Sweet E's Cafe and The Alley

Sweet E's Cafe

So Thursday's lunch took me on a trip to Sweet E's Cafe at the Kilohana Square off of Kapahulu.  We had originally planned to go to Mr. Ojisan but as we pulled in to the parking lot I remembered that Sweet E's had been strongly recommended to me by Ms. F3 so we changed our plans and pulled in for a bite.  At first glance Sweet E's looks like a small hole in the wall until you step thru their front door.  The darn place is actually quite big inside as they look like they've taken out a wall to an adjoining spot and extended their dining room a bit. 

Sweet E's is a breakfast and brunch place but they do have a few lunch items on their menu.  CW#1 chose to eat the blue berry pancakes with a side order of extra crispy bacon.   The pancakes were pretty huge but the center one was overcooked and dry.  They were filled with blueberries and tasted pretty good but were way too large for any normal person to eat.






I chose the pesto club sandwich.  I really wasn't in the mood for a lunch time breakfast so I decided to try out one of the few lunch items they had.  A club sandwich sounded good and, being the good boy that I am, I opted for the tossed green salad instead of the chips.   The sandwich as a whole wasn't bad.  I don't care for pesto in any form but the pesto aioli in this sandwich wasn't bad at all.  It wasn't strong and over powering as some pestos tend to be but there was enough flavor to make the sandwich enjoyable for even me.



The one problem I did have with the sandwich was the avocado.  It was BROWN and not slightly brown, it was brown all the way thru.  If you look it up, research has found that it takes 4-6 hours for an avocado to start to brown.  It tasted fine but it was really hell to look at on my plate as I was trying to eat it.  Umm....  ice water and a little lemon juice???  That's all it would take to keep it from browning if  you need to cut them that early in the morning.  Or just cut them to order with the sandwich.  Why does it have to be so hard.  And chefs, if you see a brown thing in your avocado bin... chuck it out.  AVOCADOS ARE GREEN AND YELLOW NOT BROWN!!!


Oh and for the salad, that was pretty good if you didn't mind the dressing.  It reminded me of a bottle of Girards Champagne Dressing if you poured it out into a serving dish without shaking it.  Lots of oil and not much taste.  If you don't believe me, go buy yourself a bottle and pour out the top 1/4 of the bottle without shaking it.  Almost the exact same taste as what I got as dressing for my salad.


As for me, I will be going back to Sweet E's, hopefully with a crowd.  The stuffed french toast looks wonderful but I'd need an army with me to help me finish the serving size.



The Alley @ Aiea Bowl


On Friday we decided to hit The Alley at Aiea Bowl for lunch.  My wife had been there for a work get together before but it was my first time.  I had heard about the oxtail soup there so I decided to try it.  The Alley is interesting because the owners there are trying to do some upscale type food in a bowling alley setting.  I'm not so sure if I like this idea.  It's a bowling alley people, let's not try to be too fancy here.  The first thing we got was our order of the Mega Crunch Fries.  They're shoe string cut and extremely crispy.  Ours could have used some better seasoning because they were hard to eat without smothering in ketchup.  For those of you who've eaten a bunch of McD's ffs while driving in your car, you can understand what I mean about enough seasoning to eat without the use of extra condiments. 

A short time later my order of oxtail soup arrived.  The oxtail is in a dark brown broth and comes with rice, ginger and cilantro and a ponzu/chili dipping sauce.  I'm a ginger and shoyu type of guy so I tasted the ponzu and sent it on it way, not because it tasted bad, it would have been great on a fish fillet, but because it would take away from the taste of what I was there to eat, OXTAIL. 




 

So at first glance I noticed something very interesting about my oxtail soup...  HOLY SHITake! There were whole shitake mushrooms in my soup.  Not a few of em, 7 of em to be exact.  Considering I had about the same amount of pieces of oxtail I was very disappointed.  They should call it Oxtail/Shitake soup if this is the normal portion because I would have preferred a lot more oxtail and a lot less shitake in my soup.  The other thing I would have liked was more greens.  There was a few pieces of choy sum in the bowl along with a small sprinkling of green onions and cilantro but not enough for my tastes.  BTW, choy sum is nice but my favorite oxtail green is kai choy.  The bitter flavor is a good contrast to the soup and makes it more refreshing to eat.

