Offbeat Eats

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.

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.

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.