Hawaii Honeymoon Part III

Having been tiny people since birth, most of the hikes on Kauai would have depleted our caloric composition to below zero, so it was in our health's best interest to consume as many different kinds of food as possible. Besides the fact that seafood is present in almost every restaurant, there is no specific Kauai cuisine. There's only an interesting hodge podge of ethnic plates from sushi to tacos to burgers. Here are four of the more memorable restaurants we ate at while on the island:

Sheraton Resort: We ate all of our first week meals in the resort, at a restaurant called The Point, or another called Shells. The "Seafood Tinfoil" consisted of mussels, shrimp, ahi, and scallops cooked in a foil wrapper with vegetables. Though it came out looking like a failed Boy Scout camp dinner, it was delicious once unwrapped. On another night, I got the "Ahi Nachos", which came on a plate that was bigger than my ego. Take wontons and fry them into crispy chips, similar to the shrimp chips you might have in a Chinese restaurant, and then liberally douse them with cold ahi in a wine sauce.

Of course, the resort also had a breakfast buffet with fresh fruits, all-you-can-eat bacon, and a pancake bar with chocolate syrup as a topping. Even better was the fact that you could opt to skip housekeeping for a day to get a free ticket for the buffet.

Beach House Restaurant: The shtick at this restaurant is that they have a great view of the sunset, so if your partner is particularly ugly, you can face the sun and spend an evening blinded by the lights like Michael Geoffery Skinner. They also wait on you like royalty, handling refills and the smallest requests with alacrity. We started with a shared appetizer of sashimi, which I followed up with buttered sea scallops -- there's nothing better than a scallop cooked in butter, served in butter, with extra butter on top. In fact, I may still have some butter lodged under my tongue from this meal.

Kintaro's: This was a Japanese steak and sushi house right across the street from our condo in Kapa'a. In the picture on the right, we claimed the last two available seats at the sushi bar on the left side, where we got to watch the sushi chef effortlessly slice and dish meals for the entire restaurant while talking about scuba diving with one of the regulars at the bar. We sat next to a couple who had lived there for years, and tried to come to Kintaro's monthly, so they gave us recommendations on sushi choices. We ended up trying five or six different types, including a fried hand-roll which turned out to be similar to a sushi waffle cone. Scallop-based sushi is good, and low-grade sake is intense.

Hukilau Lanai: The restaurant was full when we got there, but the 45 minute wait shrank to a 0 minute wait when we simply sat down in Wally's Lounge and ordered from the roaming cocktail waitress. While we waited for our drinks from the five thousand page wine list, we were entertained by Wally himself, who sang Hawaiian sings and played the guitar, while his compatriot played the vibraphone and inserted unsually incorrect harmonies. Done with seafood by this point, I ordered the prime rib au jus, and was surprised by a massive whole steak cooked to rare perfection (had it been any larger, it would have lost its primality and become divisible by 2).

Are you hungry now?

To be continued someday...

Would-be ninja impaled on fence
What's in an unusual name?
2009 word of the year

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