The Culinary Odd Spot
On finding a strange spot in a town you least expect and trying it anyway.
Sometimes, you head to a locale on the globe, and you get something that makes sense for the region in which you are visiting. For example, hitting up Chicago would prompt a prospective diner to hit up a place with deep dish pizza or Italian beef. Montreal offers, in addition to world class adult entertainment, poutine. Paris is awash in wine with baguette life preservers. You wouldn’t go to Istanbul without cramming some bit of doner kebab in your face, nor would you escape Miami without at least thinking about downing a couple dozen stone crab claws. The best choices are at times the most obvious ones, after all. It doesn’t even have to be a direct correlation. Some places have excellent generalized cuisine or things imported from their immigrant influxes. New York, Philadelphia, and the span of New Jersey between the two all have exquisitely vibrant Italian restaurants. You would expect great Mexican food in Houston and Los Angeles, albeit with their own twists on them. Et cetera.
Then there are the spots in various cities that blow you away with what they’re offering. They’re not connected to the cuisine that they offer by proximity or by common-knowledge immigrant flow. It’s finding the bomb pizza place in, like, Kinshasa or a killer sushi restaurant in Tashkent. Or, perhaps, you were looking up a jobsite location on your excursion into Lexington, KY, and saw that there was a place offering authentic Hawaiian food right up the street from not just the jobsite but your hotel. Yes, I know I sound a lot like Guy Fieri at the open of his landmark television show, perhaps the most important program in the history of mankind, Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives. I wasn’t exactly rolling out looking for one; work is work. The perks are the per diem money buying you dinners you wouldn’t exactly splurge on yourself if you were at home.
The funny thing is I became so enamored with Hawaiian food watching Fieri’s many trips to the 50th state. Their food culture is so unique because it’s a mix of proprietary seafood consumption, influences from Asian gravity to their west pulling the food into a sweet and tangy direction, and the ever-looming imprimatur of the American military. The entire Pacific Ocean is gaga over spam for this reason; the US military’s presence with the shelf-stable and somewhat delicious processed ham substitute made it take foothold on the islands from the Philippines all the way over to Hawaii. Spam, rice, tuna, sweet soy, and for some reason macaroni salad all permeate the Hawaiian culinary oeuvre to create a vibe so fucked up to outsiders that Fieri probably should have won a Nobel Peace Prize for normalizing it. Hawaiians have been through enough to have their food marginalized by mainlanders like they were British anyway. Colonization, taking the brunt of first and worst attacks on US soil since the Civil War at Pearl Harbor, and people not heeding warnings and still swarming their islands during the COVID pandemic… and you have the temerity to make fun of their love of spam? Shame. However, I’m getting off-task here.
One dish in particular always seemed up my alley. A loco moco feels kin to a Rochester/Upstate New York garbage plate the way it is constructed, even if it’s not entirely smushed together like that poorly named dish. The first layer is sticky rice. The second layer consists of two burgers soaked in brown gravy. The last layer has a couple of fried, runny eggs. On the side, generally, there is a scoop of macaroni salad. I guess the best way to put it is a deconstructed garbage plate, but either way, the entire thing, at least the main portion, always hit my foodie interests whenever I’d see it on Triple D. The macaroni salad was its own thing. I, like anyone who grew up in the Northeast or Midwest when they were kids, was assailed with a constant stream of mayonnaise-based “salads” that accompanied any cookout. Potato salad was the most ubiquitous, but macaroni salad was uniquely grotesque. Perhaps my Italian heritage always made me more protective of various pastas and noodles, so my reaction to having to taste bland, oily, mucky bullshit done to noodles elicited a certain reaction…
I did not think that the first time I would have a Hawaiian joint close to me would be in Lexington fucking Kentucky. When I think of the Bluegrass State, I think of hot browns, bourbon, The Kentuckiana Hot Loin, and more generally, barbecue of a more Southern variety. I know it straddles two barbecue capitals in Memphis to the west and North Carolina to the east, which makes it fertile breeding ground for pitmasters to hybridize or make their own statements that are more local. I didn’t think I would find a place that billed itself selling “Hawaiian BBQ.” That’s something I’d expect to see in California, or maybe in a place like New York, where people of all walks of life tend to end up. Poke is a big trend on the East Coast right now, but I have yet to see anyplace that specializes in what the Hawaiian Islands do specifically. Until this week. In Kentucky.
I’m a sucker for trying new things, especially when I don’t have to convince someone else to come along for the ride. Big Kahuna Hawaiian BBQ was right up the road from my hotel. I had to try it. The door was covered in bumper stickers, like some kitschy idea of an eccentric Salt Life Hawaiian vacation materialized into décor. On the inside, there was a huge mural of Samuel L. Jackson’s character from Pulp Fiction on the wall. They had the Triple D aesthetic down. How would the food be? I’m happy to report that the loco moco was outstanding. The burger had great char on it, the egg yolks added precious unctuous texture, and the sticky rice, gravy, and sweet soy all coalesced to make a bite so tasty that I wished I could be buried in it when I finally pass on from this mortal coil onto the next one, where I hope loco mocos would be plentiful. Also, the macaroni salad was not only edible, but it was delicious, which should be grounds to be given a James Beard Award and three Michelin stars RIGHT ON THE FUCKING SPOT.
I don’t expect everyone to come rushing to Lexington to try this place for the same reason I’ve stopped reviewing individual restaurants in the Philly area for such an international audience. My subscribers are relatively few even compared to some of the benevolent larger Substack accounts who have shared my work over the last few years, but they are a diaspora to say the least. The point of this post was only partly to extol the virtues of the Big Kahuna. After one visit, it’s earned a return, be that return happen tonight if you’re reading this on the day that it was posted or if I ever return to the home of the University of Kentucky Wildcats. Sometimes, getting that return visit endorsement is rare. Restaurants come and go on the strength of one bad visit that can turn enough people off of it to send their margins crashing through the floor. Foodservice is a difficult industry to succeed in.
That’s why if you find a weird place in a city, be it your own or another you’re visiting, that piques your interest, you should without hesitation try it out. It might be a shithole of a dump, and you might hate that one singular place. But you’ll at least have a story. Trying something new for the sake of trying it is never a bad idea, even if it ends in abject failure. Bad meals give rise to ideas. You can’t diss something with authority if you’ve never experienced it. That’s what creates bigots and boogeymen. But I don’t want to focus on bad things, because these incursions into the unknown can be everlasting memories for the best reasons. It’s going to the African-themed buffet at Disney World and it being your favorite meal of the entire trip. It’s trying pho on a whim and prioritizing it as your go-to meal for rainy, shitty days. It’s using one of your per diem days not on a chain place you know where you’ll have a decent meal but to a Hawaiian BBQ joint where you hope to have an excellent one and being proven correct.
We eat because we must. It’s key to survival. However, eating is one of the things we can actually enjoy as a passion. Some people eat for fuel only, and that is their prerogative. Blessed are those who find joy in what they eat, because a great dish is one of life’s simplest but most rewarding comforts. You can find the dish you love in familiar haunts, but human nature is prone to wanderlust and desire for the new and exciting anyway. It’s for that reason that you should always indulge when you see something that jumps off the map at you. You never know; it may jump into your heart via your stomach.