HawaiiThis is our big update on San Francisco and Hawaii. We flew out to Hawaii, the big island, for a Passover seder, and made a point of stopping in SF for a few days in each direction. We also made a point of trying to use the web to get the best air fares, but despite several days spent struggling with web sites, we wound up with the best deals by calling United and American directly. The business model is not quite their yet. This web page is and we hope you'll find some useful ideas for your own trip in it.
This newsletter covers:
This is probably the best eating city around. It is not that there are more great restaurants than elsewhere, but rather that there are fewer bad restaurants than one might usually find.
To start with, our old favorite, Laghi, has moved to Steiner and Sutter from its old home out west on Clement. They have a lot more space, both for dining and cooking, and best of all - real restrooms. Oh yeah, and valet parking. As usual, it was the pasta that stole the show. They make their own with red wine, tomatoes, mushrooms, chestnuts and other such flavorings and the texture is rich and chewy. The red wine pasta with braised goose sauce was dangerously good. We also enjoyed their smoky mixed grill of venison, duck breast and wild boar. The latter was rich and fat and piggy, a real treat when most pork nowadays is bred to taste like chicken.
We got back to Boulevard for one of Nancy Oakes's legendary pork chops and loaded up on heirloom beets and tomatoes. The fried sea food, some times just squid rings, some times a collection of squid, shrimp, fish and other goodies, are crispy and flavor some. She even served us a filet mignon that actually tasted like meat. Her secret, she barded it with bacon!
One new restaurant we tried was Jardiniere, with Tracy Desjardin in the kitchen. She was at the Mount View in Calistoga and then at Rubicon, but now she has a place of her own. The place is lovely, with a starlit dome and romantic corners. The cooking was up to form, with flavors of straight forward intensity from fresh, high quality ingredients. We loved the John Dory, a white English breakfast fish, with truffle oil and salsify and the bacon and cabbage soup. Both had magnificent aromas. The artichoke salad, very thin slices, was extremely well balanced, and short ribs with celeriac were a classic dish well done. We stayed until the live music began to play, something you might want to take into account, but we plan to be back on our next trip.
Now that Laghi has moved east, we needed a place to eat in the western part of the town, so we tried Ton Kiang with its hakka cooking and dim sun. We started healthy, with the peeled asparagus, but quickly moved over to the steamed bacon with dried mustard greens (fabulous) and the thinly sliced, deep fried beef short ribs. Our arteries began to clog as we stuffed them with fried squid and Peking duck and we were only saved by a delicious, brightly flavored, sea weed salad. This gave us room for one of their clay pot cooked dishes, a mix of shrimp, cuttlefish, scallops and fishballs that evened things out by sticking to our ribs. In truth, this was a suitable last meal for our trip west, and we had great left over goodies galore for our flight home the next day.
We did not get back to J&J which has been renamed KCheung's and was being renovated. The new management offered promises of culinary continuance, so we await our next visit. Instead we went to Great Eastern, down the block, and had the sauteed greens with whole roasted garlic, a whole steamed rock cod, giant dumplings made of Chinese sausage and tofu and a wonderful rendition of minced squab on lettuce leaves.
For dim sun, we went back to New Asia, which is as good as ever and still serving Dim Sun in the classical style. We've been wondering how long New Asia has been around. Any guesses? For a more modern take on dim sun, we went to Yank Sing on Battery, which is wonderfully inventive. Spring is pea shoot and asparagus season so we had dumplings stuffed with pea shoots and asparagus stalks with black beans and scallions. They also had fried lobster balls, resembling shrimp toast, but with a wilder flavor.
For a quick snack, we'll recommend Mara's Italian Pastry on Columbus which has great coffee and great gelati. Our favorite flavors were the coffee almond and the white pistachio.
We'll also mention the Mountain Home Inn on Panoramic Highway near Muir Woods. You can hike here from Muir Woods or use the lot across the way for your assault on Mount Tamalpais. It is a great place for a snack or meal, but watch it or you might spend the rest of the day enjoying the view from their deck rather than hiking.
HawaiiOur favorite Hawaiian Island is the big island which is kind of like two islands in one. There is the wild, rainy, outdoorsy east around Hilo and Volcanos National Park and the placid, sunny, arid west with its resort hotels set as oases in a desert of volcanic rubble. Maui has a similar split personality with its quasi-Californian Kula highlands and Haleakala crater, but eastern Hawaii covers more ground.
We stay and dine at the Kilauea Lodge which was founded by the
guy who did makeup for Magnum P.I. and his wife. (Really!) It is down home
Hawaiian funky and very comfortable and the cooking is great. Every morning
we stoked up on French toast made with taro, guava and Portuguese sweet
bread and every evening, we'd stagger out of a lava tube or crater and back
to the lodge for dinner.
The first order of business at Kilauea Lodge is the soup. They serve fantastic soups made with rich, aromatic stocks. We always have the soup, this trip they were split pea, Alsatian vegetable, Portuguese red bean soup and his signature duck soup. Since we were in Hawaii, we planned to order fish, but the lodge serves great game and meat, and it was cold and rainy, and we had just been spit roasted by Pele herself, so it was antelope steaks (out of this world), hassenpfeffer (bunny in red wine), osso buco with carroway cabbage, and a lamb rib rack. On our last day, we broke down and tried the scrumptious ono picatta.
