Quick & easy lunch to make at home: spicy cold tofu

My current favorite quick lunch to make on the weekends:

- cold tofu (soft or firm)

- squirt of shoyu

- dollop of Lao Gan Ma sichuan chili sauce (preferably the crispy chili flavor with sichuan peppercorns)

- chopped green onions or cilantro

Place in bowl. Devour.

Dew Drop Inn (Northern Chinese)

You might have noticed that I eat a lot of Asian food on this blog: especially Korean, Vietnamese and Thai. But not a lot of Chinese food, even though I love it as well. There's a reason for that...I lived in China from 2001-2006 and 2008-2010, and after being spoiled for choice for amazingly delicious and varied Chinese food, I just can't eat at the regular Cantonese style restaurants here at home.

It's funny; when I first moved to China, all I craved was American style Chinese food. Picture lemon chicken, beef broccoli, and the like. There was one - literally one - restaurant in Shanghai that served it. I ca still picture it today by Xiangyang Lu: The Grape.

Luckily my tastes matured and I grew to love Chinese food - from sweet Shanghainese dishes, to cumin crusted Hunan ribs, to chili laden Sichuanese hot pot. I loved the variety, and that I could have a different provincial style every day of the week for every meal. Even for breakfast - I could have a Shanghainese treat of sticky rice wrapped around rou song (pork floss), you tiao (crispy fried dough) and pickled turnips. Or I could have a traditional Beijing style breakfast of a giant crepe, with an egg scrambled on top, wrapped around more you tiao (soft this time) and pickles, with lashings of plum and chili sauces.

Anyway, back to Hawaii. I don't really get excited about most of the restaurants here. (Ming's in Waikamilo is on my list to try - Nadine Kam says it's great Shanghainese. Any thoughts?) But I did want to try Dew Drop Inn which bills itself as Northern Chinese food...think dumplings and bing (bread) instead of rice.

It was packed on a Friday night.

Xiao long bao: Shanghainese (not northern) soup filled pork dumplings.

Mu shu pork with sesame bread pockets (like a crispy pita)

Cold tendon with cucumber and cilantro

Chili oil covered won tons

Ma po tofu (missing the sichuan peppercorns)

Verdict? They had a great range of dishes you don't usually see in Hawaii, but I am still going to have to keep looking...

Dew Drop Inn

1088 S Beretania St
Honolulu, HI 96814

(808) 526-9522
Yelp

Comfort food: 3 noodle soups

Panya niu rou mian / Goma Tei ramen / Asahi Grill
Noodle soup is my comfort food. I think it must stem from special Saturday lunches when I was growing up...my dad would make Sapporo Ichiban saimin instead of tuna sandwiches for all of us. It was a treat, since my mom thought saimin had too much fat (the fried noodles). He would throw in fishcake, green onions, whatever sort of leftover meat or green veggies were in the fridge.

Now my version that I make at home when I’m craving some comfort adds in spam, egg (dropped in raw, like egg drop soup), and chopped up baby bok choy. Plus lots and lots of sambal oelek (hot sauce with the green cap). Yum.

We are spoiled for choice when we go out to each in Hawaii for good noodle soups: Japanese ramen, Vietnamese pho, local Oxtail Soup, and the list goes on. My usual go to is pho - I like the lightness of the rice noodles and the cleanness of the broth. But I can also often be convinced to go for a heavier bun rieu at Golden River or the Bun Bo Hue at Bac Nam.

Some recent new noodles soups that I’ve tried are:

A) Taiwanese beef noodle soup at Panya (niu rou mian)
There aren’t a lot of lunch choices near my office in Kakaako, but luckily there is a Panya. I usually get the chopped chef salad and a bubble tea, but the niu rou mian there is exceptional. Big hunks of beef with tendon attached, and a spicy rich broth.

B) Dan dan ramen at Goma Tei
If you read the reviews on yelp, the Tan Tan ramen is the thing to try here. I haven’t tried the shoyu ramen, but I’m sure it’s great as well. I got the chicken version - which is served with plenty of slices of poached chicken breast on top of the massive mound of noodles and the thick, spicy broth.

Added bonus: you can add on a side of curry rice.

