on the western part of
Honolulu in sort of an urban, industrial
area, and where we're going right now is a
place that I am very excited about. It
has come recommended from chefs and non-
chefs, locals and tourists alike. It's
called Ethel's Grill. It is a Honolulu
institution.
It's been there in its current
incarnation for nearly 40 years. What it
does is serve local favorites: fried
chicken, loco moco, not necessarily the
traditional plate lunch which you would
see with an entree and macaroni salad
and scoops of rice but things that have
become staples in the community over the
decades that it has served it. So it is a
place that is beloved far and wide and yet
it still retains its local feel. We're
headed there right now and I can't wait
to see what it's all about.
This place is super cool, could you, I
know you're really busy,
just tell me a little bit about the
history of the restaurant? "My mom and dad
opened the restaurant in 1979. Mom has
retired about three months ago, she would
have been here. She's tired
of working.
So now she's singing karaoke all
day with her friends." Didn't an Ethel's
Restaurant exist before?
"There was an original Ethel,
but my mom and dad were too
cheap to change the sign so they
kept Ethel's Grill as is."
There's a lot of sumo stuff on the walls.
"For mom and dad, sumo is their
favorite sport." Is there a lot of sumo
on TV from Japan? Are your parents from
Japan? "Mom's from Okinawa, dad's from
Tokyo." Where do the recipes come from?
"Dad was a chef but they needed an entire team,
so three years ago my husband
took over. We're going to get you a mochiko chicken."
I saw someone get a local moco,
it looks really good.
"Try the local moco." And then also maybe
the chicken.
Yeah tell me a little bit about the
turkey tails. "We marinate and then
cook it and then we deep-fry it until it is nice
and tender falls off the bone. Really fatty
really rich, it's a lot of goodness."
Can I get one?
"A sample? Yeah."
Awesome amazing.
Aloha! Now I understand that you
grew up in the area just a couple blocks
away. "Two blocks away, right over here."
i was interested to learn that this was
actually your first time here. "This is my
very first time." You grew up two blocks
away!
"It's kind of amazing, when we walked to
the shoreline, we just go straight
down that way, so we never
discovered or passed this way."
Now that you have been here, did
you enjoy it? "We have, the food was
delicious.
This is sort of like a real
local-style food you know, so it's a
good place to bring out-of-town
guests, get kinda like a local flavor."
That's beautiful, thank you.
This food looks outstanding. So what we
have here is a plate of local moco, a
plate of the mochiko chicken, and special
request for me,
deep-fried turkey tail. We're gonna start
with the loco loco moco. It's a traditional dish
in the pantheon of the cuisine of Hawaii.
Legend has it the dish actually
originated in Hilo at a small restaurant
in the late forties early fifties when a
bunch of teenagers went into some grill
one day and wanted something to eat and
wanted it fast and the owner put some
rice in a piece of meat, poured gravy all
over it and said, "Here you rowdy kids, eat this!"
And they liked it and i think the egg
came later. One of the group of the
teens' nickname was "Crazy" and they
just thought it would be funny to call it
local moco, according to my research.
That is actually the story of loco
moco, however, they were onto something
because the dish grew in popularity and
is now considered one of the
quintessential dishes here on the
islands.
It consists of plain white rice,
hamburger patty which with onion,
seasoning, a couple of fried eggs,
and then the whole thing is
slathered in a beef base gravy thickened with
flour. It is a practical filling
delicious lunch.
This is a really thick nicely charred
meat patty, you can see how it's blackened
on the outside so it's almost like a
nice and crunchy on the outside which is
brilliant.
There's a good piece of meat. It
doesn't resemble a hamburger, it
resembles sort of like a little more
loosely packed meatloaf flavored heavily
with onions and spices. There's
nothing exceptional to the individual
components of this dish but
offer together something very
satisfying. The yolk running down mixes
in with this thick beef-based flour gravy,
it tastes like almost maybe
like it has a little bit of maybe with
your identity and it is delicious.
I can see why this dish stood the test
of time over the decades. We're going to
move on. This chicken looks great.
This is the mochiko chicken served with
a scoop of white rice. The scoop of white
rice is a common sight during lunch time
here in Hawaii. The plate lunch, which is
typically an entree, two scoops of white
rice and macaroni salad, is one of the most
popular things to eat.
This kind of resembles it. Now the
chicken as was explained to me by Naka
is marinated in like a shoyu, ginger,
internal secret recipe marinade and then
it is breaded in a light mochiko flour
and mochiko flour is rice flour, so
that should have a much lighter
cleaner taste to it. A little bit of a
sauce here like a sweet ginger sauce
This is great, especially the sauce.
The chicken itself is good piece of
chicken. Thigh meat is tender, the meat is
juicy. The meat has retained a little bit
of that fermented soy and sweetness, as
well as a little bit of that
ginger, and then dipping it in the sauce
is what really kicks it up to another
level, because you see those nice bits of
minced garlic. The
ginger is great, the tartness of the
ginger really cuts through any kind of
greasiness of the chicken.
That sweet marinade is
awesome with the happiness of a piece of
fried chicken
Last but not least we have the special
honored guests, the turkey tail.
TK made an interesting comment when
she dropped this off,
she said it looks like a malasada.
Malasada for those of you who may
not know is a Portuguese doughnut
without a hole, and she's right, it looks
like a doughnut.
Look at that, she she said it was
all rich and fatty and she was right, you
can just see how greasy that is. You see
that yellow fat just running out. This is the ass end of
the turkey. It doesn't
make a lot of sense that we throw it
away,
considering we eat pigtail, considering we eat
oxtail. This is going to be like
clean vinegar sauce, which has some
pickled vegetables in there. That's
pretty good.
It's also fried in that light mochiko
flour.
Have you ever deep-fried turkey out
there any of you? I'm sure some of you
have super fast way to cook a turkey in
20 minutes. It's also a really
good way to burn down your house so be
careful all of you.
Price hawks out there, everything is
around ten dollars and you get a large
amount that will fill you up for good.
I really hope you enjoyed this episode
of Dining on a Dime from Ethel's Grill.
If you'd like to watch more, please
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