Offbeat Eats

One of the obligatory parts of living in New England is that you’ve occasionally got to give into the urge, and go find a seafood restaurant and get one of the hallmark dishes of New England summer, such as a lobster roll or fried clams. And while the options are better on the coast, you don’t necessarily need to travel that far. As we mentioned in our Wit & Grit review, several times this summer we headed up to Burlington, and on our last trip up there, we decided to visit Vermont’s “inland coast”, going to Shanty on the Shore, on the shores of Lake Champlain just south of downtown Burlington.

The useful thing about catching a flight out of Kona at 10pm is that, after a very short connection in Phoenix, we arrived in Boston mid-afternoon, which actually is nice for a change. Instead of an early-morning or light-night drive back home, this gave us a chance to stop by Byfield, MA and get some barbecue.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Mid-summer, we were meeting up with friends in Burlington, VT for one of the monthly Tiki events a Venetian Soda Lounge, and it gave us one of our relatively rare opportunities to grab breakfast on the way to Burlington. There’s been a lot of change in the dining scene in Randolph, Vermont in the last two years that I’ve been wanting to check out, including a new bagel place (Wee Bird), two restaurants merging (One Main Tap and Grill and Kuya Filipino became Kuya at One Main), and and old favorite, Black Krim, closed up shop and became Wit and Grit. Swinging through town, we decided we had time for a sit-down breakfast, so this time, we decided to check out Wit and Grit.