Tag Archives: dining

Boa mashes Asian, Mexican cuisine in cross-cultural menu

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Since the fastest-growing population in the United States is mixed-race and we live in an increasingly global and multicultural world, it makes perfect sense that a restaurant like Boa on West 32nd would open, and serve a mashup of Mexican and various Asian cuisines.

Erin and I got to sample some of Boa’s cooking recently, when we were asked by Asian Avenue magazine to write up one of their ‘Restaurant Peek” features on the eatery. We met photographer ace Brandon Iwamoto there and tasted the food and spoke with the owners on an afternoon interrupted by a tornado warning and a twister curling down from the sky in the neighborhood (it never touched down).

Inside, the restaurant reflected none of the dark fury of the weather outside (except when the entire staff and all the customers ran out in the street to gape at the funnel cloud).

The small, comfy eatery is located in the heart of the bustling, hip Highlands business district off 32nd and Lowell, and welcomes passersby who look puzzled at the combination of Asian and Latin foods. When they give it a try, say the co-owners and chefs, Julie Villafana and Braydon Wong, they like it. Continue reading →

Okole Maluna brings Hawai’i to Colorado

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Kalua Pork and Lau Lau dinners, with a bowl of saimin on the side to share, at Okole Maluna, a great little Hawai

We drove an hour north from our house last night, to dine in Hawai’i.

Well, not exactly Hawai’i, but an outpost of Hawai’i, in the most unlikely place: On a quiet Main Street corner in Windsor, a typical small, old-fashioned mid-western town on the plains of northern Colorado. Definitely not a tropical paradise, although inside the clean modern restaurant, you might as well be along Oahu’s North Shore, or somewhere in Kauai.

But Okole Maluna (Bottoms Up) isn’t in the islands. The intimate restaurant is in Windsor.

Erin and I love Hawai’ian food and seek it out in the few places where it’s available in Colorado. Most often, we find ourselves at L&L Hawai’ian Barbecue, a Hawai’i-based fast-food chain with a franchise in the eastern Denver suburb of Aurora. We think it’s a bit pricey for what you get, as well as being entirely too generous with salt on everything they serve (maybe it’s needed in hot humid Hawai’i, but our palates don’t require so much sodium).

We’ve also tried 8 Island Hawai’ian BBQ in Boulder and were disappointed both by the food and the service — especially when the staff made a bog deal of charging us 75 cents extra for a little dollop when we changed our mind on the kind of sauce we wanted on a dish. Come on, that’s like charging for ketchup and mustard!

And more recently, we had a very fine meal for my mom’s birthday at Iwayama Sushi and Da Big Kahuna Bistro, which is as known for its sushi as for its Island vittles.

Iwayama’s fun, and closer. But I’d make the hour drive any day for the Kalua pork at Okole Maluna.

Its deep smoky flavor is tantalizing, and it’s not overly salty (hooray). It’s served with two mounds of rice (for the full portion), a side of creamy Hawai’ian macaroni salad, a little bowl of Lomi Lomi salmon, which is like pico de gallo with bits of salmon mixed in, and a little serving of haupia, a conconut custard.

In fact, overall, Okole Maluna is the best place in the state we’ve found for Hawai’ian food.
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The legacy of Rocky Aoki and his Benihana restaurants

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Erin, Jared and I ate at a Benihana restaurant recently, and then learned just a couple of days later that Rocky Aoki, the founder of the Benihana chain, had died.

I wrote about my experience growing up eating at Benihana for special family occasions, and how in recent years, the restaurant only has one connection to being a Japanese eatery: its food. The staff at the one we go to, for instance, used to have one Japanese woman chef, which was a rarity in the entire company, but she’s been gone a couple of years now. The waitstaff and cooks are all non-Japanese, and as far as I can tell, the chefs are all Latino. They love to tell jokes about how they serve “Teri-juana” sauce (get it? Tijuana, teriyaki?).

They no longer are sent to Japan to train with master chefs like they used to decades ago. But they are all trained well as entertainers, and come up with some amazing tricks with their knives, throwing food around and catching the morsels. The food’s still good, which is why we go from time to time… probably once a year, if that. (YouTube has a lot of videos of dinners at Benihana, including the one above, of a birthday celebration. Most evenings at the restaurants are interrupted by the clatter of multiple birthday celebrations.)

The diners likewise are no longer Japanase or JA families. The diners are almost all white; a couple of weeks ago, we were the only Asians in the room.
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Dining at Denver’s Korea House BBQ restaurant

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Erin, our friend Joe Nguyen and I dined the other night at Korea House, a popular restaurant in Denver (actually, Aurora, the eastern suburb, where the Korean community is concentrated). The dinner was part of an arrangement by Korea House to advertise in Asian Avenue Magazine, and we were there to write a preview of the eatery.

We had the full spread of Korean barbecue — Bulgogi (marinated sliced beef), Calbi (marinated beef shirt rubs, cut off the bone) and Spicy Chicken — as well as some Soon Doobu (seafood tofu stew) and Bibimbab (meat and vegetables served with spicy sauce over rice). The food was good (I’ll post a link to the advertorial when it’s up) and the experience was fun.
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Noodling Around

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Hot stuff: Orochon Ramen lets you choose your level of heat. I opted for #3 and it was pretty damned warm.

When Erin and I were in LA last month, we ate dinner with her cousin Lisa Sasaki and her brother Eric and his wife Leah, at a very popular ramen shop, Daikokuya. The restaurant is one of several that specialize in Ramen on a block of First Street in Little Tokyo, just down the street from the Japanese American National Museum. The joint is hopping at all hours, with eager clusters of (mostly non-Japanese) people patiently waiting to enter, thanks to a couple of rave reviews including one from the restaurant critic from the LA Times, whose article is posted in the window. Luckily, we didn’t have to wait too long to be seated.

Lisa loves the combination specials: choose a ramen, and get a half-order of another entree, from tonkatsu pork cutlets and gyoza dumplings to fried rice. The fried rice was good, all right. Erin and I both thought the ramen itself (we ordered the chasyu ramen, topped with slices barbecued pork loin) was good but not awe-inspiring. The place was so popular and raucous, though, that it was simply a fun experience. Continue reading →