C) Oxtail soup at Asahi Grill
Asahi Grill is a funny little spot. It looked like an L&L type plate lunch spot from the outside, but when you’re seated inside and look at the menus, you realize that it’s Kapiolani Coffee Shop (or something like that) re-incarnated and you feel like you’re at a mom & pop Japanese restaurant from the 50s.

I went for the Oxtail soup, but was not that impressed. The broth was lacking to me that day - like it hadn’t been cooked long enough. My friend had the eggplant curry which was also a little strange to me - seemingly sweet?

 

Comes with rice; you can upgrade to fried rice.

OK, all of this talk makes me miss the amaze-balls (been dying to use that word) noodle soups from China. Every province had it's own completely different but totally delicious specialty. This is the fully loaded noodle soup from Guizhou (southern China) that you can find all over Shanghai for about a buck. Rice noodles in a pork (beef?) broth with a tea egg, tofu, some sort of meat, lots of tendon, and green onions.

Gratuitous Shanghai shot:



Panya
Couple of locations around, including Ala Moana Shopping Center and Queen St
Yelp

Goma Tei
Ward Center
Yelp

Asahi Grill
Ward Avenue

Yelp

Taiwanese hot pot in Hawaii: Sweet Home Cafe

Sweet Home Cafe

During the weekend of the crazy rainstorm at the beginning of December, when it was cold and gray outside, I was craving some Chinese hot pot (similar to Japanese shabu-shabu). Basically you pick your broth, they bring it out to you and pour it into the hot plate on your table. Then you pick your choice of raw meat and then go up to the fridge cases to pick out plates of raw veggies, fish cake, tofu and noodles. After the soup comes to a boil, you can just start dumping in meat, noodles, veggies etc, and pull them out as they get cooked.

One of the highlights at SHC are the dipping sauces. It was always my favorite part of hot pot in China, but SHC has taken it to a new level. I was used to maybe 8-10 different bowls of sauce ingredients (vinegar, hot sauce, sha cha, soy sauce, green onions etc) but SHC had 20 different items to choose from, including ginger sauce (like what you get on cold ginger chicken at a Chinese restaurant), garlic butter sauce (fusion!), and a white miso that our server recommended. You can choose to mix up a bunch in one bowl together (like I did) or enjoy them individually.

A final highlight of SHC: the complimentary shave ice (Taiwanese style) at the end. Taiwanese shave ice includes a large pile of shaved ice, topped with brown sugar syrup and condensed milk, and then with tapioca pearls, chocolate pudding, almond tofu, tapioca and these long orange chewy worms. YUM. Sugar overload!

Our meal for 3 (including leftovers) came out to about $35.

A couple of things to know: no reservations (write your name down on the clipboard outside when you arrive), BYOB, you must finish eating in 90 minutes.

Our broth "spicy"
Plates of oyster mushrooms, soft tofu, tofu knots, and gailan. Sliced beef in the front
My dipping sauce on the left, Taiwanese fish cake on the right (with corn inside)
Grand finale: bowl of shave ice
2334 S King St
947-3707 (no reservations)

taiwanese bubble tea: coffee or tea?

coffee or tea?

1960 Kapiolani Boulevard
McCully Shopping Center
Honolulu, HI 96826

(808) 942-4357
yelp

i visited coffee or tea today after reading a long list of very passionate reviews (both positive and negative) on yelp, including some saying that this was the best bubble tea in hawaii.

it's a cute little place in mcccully shopping center on the first floor, next to fantastic sams. they said the milk tea (with either tapioca, tea jello or one other chewy thing that i can't remember, $3.50) and the jasmine milk tea ($3.75) are their best sellers. i got a sample of the bubble milk tea and it was definitely good! the bubbles were perfectly chewy and not too hard.

i ordered a lilikoi green tea ($3.75) with tea jelly ($0.75). the drink is made of lilikoi syrup and green tea, no milk.

see the jelly at the bottom?? it's like jello, very bland though. just nice and chewy :) starbucks in china does a coffee jelly in the frappuccino during the summer, and that very clearly tastes like it's made from coffee, but this one was much more neutral.
you can also order the jelly or pudding by itself:

Dim Sum

Won Kee

100 N Beretania St Ste 106
Honolulu, HI 96817
(808) 524-6877

I haven’t had much dim sum in Hawaii in years, so when we decided to go for Sunday brunch dim sum in Chinatown, I had no idea where to go. After consulting with the parents and Yelp, I narrowed the choices down to two at Cultural Plaza: Won Kee and Lam Fook. Still undecided when we got there, we just picked Won Kee, since it was the first one we saw.

