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Jackie Rey’s Ohana Grill (Kailua-Kona, Hawaii)

Our last day in Hawaii was a very long Saturday spent touring coffee plantations, doing some light hiking, checking out the old Kona airport and the Kona Brewery, and finding a last relaxing dinner before heading off to the airport for a 10:30pm flight. Earlier in the trip, we had passed Jackie Rey’s Ohana Grill on the Kuakini Highway just outside of Kailua-Kona, and it looked like a great place to have a nice, relaxing dinner before watching the sun set.

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Gypsea Gelato (Kealakekua, Hawaii)

I’ve always been a great fan of gelato, that Italian cousin to ice cream. Most everything I enjoy about a good ice cream is better with gelato, with a smoother texture, and often several more options that are dairy free (damn that lactose intolerance of mine). And I used to have a world-class gelato place, Morano Gelato a short drive from my office. But unfortunately, Morano Gelato had some business difficulties in 2019-20, and then when Covid hit in the Spring of 2020, Morano closed permanently after a 10 year run. So I’m always on the lookout for a good gelato place when I’m traveling, and while we were headed to Teshima’s Fine Foods, we spied Gypsea Gelato and vowed to try them out. A few days later, after touring nearby Greenwell Farms coffee, we had a chance to stop by and check them out.

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L&L Hawaiian Barbecue (Ocean View, Hawaii)

On our second to last day on the Big Island, we got up early and drove out to Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park to see Kilaulea and hike along the shore. The road back to Kailua-Kona from Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park is a long drive (it’s over 90 miles, putting the ‘Big’ into ‘Big Island’), and we wanted to make sure we didn’t miss dinner. There’s actually not that many places to stop along the route, but the mainstay of local Hawaiian Cuisine was there for us: a location of L&L Hawaiian Barbecue in Ocean View.

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Kalikala Cuisine (Kailua-Kona, Hawaii)

After my conference wrapped up, we spent another few nights on the Big Island, moving up the coast to the Royal Kona Resort, which originally was built as the Hilton Kona Resort. It’s a surprisingly well-maintained old resort that has much of the 1960s charm to it, but it currently doesn’t have a lot of dining action, and I quite frankly wasn’t impressed with the limited breakfast options. So we headed down Ali‘i Drive to see what we could find. As I mentioned in my review of The Fish Hopper, Ali‘i Drive is basically ground-central for the central Kona coast tourist trade, with any number of restaurants vying for tourist dollars. My eye caught a rather low-key outdoor dining spot almost immediately adjacent to The Fish Hopper called Kalikala Cuisine, and after talking with a man (who I found out was the owner) on the bench out front with a nice dog, we decided to give the place a try.

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Kuleana Rum Shack (Waikoloa Village, Hawaii)

One of the places I was looking forward to visiting on our trip to the Big Island was Kuleana Rum Shack. Since discovering their most excellent rum products back in 2021 (when they were one of the sponsors at our annual Ohana charity luau), I wanted to both see if what the distillery was up to, and try the Rum Shack (which is their restaurant and tasting room).

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Teshima’s (Kealakekua, Hawaii)

After several days attending conferences on the Kona Coast, we took an opportunity to break away for the evening and check out some of the local dining scene. In this case, we had a specific destination; a short distance away in Kealakekua lies a pretty subdued restaurant, that’s been serving Japanese and Hawaiian cuisine for decades. And that’s Teshima’s. As you can read in Honolulu Magazine’s most excellent writeup of Hawaii’s Oldest Restaurants, at just under 100 years old, Teshima’s has been serving up Hawaiian-Japanese food longer than just about any other place on the Big Island, opening in 1929.

