Maui, Hawaii Special – Da Kitchen Cafe

Da Kitchen was recommended to us that serves some good traditional Hawaiian dishes.  Hawaiian food seems to have its own unique mixture of different Asian cultures influencing its style.

There are 2 locations in Maui that we are aware of.  We went to the one near the airport on our final day just before our evening flight back home. 

We got here at about 6:30pm, and it was already packed with people waiting to get in. The restaurant was quite spacious with high ceilings.  It appeared most of the customers were locals, which was a good sign.

They had quite a lot to choose from on their menu.  Here is a sample:

We started off with the famous Hawaiian sushi known as spam musubi.  It’s a sushi with spam.  This is so popular that you can even find it served at convenience stores like ABC.

We didn’t try the one at ABC, but we are certain this one would taste a lot better. Unlike sushi, this one is served warm.  The spam felt like it was pan fried.  It came with some sweetened soy or teriyaki sauce.  It’s hard to tell the relative size of the musubi, but it is certainly extra large.  The spam complemented well with the sauce, rice and seaweed.  Da Kitchen also serves a fried version of this musubi. We saw many tables ordering the fried version too.

For the main, we ordered Loco Moco,which is another common dish you hear people talking about in Hawaii. 

Loco Moco is a hamburger steak served over rice with a sunny side up egg, onions and a gravy like sauce.  This was a rather large serving for one.  If we had known it was going to be so big, we would have just shared one dish instead of ordering 2 mains.  Anyway, the hamburger steak was cooked well-done.  The sauce was also nice to have for the load of rice you get.  However, the egg was way too runny.  Next time, we will ask for a cooked egg to avoid risk of food borne illness.

The other item we ordered was the SaiMin. We wondered what was a SaiMin, because we saw it on a McDonald's menu, but were afraid to order it.  We found out that this is a ramen type of soup noodle served with veggies, green onion and pork.

Again, this looks like  an extra large serving.  It had endless pieces of pork.  The pork is prepared similar to the Chinese style BBQ pork.  The noodles were quite chewy.  It’s similar to Japanese ramen, except this felt more like a whole grain type of noodle due to it’s chewiness.  The soup was a clear  broth and was not too salty at all.

We were quite full after our meal.  It was great that we had a chance to experience some popular traditional Hawaiian dishes here at Da Kitchen.  Servers here were quite friendly and the food came within reasonable time given that it was dinner time on a Friday evening..

SFDD gives 4 out of 5 Delights.