Now back to the soup.  The soup was dark brown in color and rich to the taste.  It seemed a little over seasoned with things I wouldn't normally put into an oxtail soup, one of which would be shoyu.  I like a light and simple broth and this was well over seasoned for my taste, almost bordering on sweet.  It did have a few peanuts sitting at the bottom of the bowl but I would have liked to see a little piece of dried tangerine peel somewhere floating in my bowl.  This lead me to believe that the base of this soup was more of a fusion of two styles of oxtail soup, Chinese and Okinawan.  As for the meat, it was very tender and fell off the bone in more than one occasion.  Some of the smaller pieces were a little over cooked and had started to get past tender into the realm of mushy.  People, it's beef, you should have to chew at least a few times before swallowing.  I could have fed some of this to my 90 yr old aunt who has no teeth and she'd have no problem putting it down.

The last thing I always look at when eating oxtail soup is the oil slick that's left in the bowl after all the meat is gone.  It shows the care the chef has taken in preparing the meal.  If the slick is too thick then he hasn't skimmed the oil after the first boil.  If it has lots of fat chunks floating in it, he didn't scrub the meat to remove the fat after the first boil.  This soup had a little of both.  It wasn't the worst bowl of oxtail soup I've had but I certainly wasn't the best.  It just didn't fit the expectation I have for what oxtail soup should be.

My wife's plate was a mix of their kal bi and "Award winning" tasty chicken.  And yes, the chicken is tasty.  Probably one of the better things we ate that day.  It's fried crispy and then doused with a sweet shoyu sauce.  I had a bite and it sort of reminded me of a chicken I've had at Side Street a while ago.  A little on the sweet side but enough taste to permeate the chicken as you eat it. The kal bi was on the darker side but had a pretty good flavor to it.  The kal bi from Alonzo's at the Mililani Golf Course is just as dark but has a better overall flavor to it, and is more tender then the one we had at the Alley. 



I probably will be back to The Alley at some point.  It's not on my short list of places to eat but the food was promising enough for me to want to go back and try something different from their menu.  Parking and the noise from the bowling alley make it a little difficult to enjoy your meal thoroughly but I would give it another chance. 

Mini Garden and Kit N Kitchen

So back to the blogging...

MINI GARDEN

shredded chicken vegetable on crispy noodle

On Monday  my co-workers and I went out to lunch.  We chose Mini Garden on Beretania Street since it had been a while since most of us had been there.  Co-Worker #1 chose the shredded chicken and vegetables over crispy noodle, Co-Worker #2 and I decided to share a beef bitter melon black bean and a steamed sea bass with ginger and green onions.  CW1 received a huge plate of noodles smothered in shredded chicken and veggies.  The veggies were mostly beansprouts which was good because CW#1 doesn't like too many green things on her plate. 

Our dishes came to the table after CW#1 had started eating.  I had originally asked for pork bittermelon with black bean but we ended up with beef instead.  The beef was nice and tender and the black bean sauce was just right, not too salty and not very smelly at all.  The bittermelon were not very  bitter at all and was still slightly  crispy which is the way I prefer to eat it.  The steamed sea bass with ginger and green onion is one of my most favorite seafood dishes at a Chinese restaurant.  ***Yes, I do love the shellfish dishes too but I have GOUT so I do my best to stay away from them.*** 

steamed sea bass with ginger and green onion

For those of you who have had this dish, I have tried this at many different places around town.  The sauce at Mini Garden is a little on the sweet side unlike Asia Manoa which is more salty to taste.  I've had the dish at On On at McCully but prefer their sea bass with g&go gravy style so I don't order this there.  I've also had it at a few places in Chinatown but none were spectacular enough to talk about.

On a side note, I heard yesterday that the owner of Panda Cuisine on Keeaumoku has changed and the food isn't as good.   Anyone have any ideas if they've opened up shop somewhere else.  I did enjoy their food although I haven't been there in a few years.


PS... The food in the pictures were piping hot when I snapped the photos, thus the steam on the lens made it a bit blurry.


