Kona Eats

Those who know me know I love to travel and that most of my travel revolves around eating and food, so I cannot think of a better first post than to writer about my recent trip to Hawaii and the food adventures that ensued.

I just spent a week with my husband, Colin, and his family on the island of Kona, the “big island” in Hawaii. A few months before heading to Hawaii I was researching on-line for coffee joints to visit on a trip to Seattle and accidentally stumbled upon a highly spoke of coffee shop in Kona called  Daylight Mind Coffee Company.  With the trip to Hawaii just a little ways away I stuck that bit info in my pocket and soon after arriving in Kona, while the rest of the family slept in, I made a pilgrimage type journey as I walked the 7 km along the ocean front to this beautiful ocean side café.  I ordered an espresso made of local beans and indulged in their home-made whole wheat baguette with butter for breakfast before making the trip back. 

Something else I always try and research before a trip is finding truly authentic local food, where locals eat and you’re lucky to find it if you’re a tourist.  The internet delivered and we had a great meal at the popular hot spot of Super J’s.  It’s a small joint on the side of the road that if you blinked you’d miss, the inside has a small kitchen a few tables and chairs and the walls are decorated with family photos.   Here we enjoyed the last three lau lau’s they had for sale.  Lau lau is meat, we had pork, wrapped first in taro root leaves and then tea leaves and steamed.  The tea leaf is discarded and you are left with a soft taro root leaf surrounding the delicious meat that is cooked to perfection with all the flavors of the leaves infused into it.

While researching places to eat beforehand is fun it’s even more fun when you stumble upon places on your own.  We had several good eats that surprised us.  One was the seemingly ordinary sports bar in Hilo called Cronies with jerseys pinned to the wall and TV’s scattered haphazardly around the space.  The food was excellent; they make their own sourdough bread bowls for soup, a light as air battered fish and chips and serve fresh caught local fish sandwich style.   We were all thoroughly impressed and agreed it was a great way to end our day of volcano exploring on the island. 

We had a different kind of surprise experience when we pulled into the macadamia nut farm called Joe’s Nuts and were greeted by two enthusiastic dogs and a large man whose shirt was more sweat drenched than not yelling down at us “we rescue animals!”.  Joe, we presume, gestured for us to follow him as he took us to the macadamia nut trees and opened raw nuts for us to try before proudly showing us the newly poured concrete slab that would soon become his new nut dehydrator.  We tried several flavours of the nuts with our favourite being the simple sea salt and the vanilla which he makes from beans he grows himself.   Joe was truly entertaining and his nuts were our favourite snack while visiting the island. 

On our island drives we also stumbled across another local favourite hangout the Kohala Coffee Mill that had potent coffee and perfectly toasted buttery croissants.  While relaxing we sipped local Kona Brewing Company beers.  And breakfast always included fresh fruit from the island.   I came home rejuvenated and fully satisfied with the food adventures we had found.