Wai’olu
Before dinner on Day 2, we stopped in at the Wai’olu lounge inside the Trump Hotel for cocktails. I felt elegant and sophisticated as we swept through the hotel lobby in our airy dresses and took the elevator up to the sleek lounge overlooking the sunset on Waikiki. It wasn’t quite next to the beach, but you could see the ocean in the distance before the sun went down completely. We’d heard that this place was known for its unique cocktails, so we each ordered one after much deliberation over the menu.
My friend got the Makai Mohito, pictured above, which had Bacardi gold rum, fresh lime juice, fresh basil and mango puree. She was very well pleased with it, and it was certainly a generous portion too.
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lunch restaurants: comfort food hawaii noodles oahu sandwiches
by Lindsey
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Victoria Inn
I really wanted to get a genuinely local experience of Honolulu, and my friend – who grew up there – was more than happy to oblige. On Day 2, she took me to lunch at the Victoria Inn, located in the neighborhood of Kaimuki. Its decor is really dated (or nostalgic, perhaps), and probably hasn’t changed for decades. My pictures here turned out with a sepia hue, which I suppose is rather appropriate. There were definitely no tourists to be seen here. It’s actually kind of a dive, but I can understand the nostalgic value of the place, and it serves up cheap local comfort food that people have probably been ordering for generations.
I decided to go full-on local and got the saimin, which my friend described as being like “Hawaiian ramen.” It wasn’t until after I ordered it that she also informed me that she doesn’t care for it much. She and I share a lot of the same taste in food, so I wasn’t surprised to find out that I didn’t care for it much either. In fact, I found it rather bland and unappetizing. The broth wasn’t like any kind of ramen broth I’d ever had before – and I suppose that’s fair enough, since it’s not technically ramen – but it was kind of this bizarre chicken broth-flavored thing that didn’t have much going for it. And then there was the egg! Too much egg. It overpowered the blandness of the noodles and broth until all I could taste was egg. I couldn’t finish it at all, and in fact it rather turned my stomach near the end.
I found out later from a saimin-liking friend that in fact, good saimin does exist…just not at Victoria Inn.
The rest of the meal was an improvement:
Panya
After dinner, we headed into Waikiki to meet up with my friend B, who – quite coincidentally – happened to be vacationing in Honolulu at the same time as myself! o(^__^)o We met up at the Panya in the Royal Hawaiian Center. This Panya is a relatively new branch and is small – it’s just bakery items and coffee. The Panya branch in Ala Moana is more like a restaurant. (I had lunch there on my last day, which I’ll be posting about later).
[I have to say, it makes me LOL a little that some websites are even worse than I am re: updating. The Panya website's monthly feature is catering for Thanksgiving! Ahahaha. XD]
I got the bread pudding (pictured above). It wasn’t so bad, but it was a bit dense and a little cold to boot, which made it difficult to enjoy. It came with a lovely creamy sauce, which I made the mistake of pouring all over the pudding. The sauce flooded over the tiny container and onto the table, making a big mess of things. I ended up taking most of it home. I warmed it up the next day, and it was much, much better. Bread pudding should always be served warm, in my view! It had soaked up all the sweet sauce from the night before, and the heating managed to soften up the pudding and bring out its flavors.
There was also tiramisu:
Paesano
I’ve been a bad, bad blogger! How is my last update from January? But I figured with time springing forward today and the weather warming up at last, I ought to push off the winter slump and get back into the swing of things. The problem with taking a hiatus from blogging is that you get stuck with all this backlog that you’re not sure what to do with, weeks (or months) later. However! I am determined to make my way through them. My Hawaii posts are still plenty acomin’, and there’s much more from before my trip that I still have to do. You’ll have to forgive me for my lack of memory for some of these posts, but at least I have pictures…!
Today I begin with dinner, still from Day 1 of my trip. For dinner, we headed to Paesano, a local Italian place that’s quite the favorite with my friend’s parents. (We actually took quite a bit of food to go for them). The maitre’d was a bit snobby, but the wait staff was decent, if a little slow. No one seemed to mind that too much anyway, as the place was hopping with business that night.
Pictured above is my entree – the veal marsala. The veal was cooked nicely with a great crust, and the sauce was good, though nothing particularly memorable. I like my marsala sauce to have that strong wine flavor to it, which this one didn’t seem to have so much.
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