These last 3 pictures are from the last time I was at Mini Garden, about a year or so ago. 

soft gau gee cake noodle...

pork bittermelon black bean

honey garlic chicken

KIT N KITCHEN

creamy chicken and spinach spaghetti

Today CW#1 and I decided on a quick lunch down the road from work at Kit N Kitchen.  Kit N Kitchen was a frequent stop on my radar when I used to live in town but now I may get there about once every other month.  The good thing about starting this food blog is that I can go revisit restaurants that I've previously been to if only to get new pictures and re-sample a bunch of my faves.


CW#1 ordered the creamy chicken and spinach spaghetti.  It was a hefty portion and I'm not a big fan on cream sauces unless I make them myself so I decided not to take a bite.  Instead I opted for the grilled pork with chimichurri sauce and fried egg over the top.  I've eaten their chimichurri sauce many times before but this was a great batch.  I'm not sure if it was the bottom of the tub or if one of the chefs spilled some extra chili peppers into the sauce as they were preparing it but it was much hotter thank I had remembered and gave the sauce a much richer flavor and quite a kick.  For those of you who have never tried chimichurri sauce, it's from South America.  There are many different ways of making it but most inlcude... parsley, garlic, shallots, chili peppers and some type of sour citrus.  I personally make mine with a mix of flat leaf and Chinese parsley, shallots, chili peppers, lots of garlic and a mix of lemon and lime juices. 

grilled pork with chimichurri sauce and egg

The pork in the dish was very tender and complimented well by the sauce.  The rice is jasmine rice which I often have a craving for since I don't make it at home.  The egg on top of the rice was a little too over done for me as I wanted it to run all over my dish to create and added sauce to my pork and rice.  The plate also came with a little salad on it which is funny because the lunch special comes with a house salad that I had finished off just before they set my plate in front of me.  BTW, the house salad comes with carrot sticks, cucumber sticks and daikon radish sticks along with a miso/ginger dressing which is heavy on the ginger.  I like it but I love ginger...

With your entree you can also order their garlic pillow toast which we opted not to do this time because we were trying to stay on the healthier side.  I believe it cost under $3 and is a must have if you love garlic.  Again, I have pictures of it from a previous visit so you can see what it looks like.  I also have a picture of the sloppy eggplant which has to be one of my most favorite dishes at Kit N Kitchen.  I order it medium spicy just because I like a little heat in what I eat.  You can get it on a bed of spaghetti noodles or jasmine rice and it's under $10 for almost all of the lunch specials.  I also recommend the red wine oxtail soup and the sandy wing appetizer.  My wife also likes the spicy ground beef spaghetti with broccoli and will drink a pineapple squash whenever we get a chance to eat there.

sloppy eggplant (medium spicy)

garlic pillow toast

Ton Ton Ramen, Waipahu

Ton Ton Ramen - Waipahu

So after a week of trying to get to Ton Ton Ramen I finally made it.  Ton Ton is F3's favorite oxtail soup joint and  i can understand why.  The meat here is just as she put it, "fall off the bone" tender.

We arrived shortly before 11:45 and the place was mildly empty, kind of understandable for a holiday Monday.  There were 2 other tables that were taken up, one by a diner and the other by a couple waiting for their take out order.  The waitress sat us promptly but then forgot to bring us menus.  Once she realized her mistake she came over and blushed while trying to apologize for her mistake.

The tables and appearance of the restaurant seem to have run down over time as my daughter's high chair was covered in grease and had 2 screws missing from one side.  The tables were a little sticky to the touch and the atmosphere smelled a little like old cooking oil.  

6 piece gyoza

The menu is mainly ramen and sides.  There are a few udon dishes and a few with rice in various sizes.  Of course, I opted for the Oxtail Ramen while my wife got the Ton Ton Ramen (big bowl) and we got a mini mochiko chicken for my daughter.  We also ordered a 6 piece gyoza to round out the meal.  The waitress brought over water for all of us which went to waste because it tasted like their ice machine hadn't been cleaned recently.  The gyoza came out almost immediately as if they had expected us to order it.  It was pretty good, crispy on the bottom and tender on top.  The centers were juicy and flavorful.  I commented that it tasted like O-Tastee brand gyoza like you can buy at your local Don Quijote or Marukai but the cabbage on the inside was cut a little larger and the gyoza itself were not perfectly shaped leading me to believe that these were homemade.

