 |
 |
Youngs Fishmarket, a closer look
 |
  |
More Views on Young's Fishmarket Hawaiian Food:
 Official site of Young's Fishmarket! |
 Alan Okami blogging begind the scenes at Young's! |
 Yelper's on Young's Fishmarket! |
 Curtis Lum writes for the Honolulu Advertiser! |
Aloha!
6/30/10 - T'was exactly one Closer Look ago when I announced that we were soon headed-off to Scandinavia and, therefore, that it's gonna be all about cheap eats for the next couple of months! Can't say a Young's Fishmarket giant combo Hawaiian plate, at just over $17, is cheap by any means, but yeah, compared to Mavro's, Stage, Nobu's, and the other spots we've been hitting, seventeen bucks is a steal!
Young's Fishmarket has been a staple to the Hawaiian food scene in the islands for quite a while now, first opening in 1951 as a small fishmarket in Liliha, then adding groceries, Chinese foods, and finally, the type of food Young's is most known for today - Hawaiian! And that it does very well, no doubt, as evidenced by the fact that they are so busy, on a good day they can pump-out up to 1,000 individual pieces of lau lau alone! That's a whole lotta labor just wrapping, lemme tell ya!
Located in the City Square Shopping Center in Kalihi, right next to Kapalama Canal, there's usually lots of parking, but you may have to walk a little across the giant lot since the two rows of slots directly fronting the store tend to fill-up fast, as popular Sugoi's plate lunch and Utage Okinawan food restaurant are also located there.
Upon walking-in, you'll immediately notice large glass cases full of local/Hawaiian products of all kinds, both hot and cold, and an atmosphere reminiscent of a hustling, bustling cafeteria. Just about everything you can think of when going local is found here, from poke, raw crab, teagu, and dried marlin to turkey tails, char siu pork, pastele, and kulolo!
Workers mostly hang-out around the corner, behind another display counter where hot foods are located and ordered. The fine ladies here are cheerful, homely, and work very hard, darting back and forth while covering the many different varieties of foods listed on their menu (check out the official page and entire menu through the link above).
Aside from folks arriving to order hot lunch plates, Young's Fishmarket also does a huge amount of catering as well as shipping overseas, sending its entire menu, mostly in the form of frozen goods, to locales anywhere in the US, where home-sick locals can get a taste of home - better than two aspirin, dass' fo' shooo-uh!
Today, a few display trays were emptied, but most times they'll contain large amounts of turkey tails, char siu spareribs, roast pork, sweet potatoes, hoi sin chicken, and other such hot specials.
The L-shaped restaurant (at least in terms of visitors' space!) carries large booths on one side and table/chair sets on the other, both on a self-seating, self-serve basis - trash your own plates and return your own trays afterwards ah, brah!
It's casual and comfy, yet cleaner and in better shape than most plate lunch stops, providing a great place to eat if you can find tables available. For some reason, we had no problems whatsoever for today, unlike other times we've come. By the time Kumi and I finished, however, there were already folks waiting for our table, full trays in hand!
Kumi grabbed us some water from the free dispenser as I got situated, beginning the long but fun and important process of taking food shots!
The tab for a lau lau plate, kalua pig plate, a single piece of turkey tail, a single piece of char siu sparerib, and a single pastele? Just over $30 - maaa-ybe enough to cover tip at Alan Wong's. A little high for lunch when we're trying to cut down, but in all truth, I did order extra to satisfy my curiosity, and we did have at least three more single meals out of our order afterwards. Let's see... two-and-a-half meals for two, or five meals total (of course, with the help of some extra rice out of our house rice cooker!), divided into $30? Oh, about $6. Not too shabby...
One of the items coming as a pleasant surprise was pastele, a Puerto Rican specialty that seems to have taken hold here in the islands, popular mostly from Kalihi and on throughout the entire Central, West, and Windward side. In town, it's not so much of a staple, but they can readily be found anywhere else, sometimes in shops almost wholly devoted to pastele and gandule rice. When ordering one here, for $3.60, it hits your plate freshly unwrapped by the hard-working ladies behind the counter. And by the way, that "s" that we islander's like to leave out of the word pastele is actually supposed to be there! Don't have any idea who started dropping it, but that's not the native Puerto Rican tongue!
The dish mostly consists of a paste of green banana, which is then mixed with pork, garlic, onion, peppers, herbs, and any number of other variants. Having never tried one from the Pastele Shop, Taste of Puerto Rico, or other spots specializing in Puerto Rican foods, I had to ask around if Young's version was respectable enough to keep up. The general answer was that, yes, they were very good, but of course, if you're looking for pastele in and of itself, it's probably better going to a spot that specializes in it.
The insides were moist, tender, and tasty, with chunks of pork falling over and the cooked banana paste coming basted in oils, spices, and seasonings of different kinds. It's always good when there's a healthy element involved, meaning the banana, which kinda resembles the corn-based binder in Mexican tamales. Here's a shot of the insides:
Two other choices, spareribs and turkey tails, were found sitting in the hot displays, looking very much similiar to eachother and resembling mini ham hocks. By the time the irregularly-rounded, fist-sized balls of meaty goodness reached our plate, however, they had already been sliced into thick pieces, and since both came on the same plate, it was difficult telling the two apart:
Both were tinged slightly red from a char-siu-type flavoring, but weren't nearly as red nor as sweet as a typical Chinese char-siu. They were a bit on the tough, dry side, but the meaty, fatty, well-flavored cuts were still tasty, and perfect for this type of rugged, country-style dishes.
