At the new café, you can sip imported Kona coffee, snack on spam musubi and feast on Loco Moco.
Often, the greatest restaurant ideas are borne out of a chef-owner’s need to satiate their own cravings. Such is the case for Patricia White, who opened the Hawaiian-inspired Kona Koffeehouse last December.
“I spent the last 22 years here missing home,” says White, who originally hails from Honolulu, Oahu. “I usually go home for a month every year to see my daughter and my grandkids and family. I just kinda go 11 months of the year dying for the food.”
White opened Kona Kofeehouse at 4054 Franklin Rd SW (in the space that formerly housed Honestly Vegan and Hanu Truck before that) as a coffee shop and a café/lunch counter with a curated menu of her favorite Hawaiian dishes.
Menu mainstays include crowd-pleasers like beef teriyaki, shoyu chicken and a poke bowl that White says adheres to the Hawaiian way of making poke (it’s served on a Jasmine rice, no extras on the side like many Americanized versions).
“It’s a really top of the line ahi steak; it’s thicker and meatier. It’s super fresh,” White says, who makes the poke to order. “It’s always shoyu based, or soy-sauce based. There’s many different ways to flavor it. My favorite is with limu, which is a crunchy seaweed. But I can’t get that here. So, I’m working on sourcing that or other seaweeds to add to the poke.”
Another authentic, popular Hawaiian dish is Loco Moco, which reads like a hearty brunch menu item, but which Hawaiians enjoy any time of day. “The easiest way to describe it is hamburger steak and gravy over rice with a fried egg on top and green onions for garnish,” White says. “The egg with the gravy on top of the rice and then that little smack of green onions right at the bite is really amazing.”
There’s usually a weekly special – don’t sleep on the chicken katsu when it’s on offer. The pounded, marinated chicken breast is dipped in egg and coated with Panko breadcrumbs, pan-fried till crisp, then pressed on a grill to yield a perfectly cooked interior and crunchy exterior. It’s served on Jasmine rice, accompanied by a savory-tangy dipping sauce and flanked by a scoop of mac salad on the side (you can sub in green beans or Brussels sprouts too, but the creamy macaroni salad is a plate lunch staple in Hawaii).
Of course, there’s coffee too. Living up to the restaurant’s namesake, White imports Kona coffee directly from the Big Island. You can get it hot or iced, which White fashions into a Vietnamese-style iced coffee made creamy with sweetened condensed milk. To round out the beverage menu, there’s a roster of Citrus Dream Drinks, which drinks like a creamsicle-meets-smoothie and comes in flavors such as pineapple, mango, fruit punch and strawberry.
The bakery and dessert offerings change frequently; on a recent visit there were chocolate chip cookies and white chocolate and macadamia nut cookies. Perfect with a cup of Kona coffee for an afternoon pick-me-up.
For more information or to order online, visit Kona Koffeehouse or follow them on Facebook.
