Eating local style on the Honolulu Food Tour
“If you could choose your last meal you ever ate, what would it be?” Ryan asked each of us as an ice breaker on the Honolulu Food Tour: Eat Like a Local. I normally hate questions like this but, strangely, an answer popped into my head: “Surf and turf for the main, and chocolate molten cake for dessert.” Just thinking about my last meal made me hungry, which was good as I soon found out that I would need a voracious appetite for this tour!
Ryan warned us that we were going to eat a lot of food, and recommended not filling up on the rice that is plentiful in all Hawaiian meals. It turned out to be the best advice I had all day. He went on to explain that the tour’s goal was to take us to places where locals eat, not necessarily to only eat local food. “I’m not a good cook, that’s why I started this company in 2013 — because I know where to eat out,” Ryan said with a knowing smile.
Our first stop was YogurStory, a Korean sit-down restaurant in the Ala Moana neighborhood. Before I knew it, our table had turned into 50 shades of purple! A stack of purple pancakes was placed in the middle of the table, accompanied by lavender-colored drinks. The drinks were taro lattes, and their color comes from the taro root — a common, starchy vegetable historically grown in Hawaii. And the pancakes were made with ube, a type of purple yam commonly used in the Philippines for desserts. The ube was a florescent shade of purple that hurt my eyes, but the taste was delicious. Not too sweet, as the color would lead you to think, but definitely tasty.
Purple pancakes at YogurStory
This is when we learned that most popular food eaten by locals has a heavy Asian influence from Japan, the Philippines, China and Korea. In fact, most everything we tried on the tour had an Asian twist to it. And contrary to what one might think about Hawaiian food being light and fresh since it comes from a lush tropical island, it really isn’t. In fact, it’s very heavy, meat forward and greasy — but all in a good, delicious way.
We walked around the corner from the restaurant and stopped at a truck with smoke pouring out of it. No need to be frightened, the smoke was the byproduct of some of the best pork baby back ribs I’ve ever had, just lightly sweet like honey. The Kau Kau Grill food truck had a line of local people waiting for its garlic shrimp, poke and those delicious ribs, and I was happy to be among them.
Yummy ribs from the Kau Kau Gril
Next we walked to a large Japanese/Asian supermarket, Don Quijote, which seemed like an odd choice for a food tour; however in front of the market, there was an open-air food court with picnic tables, plus a number of Asian food stalls with a vibe that reminded me of hawker centers in Singapore. We watched as a woman meticulously made takoyaki balls, rolling the batter with chopsticks in a cast-iron skillet that looked sort of like a muffin pan. Takoyaki is a savory Japanese street food about the size of a golf ball, made with a special batter filled with pickled ginger, green onions, octopus, teriyaki sauce, and topped with bonito flakes. This is not street food for the unadventurous — but I loved it. It was a complex mixture of textures, with a bit of a fishy taste: delicious.
Serving up takoyaki balls
We continued to go to more little hole-in-the-wall establishments, and tried Japanese-style steak rolls. It was at about this time that I hit my food wall. We were eating full portions at each of these places, and even though I was avoiding the rice, I was still filling up! But our next savory stop was a local iconic food that I couldn’t skip — Spam musubi.
As we walked to the Spam musubi stop, Ryan filled us in on how the notorious pressed meat became so popular in Hawaii. During and shortly after WWII, fishing was banned around Hawaii. So the locals and the U.S. Army had to find other ways to get their protein — enter Hormel’s signature product. It was cheap and plentiful to feed the troops, as well as people working on plantations. They marinated the spam in teriyaki sauce, fried it up and then placed it on top of rice wrapped in nori. Sort of like a poor man’s sushi, but more filling. The stand we stopped at had room for a total of three people inside — so you certainly couldn’t be claustrophobic! I had eaten regular Spam musubi before in Hawaii, so I was ready to try one of the other “flavors” on offer. You could get it with bacon and a fried egg, other herbs, cheese; I chose to have mine with plum sauce, which lent a bit of a salty sour taste that I enjoyed.
Hawaii’s iconic local delicacy: Spam musubi
Finally we finished with a rare Hawaiian treat — Dole Whip — a frozen soft-serve pineapple treat served only in a few places on earth. And strangely enough, the Walgreens in Hawaii is one of them.
Throughout the afternoon, Ryan shared different stories on the history of food in Hawaii, or entertaining cultural tidbits. He also provided us with tips on other local restaurants to go to since there was no way we could cover it all on this 2.5-hour tour. The Eat Like a Local tour lived up to its name, as all of the places Ryan took us to were places few tourists would wander into on their own. However, all were places I’d come back to in a heartbeat. This is the real side of Hawaii that few people get to experience, far away from the touristy luaus and sunset dinner cruises.
One final bit of information Ryan relayed to us may have been the most important — the local term “kanak attack.” Let me use it in a sentence: “After pounding three plate lunches, I had a major kanak attack.” Basically, it describes that crazy-sleepy food coma you fall into after eating at six restaurants on the Eat Like a Local Honolulu Food Tour!
- Contributed by Sherry Ott
Eating Like a Local on a Honolulu Food Tour from Hawaii Things to Do