Back home in Lahaina

I’ve been here many times but I don’t think I’ve blogged about it yet. Sometimes I get a crazy Hawaiian food craving, and this is our restaurant of choice to satisfy that craving. The restaurant is hard to see from the street, as the entrance faces the back and not street front, but upon entrance, it’s quite festively decorated, taking the Hawaiian theme to heart, with fake foliage, vines and even a fake tree in the middle of the dining room.

I can’t help myself, when there’s Spam musubi, I order it…

Okay, my view on Spam- well, it’s not so bad. My mom and dad used to fry up thin slices of it, and then put sugar on them (because they felt like Spam was way too salty, which it is…but the addition of granulated sugar on top is not a great addition). We’d have this with rice, so this is not that much removed from spam musubi. I admit the Spam slime (the gooey slimy gelatin that encases the Spam in the can) is the most unpleasant part, and would deter most people upon experiencing “Spam in the raw”. Upon opening the can, I would suggest immediately rinsing and blotting the gelatin away, as it does not add or detract from the overall experience, and slicing it up and frying it to get a good crust on it.

Back to the spam musubi, they do a decent one, with a bit of teriyaki and green onion chopped on top. Nice little snacky appetizers to start the meal.

Plate lunch is very popular in Hawaii (from what I remember when I went in, ah, 8th grade!) so they have something similar with their lunch specials, choose one or two chicken or beef or pork, each plate comes with their ramen salad, rice and a scoop of mac salad. Here are the variations that we ordered:


Julian got the lahaina fried chicken and upgraded his rice to bacon fried rice. Almost all food is better when you add bacon. I think the lahaina fried chicken is the thing to get here, the marinade for the chicken is sweet, fried perfectly with fried crunchy bits all over it. The ramen salad is interesting - straight from the package ramen, crumpled up over thinly sliced cabbage, green onion and a tangy dressing. The mac salad is a nice texture contrast, very creamy and overwhelmingly ginger flavored, that's the only thing that I don't really like about their mac salad, how strongly the ginger taste is. The sauce was a teriyaki sauce, but I don't use much of it myself, I usually douse my plate with siracha sauce.

My plate lunch combo was very similar, lahaina fried chicken, BBQ Hawaiian chicken, plain white rice, ramen salad and that scoop of mac salad. Whenever I'm here, I'm quite drawn to this order, but I've gotten variations on this before - I think last time I ended up switching out my ramen salad for gyoza (very freshly fried!), and sometimes I get chicken long rice on the side (not pictured, but think, salty chicken noodle soup with rice noodle instead of thick pasta noodle, with a lot of green onions). I've also had their salmon, which was decent as well.

Also, on another visit, I've tried their premium Hawaiian ice cream. Owen couldn't help himself when he saw that they offered a chocolate, coconut and macadamia nut ice cream. (not pictured.) The generous scoop more than satisfied his cravings, the coconut made the whole scoop very rich, and the macadamia nuts were fun to crunch into. I didn't have much at all, since I'm not really a fan of chocolate ice cream (I know, it's a thing...), but if I did like it, I would choose this one.

This place is one of our favorites and we usually have excellent service. Highly recommended!

Back Home in Lahaina
916 N Sepulveda Blvd, Manhattan Beach, Los Angeles, California
http://www.backhomeinlahaina.com
310-374-0111

Dynasty Chinese Restaurant

Judy's bridal shower was at Dynasty Seafood restaurant, mainly because us bridesmaids were planning this on the fly, and wanted to choose somewhere where they'd have a private room. I tease about the name of this place, as I call it "Dy-NASTY", but it's actually okay, a bit more upscale than the usual Chinese restaurant. Anna had wanted to get dim sum, but it ended up being a banquet type meal, because we were required to spend a certain amount of money to have the private room. Ah, well, at least we get to grub on banquet food that I don't get to have very often...

First up was a cold appetizer platter with, starting from the right - seaweed salad, cold cut pork, jellyfish, another kind of cold sliced pork, and in the middle, little red squiddie things. Jellyfish is something I haven't had in ages, so it was a nice treat. Seaweed salad was good too.

Seafood soup was up next, or was it sharks' fin? Or fake shark's fin? Anyways, it was tasty and seafoody, with soft tofu and those Chinese button cap mushrooms from a can. Yum.

Everyone's favorite banquet food, Honey Walnut Shrimp. This was a pretty well done version of it, even though it looks drenched in mayo it was not too bad. I like the candied sesamed walnuts a lot too.

This tender beef dish was a surprising win, I usually don't like the way they make beef dishes in these Chinese banquets, but this was really delicious. With a bit of rice, this was amazing. I would order this again, for sure.

This combination veggie meat seafood dish contained sugar snap peas, thinly sliced white chicken breast meat, squid slices, carrot and mushroom slices, all cooked together in a light starchy sauce. Pretty standard banquet dish, decently done, the squid was nice and springy, and I like any form of sugar snap peas. Solid dish.

This dish was fried fish filets with spicy salt. Pretty tasty, I really liked the spicy salt on this one, and the fish filets were yummy and free of any bones. I guess you could call them Fish McNuggets, as they were cut into bite size pieces.

Chinese style Fried chicken, all chopped up and ready to be attacked by chopsticks. This was pretty good, actually one of the better fried chicken I've had in awhile, with nice and crispy skin, and moist chicken meat. Wish this was in front of me right now.

