Ohana Aina

Rating: OK
Meal: Lunch
Price:  1000 yen
Payment:  Credit cards accepted
Dishes: Minced chicken with red and green peppers and pineapple
English Menu: Yes

Smoking: No

Hawaii is big in Japan, and there are numerous little Hawaiian themed restaurants scattered around.  One of the ones nearest the base is Ohana Aina.  It's a small place, and they are big on "slow food," so much so that they warn you on the first page of the menu that it will take a while to cook your food.  You have been warned!  Actually it didn't take all that long, but it wasn't too busy, so your mileage may vary.

 We're in the middle of Golden Week here, a series of holidays that all string together to make approximately one week of tourist madness.  Since Japanese don't like to take vacations because of the perception that they are letting their co-workers down, when the entire country *has* to take vacation, they *all* take vacation.  Even little Yokosuka gets its fair share of Japanese tourists wandering around and generally looking like Japanese tourists anywhere do.










I tried two other places before stopping here but they were either full or clearly too busy to be bothered getting to me.  The menu is mainly Hawaiian inspired and filtered through Japanese tinted glasses.  I've never been impressed with what the Japanese have done with Hawaiian "themed" food myself.  I kind of think of Hawaiian cuisine like Pacific Northwest cuisine...it's too young to have any defined shapes.  In Oregon, it's "pacific northwest" if it has salmon in it.  For Hawaiian, it seems to run in the "has pineapple" in it, or "put an egg on it" direction.  Now, I'm all down for an egg on everything, and I like Thai food so I went for their one and only thai dish, minced chicken with vegetables and an egg on.

Of course it had pineapple too.  And a scoop of a brownish frozen banana mush that I was told to mix in with everything.  This I dutifully did, and it was...ok I guess.  But otherwise the chicken was kind of tough, not truly minced, and the flavors were very singular and one-noted (typical with Japanesification of most foreign food).  While it wasn't terrible, it wasn't great either, meriting an OK from me.  It was also kind of expensive for the small quantity of food.