A "Hawaiian plate" is a different meal from a plate lunch. Instead of two scoop rice and mac salad, you get a set of small dishes from the lūʻau table, built around pork and poi. If you only eat one meal of Hawaiian food on your trip, make it this one, at a place that's been making it for decades.

What's on the Plate

  • Laulau: pork (sometimes with butterfish or chicken) wrapped in lūʻau (taro) leaves, then ti leaves, and steamed for hours. Unwrap the outer ti leaf; don't eat it. Eat the taro leaves; they're the best part.
  • Kalua pig: pork cooked in an underground imu, or roasted to taste like it, shredded and salted. Smoky and soft.
  • Lomi salmon: salted salmon "massaged" (lomi) with tomato, onion and green onion. Served cold. It's the fresh, sharp counterweight to the pork.
  • Chicken long rice: chicken in ginger broth with clear mung-bean noodles. Despite the name, there's no rice in it.
  • Pipikaula: salted, dried beef, then fried or broiled. Like jerky's richer cousin.
  • Squid lūʻau: taro leaves stewed with coconut milk and squid or octopus. Green, soft and sweet.
  • Poi: pounded taro. Eaten fresh it's mild and a little sweet; a day or two old it turns sour. Locals argue about which is better.
  • Haupia: firm coconut pudding, cut in squares. Dessert.

How to Eat It

Take a bite of something salty — kalua pig, lomi salmon, pipikaula — then a bite of poi. That's the whole idea: poi is the neutral starch that the salt plays against, the way rice works on a plate lunch. If poi tastes like nothing on its own, that means you're tasting it right.

Where to Get It

Helena's Hawaiian Food in Kalihi is the James Beard–recognized benchmark, famous for its pipikaula short ribs. It keeps a short week, so check before you go. Ono Hawaiian Foods in Kapahulu and Haili's Hawaiian Foods are the other long-running Honolulu counters.

Highway Inn has been serving Hawaiian food since 1947 and runs locations in Kakaʻako and Waipahu. On the windward side, Waiāhole Poi Factory makes poi on site, and its laulau plate is worth the drive over the mountains.

On Maui, Da Kitchen in Kahului puts laulau and kalua pig on big plates. For the Big Island, see our Big Island Hawaiian food guide.