A bite or two into our gyoza and our waitress was back with our ramen.  The oxtail ramen comes in a decent sized bowl with about 6 or so pieces of oxtail sitting on the top.  The soup, at first taste, was on the blander side with a medicinal aftertaste.  It is accompanied by a container of chopped ginger which you can add to your liking so I put in a healthy, heaping spoonful and added a swirl of shoyu and the soup was good to go.

 Oxtail Ramen

The soup is surprisingly light for as cloudy as it looked and taste like a good oxtail soup should once the ginger and shoyu are added.  The noodles are flat and curly and cooked just right to have enough texture and body to hold the soup as you slurp it up.  The broth was a little oily for my taste as it left a film on my mouth after I had finished it.  The meat was extremely tender and not too fatty and the cartilage and gristle were tender and very easy to eat.  I had two personal problems with the oxtail itself.  One was the fact that the larger pieces had been cut down into smaller pieces and I had nothing to really gnaw on after eating the meat.  The second was there was way too little of it...  I could have eating a second serving of just the meat!

I noticed in one of F3's pictures that she had just the oxtail soup with rice on the side.  I may have to see if I can do that on my next trip.  As for an oxtail ramen, this tasted like an oxtail soup with ramen noodles in it.  If I compared it to Ramen Nakamura's Oxtail ramen, Ramen Nakamura would have to be closer to a ramen as the broth is more of a traditional ramen broth with oxtails as the feature meat.  Comparing it to the oxtail saimin at Alonzo's @ the Mililani Golf Course, I think that Alonzo's is fuller in flavor as they combine the oxtail broth and saimin broth together in their soup.  Either way, Ton Ton has made it to repeat status whenever I'm down in the Waipahu area looking for some oxtail.

  My wife's Ton Ton was an adventure in itself.  It was fully loaded with all kinds of different things including chicken katsu, char siu, corn, wakame, kamaboko and egg.  The broth for the Ton Ton was a cross between a shoyu ramen and a miso ramen.  It was a little on the salty side but carried well on the noodles.  My wife usually will leave the bowl empty on a good ramen but said that it would have been too salty to finish the broth left in the bowl when she was done.

Ton Ton Ramen with katsu on the side

As for my daughter's mochiko chicken, the chicken was very flavorful and crispy.  The taste was similar to the mochiko chicken at Tanioka's down the street but crispier and cut into smaller pieces.  The mac salad seemed to be an afterthought for the owners of the restaurant.  The noodles were well over cooked and mushy and seemed to be unflavored and seasoned with just a cheap mayo as it was sweeter than your normal Best Foods mayo mac salad.

Mini-mochiko chicken plate

All in all it was a pretty good lunch.  I thoroughly enjoyed the oxtail itself although I would have to admit that each dish we ordered had at least one flaw to it  If I had to give a rating to the over all meal, I would have to hold back and say 3 1/2 stars to the meal with an asterisk of 5 stars for just the oxtail.  As you can see there was only bones left in my bowl when I was done with it.

All Pau!

Catching up...

I got scolded today by F3 about not keeping up with my blogging... so here goes...

Spicy Pork

Yesterday, after sitting in Waikiki for a conference in the earlier part of the week, I finally got back into the lunch routine with my co-workers.  We decided on Choi's Garden for some healthy Korean food.  I guess you could say that CG has become one of our monthly lunch hang outs since the food is pretty good and the service is quick and friendly.  Parking is relatively easy since there is a valet who will take your car for you if their lot is full.

Spicy Pork and sides

One co-worker decided to eat the stone pot bi bim bap while another decided we would share a yuk ke jang and spicy bbq pork between the two of us.  I usually flip between the multigrain stone pot rice combos and the cold noodles but spicy pork sounded good so I jumped on board.  The spicy pork was excellent with just enough heat and flavor not to overpower the taste of the pork.  It was served with Korean miso, raw garlic, jalepenos and lettuce leaves to wrap the pork in.  Sadly the sizzling platter it came on wasn't hot enough to finish cooking the garlic all the way through so the garlic was semi-raw and pungent.