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The Fish Hopper (Kailua-Kona, HI)

After several years of having my work travel severely curtailed by the pandemic, 2023 has been a whirlwind of travel. While my usual work travel concentrates on some particularly non-exotic locations (I’m lookin’ at you, Lakehurst NJ and El Segundo, CA!), this year had a few plum trips. Just two and half weeks after returning from a week-long work trip to France, I found myself heading off to the Big Island in Hawaii for a week-long conference, and between the travel and a few extra days tacked on to the end of the trip, Carol and I had a few days to explore the island. But with any trip to Hawaii from the East Coast, it’s a bit of a marathon getting there. Our voyage started at 6am from Boston Logan (meaning departing our house a bit after midnight), connecting in Phoenix, and arriving late afternoon at the Kona airport. By that point we were starving, so after procuring the rental car, we headed down to central Kailua-Kona to a spot recommended to us by the rental car shuttle driver: The Fish Hopper.

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Palace Saimin (Honolulu, HI)

While I’ve talked about many of the dishes that demonstrate the ethnic fusion of Hawaii, few of them embody the multicultural fusion of Hawaiian cuisine as much as “saimin”. Saimin is basically a noodle dish that is a mild fusion of elements taken from each the major cultures of Hawaii’s plantation era: Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Hawaiian, and Portuguese. The resulting dish is a noodle soup that bears a lot of resemblance to Chinese “mein” and Japanese “ramen”, usually with some other ethnicities adding ingredients, such as Spam, gyoza, udon, or wontons. In any case, much of the Kahili neighborhood had Saimin joints popping up during the middle of the 20th century, usually run by recent Okinawan families. And pretty much everyone I know that grew up in Hawaii has told me stories about how much saimin they ate as a kid, either as soup, or as the related “fried min” (pan-fried noodles with the same sorts of toppings). Oahu has dozen of Saimin places, and one of the older, more classic, and, quite frankly, no-frills places is Palace Saimin.

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The Pineapple Room (Honolulu, HI)

(Closed) For our last meal in Hawaii, we decided to check out Alan Wong’s The Pineapple Room. Alan Wong is one of of several Hawaiian Chefs (along with Sam Choy, Roy Yamaguchi, Peter Merriman, and Bev Gannon, amongst others) that have worked for the last few decades to establish “Hawaiian” as a proper cuisine type. For all my discussion of local Hawaiian food, such as the Loco Moco, the Spam Musubi, and the Plate Lunch, there’s also a lot going on in Hawaiian cuisine in the fine dining sector. One of the places that’s often recommended is Alan Wong’s restaurant, called simply “Alan Wong’s Restaurant”, but our itinerary didn’t have the time, and we didn’t have the stomach space, to visit there. But Alan Wong also runs a lesser known restaurant, The Pineapple Room, which is nicely hidden away inside Ala Moana Mall. Specifically, inside the Women’s department in the Macy’s. It’s also fairly easy to get reservations there, and you also have a pretty good chance of getting a walk-in seat. So on our way to the airport (after a pleasant hike up to Koko Crater), we stopped at Ala Moana for some light shopping and one last meal.

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Zippy’s (Kaneohe, HI)

If there’s a single place that really represents what “Hawaiian Food” is, the first place probably has to go to Zippy’s (their competitor L&L Drive Inn comes in at a close second). Zippy’s is a combination fast food and casual restaurant (literally, since most Zippy’s have both the fast food counter and a table service dining room) that started in Honolulu in 1966. Filling nominally the same sort of market niche that Denny’s does on the mainland, the key to Zippy’s is that just about every local Hawaiian food item I’ve talked about is on their menu in one form or another. Spam musubi? Check. Plate lunch? Check. Saimin? Check (both fried and as soup). Teriyaki burger? Check. Portuguese sausage? Check. Shrimp plate? Check. About the only thing I didn’t see on their menu was a malasada. So their motto is “All your favorites”, and at least with Hawaiian food, I think they’ve got that covered. So, on our last morning on Oahu, it was finally time for me to make some time for a stop in at Zippy’s, ducking into their Kaneohe location right by the Windward Mall.

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