The first and only other time I've had turkey tails before was a memorable moment in Molokai, at the home of a good friend and her mom's authentic Filipino cooking. Turkey tails were one of my friends' favorites, and a giant pot of stewed tails were ready and waiting for us as soon as we stepped in. All I remember was that I couldn't seem to salvage much meat at all from them, a giant mound of fat gradually building on my plate, ready for discarding. My friend's plate, on the other hand, left only bones, without a single bit of fat clinging to them! You know what that meant! I couldn't believe how much fat she put down, but I stopped eating immediately, as I didn't want to waste any more and couldn't seem to stomach the soft, pudding-like blobs of fat.
The stewed tails there in Kaunakakai, Molokai bore no resemblance at all to the baked/grilled pieces here at Young's Fishmarket, which did come with large sections of meat that actually tasted more like pork than bird! I guess the pieces on our plate were darker and a bit more over-done than the lighter cuts one of our kind servers was nice enough to allow us to sample from the back, but either way, the turkey tails were still perfect with some hot rice, and as a pupu item would be even better, I'm sure. Here's one of the pieces where you can still recognize tail bones:
Whole plates, as in most Hawaiian food stops, come complete with a number of different sides, here with pipikaula, Okinawan sweet potato, a choice of rice or poi, and a choice of mac salad or lomi salmon. As for pipikaula, this is one type of meat that varies widely in taste, appearance, and form depending on where you go. Here at Young's, they employ a home-style, backyard-smoked type of deal, where rough cuts end-up looking very similiar to cuts of pork spareribs, only this time, it's using beef. Lots of places, including the excellent Highway Inn in Waipahu, where they are famous for pipikaula, smoke their beef first, then slice and pan-fry in oil before serving, which adds an extra kick of flavor and moistens the meat. I'm pretty sure that's what they do at Young's, although I wasn't exactly impressed with the dry cuts given here:
Both of us chose lomi salmon as a side instead of mac salad, and both of us were happy with the decision. Nicely salted from the salt salmon, a good balance was struck between fish, onions, and sweet, decently-ripe tomatoes, making the dish almost as good as mine! Just kidding - no restaurant comes close to mine! Sorry for the arrogance, but in actuality, most restaurants don't always have the luxury of over-ripening their tomatoes, which is probably the biggest key to a good lomi salmon.
In the background sits a kalua pig plate, for $11.50. Once upon a time, there was an older gentleman who used to supply Young's, along with other restaurants and stores, with their kalua pig, as he used to prepare his pork in an earthen-covered imu with hot rocks in the old-fashioned, traditional style. He did cook everything in a concrete basin, but the dirt on-top was real and everything else was done in the genuine way. Unfortunately, so many years ago, he discontinued the practice, so Young's now makes their pig in-house in large ovens. Fortunately, however, I've always said that I'd rather have an oven version done well than an imu version done bad, or vice-versa! Whatever the case, the kalua pig here still rocks! The three most important things in a good kalua pig, to me, are the liberal application of salt, the tenderness and juiciness of the meat, and a nice smokiness (even though it comes from a bottle, applied lightly, of course!), and all three were right on the money! Absolutely delicious! The salty, tender, smoky mound of meat sat in an oily liquid that may be bad for the arteries, but ooooh, was it sooo good!
The other purely Hawaiian main dish here is laulau. These plates are made with pork daily, but they also make chicken on Thursdays, fish on Fridays, and beef on Saturdays. Here's Kumi's order, a pork laulau plate for $10.65. There's no rice on her plate because she ordered poi, instead:
Just like our freshly un-wrapped pastele, our kind servers opened and discarded the inedible ti leaf wrappers they are steamed in before plating. With veins from the soft inner wrappings of luau leaf clearly showing and unlike the ti leaves, coming very much edible, there was a good ratio of meat to luau leaf, meaning, there was a good portion of pork inside. Oddly enough, I'm one of the few local boys that actually prefer less meats and more luau leaf, which kinda resembles spinach (some folks do use spinach instead of luau leaf!). The soft, cooked-down leaves soak-up all that delicious pork fat and turn into some of the most flavorful greens you'll ever find! I love the fact that they use lots of good ol' natural sea salt to flavor their meats, although not everyone will share in my particular high blood pressure preferences.
Here's a shot inside, revealing a tender, delicious meat steamed to a fall-apart perfection, further softened by its cacoon of leafy greens to trap in all that flavor and moisture:
Mmm-mmm - Winnah'z! Young's Fishmarket can always be counted on for a fabulous Hawaiian food meal. They also have other Hawaiian and local staples as well, such as chicken long rice, tripe stew, squid luau, Portuguese sausage, even chow mein and sashimi platters! Between individual plates, family-style take-out orders, walk-in's, catering, and shipping throughout the US, I can't think of another Hawaiian food place that can compete with this kind of sheer volume, and you don't sell that much without having an excellent product.
In other words, get down here and grab a plate yourselves!
Hope you're all having a great week!
Take care, and Aloha till next time!
Aku
Post a Comment or just say hello! Don't worry about leaving REAL names if you don't want to! No e-mails will be posted without consent, last names will be abbreviated, and if you don't want me to post all or any part of your correspondence, please state so! Hope to hear from you all!