Then we drove around to the other side of the island. We stayed at the
Orchid at Mauna Lani. Our last stay was at the Mauna Lani
and we'll recommend both hotels highly. We decided to try the Orchid because
Best Places to Kiss gives it one more kiss than the Mauna Lani and also
because the Orchid gives Sheraton/Starwood points. In the good old days,
the Mauna Lani was the king's hide away with fish ponds and pleasure pavilions
carved out of the rock strewn volcanic coastal region. Now, even commoners
can get in and enjoy the place. The fish ponds and some pavilions are still
here (and open to the public) for historical interest and there is also
a veritable trove of petroglyphs in a kiawe grove at the north edge
of the complex.
As for food, Brown's Beach House, was number one on site. Here we ate fish, starting with a soft shell crab crusted with macadamia nuts and a lobster or a potato and jicama taco. We fell in love with the opakapaka (pink snapper) crusted with crab served on a black rice risotto. Black rice is slightly sweet and has big starchy kernels so it really soaked up and set off the sea food on top of it. We also loved the grilled ahi tuna with wasabi mashed potatoes, and not shy on the wasabi either. The desserts were good, but then, we are not big dessert people.
We also tried The Grill, a more formal restaurant, but this was no ordinary meal. This was a Passover seder, a meeting of the Kahanes (traditional Jewish priests) and the Kahunas (traditional Hawaiian priests). We sort of expected one of those Christmas in Rangoon sort of things, but Passover, as one might expect for a holiday celebrating a flight from slavery, packs better. The hotel team rose to the occaision with a great seder plate, an extra glass for Elijah (still a no show), and somehow they kept the matzoh crisp in the tropics. We ordered off the regular menu and celebrated the season with a canneloni of duck confit, rack of lamb and opakapaka with prawns. We topped off the meal with a can of those chocolate macaroons - our sole import for the feast.
A former chef at The Grill has opened a new place called Oodles of
Noodles in a shopping center down in Kilua-Kona. Shopping mall restaurants
can be a mixed bag. The Cap'n Argo's Inedibles of the world have given them
a bad rap and if you poke around you can find gems. This is one of them.
We started with a bento box full of dim sun (shui mai, har gow and lobster
and sticky rice, all with rich sticky skins), spring rolls (fried) and summer
rolls (steamed). We also had the fried squid in a noodle basket. The seared
ahi tuna casserole with onion rings was a magnificent take on the old Kraft
standby, but even better was the Peking duck oriental risotto, full of mushrooms
and star anise. We barely got to scratch at the gigantic menu which includes
a good collection of vegetarian and vegan items. All told, this is a rave.
Everything we did have was great and we are eager for a return match.
We only managed to get up to Merriman's for lunch. It is up in
Waimea, Hawaiian cattle country, and worth at least a stop as you are crossing
the island. We went to town with oriental fried noodles with a mix of spring
vegetables, Tahitian poisson cru (raw fish), corn and shrimp fritters, quesadillas
with pork and goat cheese and seared ahi tuna with pickled ginger and corn.
There is an Asian influence, a Polynesian influence, some of the new world
and some of the old. That makes Merriman's very Hawaiian and their concentration
on fresh, seasonal ingredients makes their food delicious.
Across the street from Merriman's is a wonderful art and gift shop called
the Gallery of Great Things. It sells stuff: paintings, antique maps and
photos, carvings, shells, fountains, woven fans in a broad range of prices.
This is a great place to rummage around when you have no idea of what you
want or you really need to get someone a present that yells HAWAII!
Our schedule didn't let us get to Kona Village Luau, which we still think is the best on the island, so we went to the Mauna Kea Luau instead. The Mauna Kea, originally a Rock Resort, exudes peace and calm. It rises with the strength of a Mayan temple from a lapping sea of green foliage. We could even feel our blood pressure dropping as they explained that they had lost our reservations. But no matter, we had a great table and enjoyed the show and the buffet. The imu pig was great, but the real hit was the chicken cooked with taro leaves. They also had imu turkey, cooked on hot stones in the same underground pit as the pig. By the time dessert came around, all we had room for were the excellent lemon cake and the guava filled macaroons.
If you have ever flown to one of the out islands via Honolulu, you have most likely wondered what to do with the two or three hours stopover. You could ride the Wiki Wiki bus or watch the agricultural inspectors checking people's bags, or you could take a ten to fifteen minute cab ride over to Sam Choy's Breakfast, Lunch and Crab right on the Nimitz Expressway. This is a barn like place with indoor neon, a concrete mounted marlin cruiser and a bright, bustling ambience that fairly screams "aloha". They serve three meals a day as the name implies and this includes lau lau (taro leaves and pork shank wrapped in big green ti leaves), fried oysters, soft shelled crabs, a seared ahi salad with crispy noodles. They have a broad array of sea food, steaks, beers (Sam Choy runs a brewery) and a perky, efficient staff. We do advise calling for reservations, as they are a popular place, but it sure beats checking out the tee shirts at HNL.
