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More grinds: da plate lunch

Last summer when Barack Obama was asked what he was going to do while on vacation with his family on Oahu, he said “I’m going to get a plate lunch.”

That response may have confused mainlanders, but everyone in Hawaii knew exactly what he was talking about. A plate lunch, for the uninitiated, is quintessential Hawaiian cuisine. It consists of two scoops white rice, one scoop macaroni salad (heavy on the mayonnaise), and a heap of protein—maybe some kalua pig or teri beef or katsu chicken. Basically anything that is cheap so you can get lots of it.

They say the genesis of the plate lunch was probably the bento box meals eaten out in the sugar cane and pineapple fields by Japanese, Chinese, and Filipinos back in the 1880s.

Zack Lee of Sugoi

Zack Lee of Sugoi

Supposedly Obama likes the plate lunches at Zippy’s and Rainbow Drive-In, two old-time flip-flop joints, but my favorite is Sugoi in Honolulu. Sugoi, which means “awesome” or “excellent,” was started by Zack Lee in 2000. 

“My wife, Sherry, used to be a hula dancer,” Zack told me, “and the Japanese tourists would yell, ‘Sugoi!” while watching her dance. That’s how we came up with the name.”

In keeping with the origins of the plate lunch, Sugoi started out specializing in bento box lunches—misoyaki butterfish, mahi mahi, salmon, ahi, as well as chicken. You can still order fish, but the thing to get, as far as I’m concerned, is the spicy garlic chicken plate lunch. It definitely gonna broke da mouth.

“It’s become our signature dish,” Lee says. “And you can’t get our garlic sauce anywhere else because we make our own. We call it ‘liquid love.’”

Which is curious because the flavor of the garlic chicken is so intense, you’re going to reek of it for days on end. So the only way you could consider it “liquid love” is if you brought your squeeze with you and they had the same thing. Udderwize, bruddah, bettah off getting da yakisoba noodles, okay? Kay den…

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