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 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.