One of the more decadent dishes of the banquet was Lobster, chopped up and cooked Chinese style, with scallions and ginger. It was good but not very many people ate it, as at this point, we were all getting pretty full (there were only 8 of us, eating a banquet made for 10.) I ended up bringing home a bunch of this for my parents as leftovers, which I think they appreciated. Look at those little lobster eyes staring back at me as I eat it! I think that makes the lobster taste even better, haha...

A mountain of fried rice, with shrimp, charshu pork pieces, scallons and egg. Tasty, but again at this point, we were getting a bit too stuffed.

This is the cake that I had bought from La Patisserie, one of the best bakeries in the world, in my opinion. Their cakes are consistently moist, super tasty and classically pretty. My mom picked this one out - I think it was their Black Magic cake - Chocolate cake, truffle and chocolate chip fudge fillings, iced with fudge and ganache. Can there be any more chocolate on one cake?? This was super delicious, and I usually don't really like sweets. It's that good. Funny story about the personalization part - so I asked for them to write, "Happy Bridal Shower Judy" on it, and when the lady first did it, and showed it to me - it said, "Happy BRIDLE shower Judy" on it...and I had to ask her to redo it...and she had to ask someone else how to spell "Bridal". Nice!!

Anyway, I think everyone had a good time and enjoyed the food, and DyNasty was actually very good to us - but I don't think I could ever stop calling it DyNasty, it's just too much fun.

Dynasty Seafood Restaurant
10123 N Wolfe Rd
Cupertino, CA 95014
(408) 996-1680

Korean Food Mart (Koreatown Plaza)

Our lunchtime adventures at work have expanded their radius all the way to Korea town! One of our favorite places to go for lunch is in this Korean food mall, within Koreatown Plaza, because of the variety and quality...I'll just go over some of the usual things everyone gets...

This is the dumpling and soup combination at Chew Young Roo. They make fresh dumplings/baos here, right in front of your eyes. From the left - King Dumpling, Red Bean dumpling, and then 2 shrimp dumplings (warning: they're pretty spicy!) This combo also comes with a brothy soup. I've never gotten this combo so I can't tell you what the soup tastes like but it looks like miso soup.

The King Dumplings (in one order, you get 4 of them for 6 dollars) is something that we usually order then share as a group. They're really good- fresh, bursting with meat and veggies, and great with a little bit of soy sauce drizzled in over them before taking a big bite.

Here's what I've gotten a few times - cold noodles and kalbi ribs combo. This is a combination that is the best of all worlds - delicious meat and onions on a sizzling plate, contrasted with cold noodles, which are extremely refreshing. I like the addition of the half egg as well. With a side of kimchi and sliced radish, this is a filling meal but the noodles are pretty light. Highly recommended.

Right outside the foodcourt, there's a Kyedong Fried Chicken. This is a box containing a "whole fried chicken", chopped up into pieces.

I just like the picture of Chef Kyedong...he seems so proud of his chicken.

And here it is, the reveal of what's inside the box...they really chopped up the whole chicken, into little bits even. It also comes with radishes, a common accompaniment to Korean Fried chicken.

Here's the delicious close up. The taste of the fried chicken is surprisingly sweet - after frying, they poured some sort of glaze on it, which was an interesting taste combination. It was like eating candied fried chicken. Pleasant, but not necessarily my bag. I think I prefer a spicier coating or plain, but this was still pretty tasty. My favorite pieces were the drumsticks, of course.

Koreatown Plaza really feels like a transplanted part of Korea in LA. They even have a grocery store, selling meats of all kinds that I will indulge in someday. Oh, they also have really good melon and mango popsicles - I can find them nowhere else.

Koreatown Plaza
928 S. Western Avenue
Los Angeles, CA

Cynthia's Restaurant

Meeting up with some old coworkers from the 'flix, we decided to meet in a halfway point between our two workplaces. Jane suggested Cynthia's restaurant, known for their comfort food. I trekked down the street for an early lunch - it's not too far but it's a solid 20 minute walk...

It wasn't too hard to find them - they were the only ones in the restaurant! I guess we really did take an early lunch...

After a quick look at the menu, I quickly made my choice. The waiter was kinda...weird. A little forward. I don't really know how to describe it, he was really forward and left an awkward feeling. Well, that didn't change the quality of the food, so here goes...

Jane and I got mini sliders with fries. Each of the patties were different - turkey, angus and kobe. I couldn't taste the difference between the angus and the kobe one - I think Kobe beef is really like any other beef when it's in burger form. The turkey one was a little dry and needed a lot of dips into the ketchup. Overall, pretty decent but I've had better burgers in my life.

Peter's chopped salad - he's trying to eat better, and this was a great step in that direction. I felt a bit guilty eating mini burgers in front of him. He mentioned that the salad was quite good though, so I guess I shouldn't feel so bad.

Erika got what the restaurant was known for - their fried chicken, with a side of fries and salad. This is a pretty upscale chicken plate! Maybe it's because I don't usually have salad with a bunch of fried chicken...maybe I should more, to make up for eating the fried chicken! In any case, Erika seemed to like this.

To get the full effect of "comfort food", we got a dessert of bread pudding for the table. This was probably the most mediocre bread pudding I've had. Nothing special. I didn't have very much of it - too sugary without having a good taste. Oh well.

It was great to see my former co-workers, but I had an issue with Cynthia's later - I found out that they had charged me twice for my credit card! I called the restaurant, which reassured me that the charge would be taken off (an issue with their credit card company, I think, because a whole bunch of people had the same problem.) Not their fault, but definitely a hassle. It was kind of pricey, too, but it was to be expected because it was on trendy 3rd street on the expensive Beverly Hills City Limits. It was okay but I don't see myself going back here very often.