -- and they serve a bowl of potato chips to all drink tables), and a great show in a very laid back environment, I'd highly recommend House Without a Key.  

So, that's the Honolulu (Waikiki) wrap-up.  I think I'll start a series on my own food next (after all, I can't eat out ALL the time, especially after Hawaii) so stay tuned for that.  Aloha! 

Cha for Tea (Long Beach) 7.22.14

Yesterday, I had a work meeting and since I've decided this week is a "stay-cation --> vacation" week, we met across the street from campus instead of on campus, at Cha for Tea  in Long Beach.  Cha for Tea is a local chain tea shop that serves boba milk tea (and other teas) as well as a small menu of appetizers, entrees & noodle soups.

My two favorite things here are the crispy chicken and the fried dumplings (yeah, yeah, the reducing the gluten consumption is not going so well here), both of which are often being handed out during lunchtime as a sample by a gracious employee seeking to capitalize on passing food traffic.  Yesterday, I had the green tea salad with fried dumplings:

Green tea salad with fried dumplings

The salad was fine. I liked the dressing (green tea sesame ginger) a lot--it's a thicker vinaigrette that goes well with the greens and I'm really glad that they use a spring mix instead of the romaine or leaf lettuce that's pictured on the menu. The crispy dumplings were their normal awesomeness with crispy hot goodness and lots of meat (ground chicken). All in all, it was a fine meal.  Would I go out of my way to come eat here regularly? Probably not, but it's very convenient to campus and the salad made for a much prettier picture than the dumplings on a plate by themselves so yes, a fine lunch, but nothing to necessarily write home about. 

I also ordered the almond milk black tea which is there biggest seller and is usually one of my favorite drinks of all time: 

Almond milk black tea

For some reason, yesterday, either my tastebuds were slightly off or the milk tea itself just wasn't as good as usual.  This is actually great news because, seriously, I need to stop paying over $4 for tea. Maybe it was just the fact that I didn't get a cool heart bendy straw to cap off my experience.  Whatever it was, I will probably go back and have another milk tea at some point, but maybe I'll ask for a little less sweetness as yesterday just seemed too sweet and not almond creamy enough.  I probably should have just asked for an adjustment, but I have a martyr complex so I thought I'd just suffer through it. 

Overall, I like Cha for Tea, but I'm not crazy about it. It's conveniently located, but unless I need somewhere to meet someone, I'm more likely to make some tea in my office or go to Thiptara for lunch where I pay the same price but feel happier about the quality to value ratio.  

Daikokuya Ramen & Ozero Tea & Desserts (Little Tokyo) 7.21.14

So, my friend and I had been planning to get together for awhile to check out the Japanese American National Museum's current exhibition Perseverance.  We finally found a day that we could get together for a museum & lunch date, but, I failed to notice, when I visited the website yesterday that JANM is closed on Mondays. Super sad panda....but hey, there's always lunch to be had, and in Little Tokyo, good eats are never far, so we decided to head over for an early lunch to Daikokuya.

            

(Random street shots of Little Tokyo in LA, because I'm never down here and well, there are beautiful things besides food.)

Daikokuya is an LA-area Ramen chain that was been ranked in Yelp's Top 10 Restaurants in 2011 and is pretty much super busy all the time.  Luckily, we were there early enough to get a seat at the bar without a wait and we quickly ordered two bowls of the Daikoku ramen, which is a pretty standard tonkatsu broth based ramen with chasu (pork), egg, ramen noodles, bean sprout, and green onions:

This was the pristine picture before stirring in the green onions, but you can't really see the goodness of the ingredients, hence...

The less composed picture with the ramen noodles, pork & egg.  Sorry for the shadow in the corner. I probably should have taken more time to compose the shot, but I was hungry. 

So, this is probably the best ramen I've had since returning from Tokyo.  I don't eat ramen THAT often so that's not saying a whole lot, but it was delicious. The broth was savory and delicious, the noodles were just the right texture of firm, the meat was super tender and the egg--OMG, the EGG.  I am not generally an egg fan, but that egg was seriously one of the best things I've eaten in awhile and really made the dish.  My friend thinks that it must have been marinated in something to infuse it with the flavor it had and it was a lovely medium boiled texture so it was cooked all the way through (not runny), but the yolk wasn't firm like a hard-boiled egg tends to be.  It was super good and pretty darn filling.  

Cool Art on the Wall of Ozero

Before getting back in the car for our ride back to her place, we stopped off at Ozero Tea & Desserts where I had a mango jasmine iced tea and my friend had a brown sugar milk tea with boba. 

Mange Jasmine Iced Tea & Brown Sugar Milk Tea w/ Boba

I'm really glad there's not an Ozero around the corner from my house because the mango jasmine tea was pretty addictive--just the right amount of sweet mango syrup blended with a lovely jasmine tea.  When I say, "just the right amount," I mean that the mango didn't over power the taste of the jasmine blossom in the tea which made it really balanced.  I am a stickler for well-made iced tea (a lot of places really overbrew their tea) so this was a nice post-meal treat. 

So, lesson learned--check the hours when going to visit a museum and make sure they're not closed on the day you plan to visit...or don't and have a great meal anyways.