Still CG is one of my top 3 favorite places to eat Korean food and I'll be going back again soon.

F3 doing her thing again

Today on the other hand was a experiment in gluttony with my new favorite foodie, the incomperable Miss F3.  We headed over to Young's Fish Market in search of the elusive butterfish laulau.  This was a task in itself as Dillingham Blvd was shut down due to some sort of accident and gas leak and traffic around Youngs turned into a beast of a jam. 

F3 taking pictures of food

Once we got there we were saddened to find out that they were out of the butterfish laulau and we had to settle for pork instead.  The laulau there are fairly huge but I was pleasantly surprised to find that my luau leaves were extremely tender and the flavors from the pork had seeped in without making the leaves over salty.

I also ordered ahi poke with limu kohu and, of course, turkey tails.  The ahi poke was okay but for the price, should have been mixed to order.  It lacked salt so I put a good helping of chili pepper water to give it some extra taste.  The turkey tails were hot and fresh and not very oily which was good since that meant that I could eat more before my viens clogged over with fat. 

My Plate

The laualu plate also came with poi and lomi which was ok in flavor but the lomi was short on salmon for my liking and the poi was too fresh and on the watery side. 

For those of you who are reading my blog without knowing about me, I'll give you a little background about some of my food experience.  I worked for many years at a Hawaiian food restaurant upon moving back to Oahu 16+ years ago.  I was the fish cutter and poke maker for many years and have developed many different types of poke over the years.  I am very critical of Hawaiian food as I can make most everything myself. I have and continue to do the catering of pupus for various weddings and events, which makes me very critical of the flavors and quality of foods I eat at restaurants.

That being said, I was happy to get my fill of some good Hawaiian food with the exceptional company of Miss F3.  It's probably been over a decade since we've seen each other and I hope it won't be that long before we get together again.  BTW, as for Hawaiian food... stay tuned to this bloggosphere to see some of my cooking and possibly a recipe or two in about 3 weeks as I will be making some Hawaiian food for a viewing party during Merrie Monarch week...

Serg's Mexican Kitchen - Manoa

Inspired by my friend, Fashionably Forward Foodie, I decided to start documenting my eating adventures.  My first stop on this journey was one of her recommendations, Serg's Mexican Kitchen in Manoa.  I pass this hole in a part-of-a-closed-down-gas-station fairly frequently, either on my way to the Manoa Marketplace, Andy's Sandwiches or when I eat right across the street at Asia Manoa...  I've never ever had the inkling to stop and try it out until reading about it in her blog the other night. 

Luckily for us, it happened to be a pretty cool and sunny day with the tradewinds blowing just enough to keep the heat down.  All of the seating at Serg's is out doors where the gas pumps used to be.  F3 had recommended the beef flauta in her blog but I opted for the pork carnitas with beans and rice.  What was set before me was better than I expected although not a perfect plate of food.  The carnitas were flavorful but a little on the drier side for me.  The rice was a little mushy and the beans were lacking a little salt but on the whole, not bad for being hidden 5 minutes from my work. 

Carnitas with rice and black beans...

*** rant mode on ***  One of my biggest peeves about Mexican restaurants is when they only serve pinto beans and no black beans for refried beans.  The other peeve is that some restaurants over process the beans so there is no semblance of a bean anywhere to be found on your plate.  *** rant mode off ***  Happily Serg's served black beans as their side... sadly they were over processed and looked like a slop of black paste tucked in a corner of the plate. 

There was one redeeming quality about Serg's that I found to be very tasty.  Along the counter Serg's has a variety of freshly made salsas which I had to sample.  I don't believe in mild salsas so I hit the three hottest to smother my carnitas in.  The avocado salsa was my favorite, followed by the spicy tomatillo and the chipotle-hot.  The avocado and tomatillo reminded me of my friends from Northern Mexico, heavy on the lime and cilantro.  As salsas they were very tasty but mixed together, they were wonderful.  

Co-Workers Beef Chimichanga

While I was sitting there trying to blog my experience I got a phone call.   Apparently the Blogger App for Droid doesn't save your work when you get phonecalls thus the lack of pictures and details about the food.  Luckily some of the photos were on my phone so I was able to upload them to this blog.  I promise the next blog will be better... I hope...