There were 3 of us for brunch, the perfect number for dim sum, since everything comes in orders of 3. Won Kee has the cart ladies, who push around steaming carts of dim sum in bamboo steamers and lift the lids off each type of dim sum as they walk past. Since I can speak mandarin, I ordered most of our dim sum by name, but it was fun also to see what they had available (they kept pushing this one order of seafood in a tofu wrapper on us, it kind of felt like it was the one order they couldn’t get rid of!)

Everything (except for the cha shao su/char siu soo, similar to ma tai soo) was delicious. The cha shao su was mushy (instead of flaky) and had a very congealed (too much cornstarch?) filling.

Char Siu Look Fun

Char Siu Soo

Pineapple Buns

Xia Jiao (har gau?)

Char siu bao and spinach dumplings (bo cai jiao)

Dim sum cart

Happy Garden Dim Sum

So this is a pretty new dim sum place in Chinatown, on Maunakea close to Hotel St. It's a tiny hole-in-the-wall (literally 10 tables) but is run by a bunch of Canto speakers and seems fairly authentic. I haven't eaten dim sum in Hawaii in ages, so I can't compare it to anything, but it seemed like they offered several dim sum outside of the standards, and also had a table in the back where they would fry up the luo bo gao (turnip cake) as an exhibition. No carts, but a steamer table in the window, right in the front of the restaurant, where you can point to the dim sum that you want, or you could order the dim sum off the menu.

Limited selection of dishes & noodles/fried rice aside from the dim sum. Dim sum plates are $2, look fun was $2.88, and our chicken chow mein was $5.50. The dim sum we had were all very good (including one interesting pork-peanut dumpling)...a good find to get your cheap dim sum fix in Chinatown, if you aren''t looking for anything fancy.

Steamer tables in the front window

Boneless chicken chow mein (crispy)

Tofu skin stuffed with meat & bean sprouts

Half moon (chive) and peanut-pork dumplings

Sticky rice with chicken wrapped in lotus leaves

Char siu bao

Review: Maple Garden

Maple Garden
909 Isenberg St near King St


I had high hopes for Maple Garden, because I'd heard it is the best place for Northern & Sichuanese Chinese food in Hawaii (the fact that they claim to specialize in both of those is a warning right off the bat, because no restaurant in China serves both of those cuisines).

Front: mongolian beef, spicy eggplant
Back: mapo tofu, crab soup


I called in and placed an order in Mandarin, hoping that if I spoke Chinese they would pay special attention to my order and make it more 'authentic.' We ordered yu xiang qie xi (fish sauce eggplant), mapo tofu, meng gu niu rou (mongolian beef), and xie fen dou fu gen (crab & tofu soup). (total for the 4 dishes: $35)

The mapo tofu was the best of the bunch, although it didn't have ANY ma jiao (sichuan peppercorns, the black ones that numb your tongue) which is the best part of the dish. The other dishes were just ok; if they were served in China, I don't think the restaurant would have any business, because they were just average.

Oh well, I don't think I'm going to find any satisfactory Chinese food in Hawaii after 5 years in China. Moral of the story is: I should've learned to cook when I lived in Shanghai!!

Review: Royal Kitchen (dim sum)

Royal Kitchen
100 N Beretania St #175

We have 2 places in Chinatown we go to pick-up dim sum: Char Hung Sut and Royal Kitchen. Char Hung Sut is just the basics, but they're stood up over the test of time: steamed char siu bao, pork hash, ma tai soo, and chow fun. Royal Kitchen has more options: char siu bao (steamed or baked), lup cheong, coconut, azuki bean, or curry bao.

I had a baked char siu bao (eh, not very impressed, the bread was a little dry), this excellent sticky rice (with veggies in it and wrapped in a dumpling wrapper), and a white rice cake. Total $2.50.