Joyful dining in Kaneohe
Friday - November 02, 2007
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Whenever the owner of a restaurant tells me he buys fresh fish from our local fish auction, I’m happy to see what else is on the menu. Any restaurant owner who gets up to go to the fish auction or makes sure, at least, that there’s a catch of the day reserved for him gets my vote.
At Joyful Garden in Kaneohe, owner Tommy Hui believes in using local fish and fresh, local produce whenever he can.
“The seafood is so fresh and it tastes so good that we don’t need to do too much to bring out the flavor,” says Hui.
Joyful Garden, in Windward City Shopping Center, is bright and clean with an open, warm appeal. The room, which seats 192 people, is large enough to suffer from the sterility that many hotel ballrooms do, but Hui has avoided this for the most part by using sliding doors to make private banquet rooms and choosing neutral colors to create a warm, relaxing tone. He designed the clean, simple interior himself, traveling to China to bring back attractive glass-etched panels, and he uses linen tablecloths and napkins to give a finer dining touch.
“I think on the Windward side people are more used to eating family-style and in more casual restaurants,“he says.“I want to offer people a taste of Hong Kong-style food in a more upscale environment.”
Dim sum is a specialty here, with dishes perfectly executed by a staff that includes a highly experienced dim sum chef. Expect the pork hash to be all pork, and the crispy shrimp puffs to be as light as a feather. Seafood offerings including shrimp dumpling and half moon are superb, and the spinach and scallop dumpling is as good as any I’ve tried. And even though I’ve no sweet tooth, I was seduced by the perfect egg custard tart. Dim sum prices are between $2.10 and $2.40, with house specialties such as seafood and corn dumpling, shrimp look funn and mochi rice wrapped in lotus leaf for $3.50.
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At dinner, specialty dishes include Mongolian beef, live lobster, live crab and several excellent boneless chicken dishes.
“We also make our own Peking duck from scratch,” says Hui of the tiny, light, doughy buns and accompanying sauce. It’s obvious that the cooks at Joyful Garden are not afraid of hard work - many of the dishes on the menu are more complicated and time-consuming than in other Chinese restaurants - but it’s all part of Hui’s commitment to quality. There’s a boneless chicken dish, for example, that’s served with fresh choy sum, shiitake mushrooms and ham, covered with a thick white sauce made from chicken meat, chicken bones and vegetables and cooked for more than 12 hours.
And all dishes can be made MSG-free - you only have to ask.
“Our dishes have minimum MSG in them,” says Hui, adding that there’s always a chance that ingredients like oyster sauce contain MSG. “But anyone who wants completely MSG-free food can be sure we’ll do that for them.”
Hui says he’s always had a dream of opening his own restaurant.
“I like to eat,” he says when asked why he ventured out on his own, “but mostly I really like to see people happy when they eat good food.”
Joyful Garden
Windward City Shopping Center 45-480 Kaneohe Bay Drive 235-8228
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