It's as though without rice you couldn't eat. It's the stuff everyday people eat every day.
A bits-and-pieces cuisine, "local food" is the culinary equivalent of pidgin. It holds "hurricane popcorn," where butter is bumped for seaweed confetti and rice crackers oxtail soup smoky, greasy, kalua pig and other items known simply as "local" food. It's filled with dishes like Spam musubi - basically a giant piece of sushi, but with canned luncheon meat instead of fish - and a snack-time soup of Japanese broth and Chinese noodles called saimin. And over the decades, they shared their families, marrying to produce the most ethnically diverse state in the country, and perhaps its only real melting pot.Īnd that pot got carried into the kitchen. They shared their lunches - their noodles, their curries. In the fields, they connected their unfamiliar words with bits of English to create an enduring pidgin. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, waves of Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos and Portuguese arrived to work the sugar cane and pineapple plantations.
Honolulu was my home until five years ago, and I always found the "ethnic" aisle - where taco shells and pasta had also been exiled - the clearest expression of Hawaii's culture. Definitely island theme to the place and it’s overall pretty comfortable.Midday is prime time for local food, when lunch wagons line up by office towers to dispense Styrofoam containers of 'plate lunch': heaping masses of Korean barbecued ribs, beef stew or teriyaki mackerel alongside mayonnaise-engulfed macaroni salad. I would definitely consider coming back again, as the Kahlua pork and a few other things, possibly the poke and custard pie (which they were out of when I was there) definitely have some attraction. It’s important to note that this is finger food, but I don’t quite know exactly how they intended to get the musubi into the cup of sauce (too large for that and cutting it was pointless, particularly with a plastic knife) that came with. This one worked arguably the best, though the nori, rice, meat and sauce did not blend together as symbiotically as I would have hoped… the Spam side did well on the subtlety end, but there was less Spam in there (never thought I’d ever type that particular phrase) than there should have been, again, for that balance. The chicken was tasty, but I don’t need and definitely don’t want either chunks of congealed chicken fat or joints at all, let alone in that dish.
As to the food, I wanted to go kind of light and just stuck with musubi, both Spam (of course) and the chicken, which came with teriyaki in it and on the side. Drink selections, incidentally, are not so hot if you want something sugar-free, a common lack in most of the area, I’ve found. She gamely braves it all and never wavers in her friendliness, but clearly could use a bit of help… so you may be waiting.
That particular meat is available on almost everything… seating is kind of odd here and despite this being more or less a hole in a wall of sort of run down buildings in a sort of questionable looking strip mall, it gets pretty jammed and the one girl trying to sort all of it out, server, cashier and everything else, definitely gets run to the limits. The dude who said if you liked Spam, you’d like this was on the mark.
0 kommentar(er)
