Highway Inn – Honolulu
In my opinion, Hawaiian cuisine is fantastic. The most famous gluten free dish is of course poke. You can’t go to Hawaii without trying it. Sadly, many other dishes are generally not celiac safe. Think of spam musubi, saimin, pork hash, and loco moco. Due to its history with Japan, soy sauce or shoyu has become a staple in Hawaiian cuisine so that makes things even more complicated. Still, I was adamant on finding a place that serves gluten free Hawaiian cuisine so we could try it together and luckily Highway Inn was just the spot for that.
The restaurant isn’t open until late, so when we grabbed an Uber to Honolulu’s Kaka’ako district, we only just arrived on time to order something to dine in. The menu clearly indicates which dishes are gluten free, but they do ask you to alert the server about celiac disease. A quick glance shows that there are several combo plates and á la carte dishes that you can eat as celiac, but our eyes were drawn to the Highway Inn Tasting Plate with Chicken lau lau ($29,99). We were very happy to see that the tasting plate was completely gluten free.
The chicken lau lau is chicken that is wrapped and steamed in taro leaves. It is the package in the middle of the photo. What you see above the lau lau is not pico de gallo, but lomi salmon. Salted salmon, tomatoes, and onions are chopped and mixed to serve as a side dish. Next to it on the right is squid lū’au. Yes, you can’t recognise it as squid, but that is because the main ingredient, and what makes it green, is taro leaf. The leaves are cooked with coconut milk to which the squid is added. It is a very creamy, coconutty dish and a quite unique tasting combination with the seafood.
Below the squid lū’au is the chicken long rice. Despite the name it is not a rice dish, but made with cellophane noodles. It consists of shredded chicken, noodles, and a delicious broth that can be made more or less soupy depending on the recipe. Below in the centre is the most recognisable dish of them all, the kālua pig. This you can find at restaurants across Hawaii. It is smoky tender pork that was nice to eat together with the poi. When taro root is cooked and mashed it becomes a thick purple paste called poi, which you can see in the bowl to the left. At the top left is ‘uala (sweet potato) and haupia (Hawaiian coconut pudding), which was the traditional dessert.
The tasting plate was a great way to try different kinds of Hawaiian dishes and some of the things were unlike anything we had tried before. This is a recommended spot if you have fulfilled your poke craving and want to discover other gluten free Hawaiian food. I really enjoyed experiencing it and I was glad we went to Kaka’ako for Highway Inn.
Highway Inn Tasting Plate with Chicken lau lau.