Hawaiian Eats 4: Wedding Food

One final post on our trip to Hawaii. After our wedding, the wedding party traveled to Hawaii with us for the "after party" luau we held for my relatives in Hawaii. We stayed at the Ala Moana hotel and on the first night we arrived, we spent a good hour or more walking up and down Waikiki searching for a fun, non-chain restaurant to eat at. We found Doraku, a swanky sushi bar on the third floor of the Royal Hawaiian Village and kicked off our evening with tons of sushi and sake bombs.

Kyle and I stumbled upon the restaurant again after a morning at the beach and decided to see whether it was the company or the food that made the restaurant so memorable the first time. Turns out, it was a combination of both.

This toro avocado tartar dish was simply amazing. Menu describes it as "scraped fatty tuna mixed with tobiko eggs and takuan over mashed avocado served with sweet spicy chili soy sauce." I loved it so much that I tried to recreate it at home and came close...still need to perfect it!


Kyle ordered salmon chazuke in addition to his chicken dish. This is one of his favorite "comfort foods" and is actually really healthy (minus the fact that the main part is white rice). It is rice with green tea and some nori and salmon to add flavor. He said it would have been perfect without the cilantro stems.

These are the garlic teri seared edamame: soybeans tossed in the wok with teriyaki sauce and grated garlic. Although it made us stink like garlic the rest of the day, it was a yummy treat! We also ordered lobster tempura (which as decadent as it sounds, was not actually delicious enough to be worthy of a blog photo), and karage chicken (basically, fried chicken). If you find yourself in the heart of Waikiki and need to venture away from the Cheesecake factories and other chains that overtake the neighborhood, try this place out!

After stuffing ourselves, we hurried back to our room to get ready for the main reason we went to Hawaii: my cousin Dawn's wedding! The wedding was absolutely beautiful and the food, like all weddings in Hawaii, was delicious. Only problem was that we were so hungry and excited about the food, we didn't even stop to take many photos. Here are the few we did take:

A never ending salad bar! I filled a whole plate of just salad--from fresh poke, to edamame , to a delicious watermelon salad, it was a perfect way to highlight all the wonderful local fruits and vegetables that Hawaii has to offer!

One of the other highlights was the ice cream bar which had my favorite, lychee sherbet! There were also an endless array of toppings including some local treats like macadamia nuts and mango.

Caught in mid-topping...Kyle was nice enough to get me some ice cream on the way back from a bathroom break. However, he got me chocolate ice cream with oreos and chocolate sauce...and I also had my eyes on the lychee ice cream with lilikoi topping. So I went back for seconds as seen in this photo. It all paid off when I won the center piece of three beautiful candle holders for being the person at the table who ate the most scoops of ice cream!

Congrats to my amazing cousins Dawn and Harry and thanks for a great meal!

Aloha,

Emi