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.