Sampling a Hawaiian Luau with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Rut Paget
My editor at The Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200,000) called me and said she would like my husband and me to go out on a date at Hula’s Hawaiian Restaurant, so I could do an article on that.
“Florence can go out some
other time,” she joked with me.
Blue lights outlined the bar
and colored lights framed the windows.
It is fun to be seen in this noisy, party-time restaurant that fascinates
children and adults alike with its Hawaiian – inspired décor.
My husband Laurent and I
began our meal by ordering some festive pupus or “appetizers’: surfrider sticks
and tiki torches.
The surfrider sticks, which
looked like surfboards sticking up in the sand, are chicken breast pieces
threaded on skewers and planted in a thick slice of roasted pineapple.
Both dipping sauces tasted
great. One was a slightly, sweet Thai
peanut sauce and the other was a mildly, salty soy-teriyaki sauce.
Six meaty miniature
drumsticks that came bathed in a spicy, sesame-hoisin sauce made up our tiki
torch dish. The hoisin sauce, molasses,
and Chinese hot sauce gave the chicken a luscious kick. The sour cream dipping sauce made the already
rich chicken very filling.
We drank one of Hula’s
eclectic beer choices with our appetizers: Longboard Lager produced by the Kona
Brewing Company in Hawaii. Co-owner D.
likes to offer out-of-the-ordinary items to make eating an exotic experience.
Co-owner D. proudly says that
Hula’s offers five choices of fresh fish nightly and that the restaurant never
uses farm-raised fish. He notes also
that Hula’s only offers fish selections that the Monterey Bay Aquarium lists as
existing in safe numbers for harvesting.
The four fish that show up on
the menu most of the time are ahi (a slightly, strong-flavored tuna with light,
pink flesh), ono (a sweet tuna with white flesh), mahi mahi (sweet-flavored
dolphin fish with white flesh), and hapu (delicately flavored sea bass, also
known as grouper with lean, white flesh).
Diners have a choice of how
they would like to have these fish prepared, including styles as diverse as
coconut-encrusted, Cajun, lemongrass-encrusted, pan-fried with onions,
macadamia-nut encrusted, or blackened.
For his dinner, Laurent chose
the wasabi fish with mahi mahi, which is one of the most popular items on the
menu. The mahi mahi arrived blackened on
a bed of pale, green wasabi mashed potatoes (made with Japanese horseradish).
The mashed potatoes were
delicious and the sweet flesh of the mahi mahi hardly needed the wasabi-cream
sauce, but it did taste good with it.
I ordered the luau pork plate
that came with coleslaw and rice.
Co-owner D. told me that in Hawaii, a pig for a luau would be roasted in
a pit for several hours. Hula’s does not
go to quite these lengths, but they do roast the pork for several hours with
teriyaki and molasses and add pineapple at the end for flavor.
The pork tasted almost like a
dessert except for the saltiness of the meat.
I wished I had not ordered appetizers, so I could have devoted my full
attention to the pork.
We drank a good wine with our
meal as a lark: the Maui Blanc. This
wine is made from pineapples and has a mild flavor and wonderful pineapple
bouquet. The pineapple wine went
extremely well with the sweet-fleshed mahi mahi and luau pork that we ate.
Co-owner D. says that it goes
well with most of the items on Hula’s menu.
The wine has been made for twenty years on Maui by Tedeschi Vineyards.
Co-owner D., who opened Hula’s
with his brother, lived on Maui for twenty years where he operated restaurants
after graduating from college.
When the two came to Monterey
seven years ago, they saw that there were no Hawaiian restaurants and decided
to fill the void.
His brother had the food
expertise as well as the eye for knick-knacks – he is the one who has gone to
garage sales to find things like the hula girl lamp stand which graces the
bar. The brother is the design man.
Together the brothers D. have
created a rollicking, good-time restaurant that evokes the aloha spirit on the
Monterey Peninsula.
End of Article
We did take Florence to
Hula’s after our date, and she loved it.
We had fun posing by all the fun decorations and doing hula dances. We all laughed about a dish called a “pupu”
platter.
By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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