Hawaii Travelogue: Eating Healthy in Honolulu

I planned to write about fitness and my attempt at exercising while in Honolulu this week, but I actually found it more difficult to stay on my healthy eating plan than finding time to exercise.  So, I’m changing it up and sharing my eating experiences of the last seven days.

If you’re not familiar with the way people eat lunch in Hawaii, let me give you a rundown in pictures.

Notice anything special?  Maybe a couple scoops of white rice and another scoop of macaroni salad?  That is very typical of a plate lunch in Honolulu.  You might be able to substitute a tossed salad in place of the mac salad, but it’s usually just chopped iceberg lettuce, shredded carrots and red cabbage tossed with some Thousand Island dressing.  This is what I was up against.  In a city where Asian Americans make the majority of the population, rice or noodles are present at every meal. Carbohydrates were haunting me at every turn.

I can tell you I gave in to some temptation almost every day, but also tried to make good choices every day, as well.  For example, the day my sister and I had dinner with some of my cousins (all men), we all met at the huge shopping mall near Waikiki, called the Ala Moana Center.  It’s three levels and has six different wings.  You, literally, need a map to find your way around.  For someone who is not a window shopper (that would be me), it was almost nightmarish. Anyway…back to the food.

We decided to meet everyone at the food court in the center of the mall.  With at least thirty fast food options, I essentially decided I’d be eating junk food.  Believe it or not, I had one of the healthier meals in that crazy mall food court.  I ended up at a stand that had the smallest menu but still favored the plate lunch style.  You could choose from a small variety of roasted meats; prime rib, roast beef, roasted turkey, leg of lamb or oven roasted corned beef.  Choose two sides (predictably the most popular being rice and macaroni salad.  I chose roasted turkey with two sides of tossed green salad with ranch dressing.

My cousin who graciously put up with my sister and I invading her home has her own healthy eating regimen. After discussing food one evening, she shared with me a few places around Honolulu that she recommended for healthy lunch options.  Right off the bat, I’ll tell you they were surprising, had delicious offerings and were rather fun to try out.

Let’s start with the Peace Café near downtown Honolulu. 

It’s an unassuming location and you could easily miss it if you weren’t specifically looking for it.  It sits between a larger Thai restaurant on a corner and a Rastafarian styled smoke shop.  In a sentence, the ambience resembles a 1970’s health food restaurant plopped in the middle of Hawaii.  With chalkboard menus, communal tables, self table bussing, and servers with the requisite bohemian clothing, nothing says “Hawaii” except for the addition of some tropical or Asian ingredients.  Like the banana-mango mochi dessert.

We wanted to try a variety of dishes, so we started with my cousin’s recommendation of Moroccan Stew

starring chick peas, pickled veggies and brown rice. This was a flavorful dish full of cinnamon and other spices of northern Africa. We also ordered the Hanoi sandwich which was definitely full of the Vietnamese Ban Minh flavors that you might expect.  Fresh crunchy veggies, tofu and a wonderful peanut sauce make this a satisfying sandwich on fresh ciabatta bread instead of a traditional French baguette.

We enjoyed these two items so much we decided to try a few others. We opted for the Soy Soba Salad and two of the mochi desserts (a banana-mango mochi and a coffee-chocolate mochi). The soba salad was refreshingly cold with crunchy veggie, alfalfa sprouts, shreds of nori, and a slightly spicy tamari-miso based dressing.  The desserts had the typical gooey-chewy consistency for which the traditional Japanese sweet is known, but didn’t taste like any mochi I’ve eaten before.  Both were full of their respective flavors, but the coffee-chocolate mocha dessert was clearly my favorite.

 

By the way, did I mention that Peace Café is strictly a vegan restaurant?  Not somewhere I’d typically take the meat lovers in my circle, but my sister was game and easily volunteered for the food adventure.

Our second foray into the healthy food lunch scene in Honolulu took us to Greens & Vines.  On the ground floor of a condo high rise, this is another restaurant you would drive right past if you weren’t specifically looking for it.  Not only is Greens & Vines another vegan restaurant, it goes another step further.  It’s a RAW vegan restaurant.  Essentially, this restaurant serves a plant based menu and none of the offerings are cooked.  Some are dehydrated, but nothing is ever cooked.  As with the Peace Café, Greens & Vines was a wonderfully delicious surprise.

We started with the Not Tuna on Onion Bread; a delicious scoop of Not Tuna salad on a lettuce leaf atop a piece of onion bread made from sunflower seeds, brown flax, onions, olive oil and some gluten free tamari.  Interestingly I think this simple appetizer was my second favorite of the day.

Next we tried both cold soups on the menu, a Lemony Zucchini Bisque and a French Onion.  Between the two of us, we agree that the bisque was the winner in both flavor and texture.

For our entrees, we again, went with my cousin’s recommendation for the Living Lasagna and the Kaffir Miso Pad Thai suggested by our lovely waitress/hostess.  I’m not even going to show you the pad thai.  For some reason there was a bitterness to it that put me off.  I will, however, showcase the visually stunning and extremely tasty lasagna.  BEHOLD!!

The noodles are thinly sliced zucchini.  There is a fresh basil pesto, a sun-dried marinara, and an amazing macadamia nut “ricotta” cheese.  TO DIE FOR!

We ended lunch trying the Wicked Chocolate Tart and the special “cheese cake” of the day; the red dragon fruit, green tea, and mango layers.  Being the chocolate fiend that I am, my vote went to the amazing tart.

So, with the help of my cousin, we found that Honolulu can provide a healthy option to the traditional plate lunch; even in the busy center of a touristy shopping mall’s food court. We’ll continue our healthy food adventure as we travel to the Big Island and visit more family in Hilo, and possibly make a trip to the other side of the island to Kailua-Kona.

Hopefully some surprises await us there!  ALOHA!

Until next time…