Eat Your City: Oahu, Hawaii Food tour continued - Some shrimp scampi, shaved ice, watching for green sea turtles...

Wednesday 25 July 2012

Oahu, Hawaii Food tour continued - Some shrimp scampi, shaved ice, watching for green sea turtles...

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To cool off after the pineapple goodness from earlier in the day, we headed north to Matsumoto's Shaved Ice, which my aunt and uncle brought me to a few years back. We needed something cool before we started shrimp trucking for super sweet tasting Kahuku shrimp... drowned in butter and garlic!!

Just before you enter the little sleepy tourist town of Haleiwa, we spotted our first shrimp truck... Mackys!

We wasted no time in lining up and getting a plate of butter garlic shrimp - tender, salty savory buttery mmmm! Served with 2 scoops of rice topped with some of the fried buttery garlic and a simple green salad with italian dressing, they disappeared fast.

We also got a plate of spicy hot shrimp to share. Cooked essentially the same way as the garlic shrimp, but with hot sauce added to the butter to mellow it out, it added in a nice bit of heat, but killed off the sweetness of the shrimp. Kimchee ranked both the garlic butter and spicy hot shrimp a 8/10

They still do the routine at Matsumoto's.. line up, think about what you want to get, tell the staff at the door what you'd like, take your marked cone, debate on if you need more souvenirs as you wait (I ended up buying a t-shirt with sumo wrestler happily trying to eat multiple shaved ices in his arms), watch your shaved ice get assembled...

And... dig in! We got large snow cone with lilikoi (blue passionfruit), guava (pink-red) and pineapple (yellow) syrups on our snowcone, on top of tasty soft red bean dessert (Asuki beans) and to up our blood sugar levels some more.. it was drizzled all over with condensed milk. Mmmm! Time to eat it before the hot weather turns it into a melted goop... Brain freeze time!!

We took a short digestion break at Turtle Beach, watching a family of wild sea turtles graze on fresh wakame salad growing on the shoreline. One particularly hungry or stubborn green sea turtle stayed close to the waterline despite the tide rising and chomped on its lunch while everyone admired it, and listened to it go chomp chomp chomp!

After drying off our feet, and left plenty of sand in our sandals and car, we headed off, rounded a bend with windmills, and shortly after, we hit up a Giovanni's, with their characteristic white food truck barely discernible underneath all the signatures from guests leaving their mark. Guess that's why they have a banner, though that was getting scribbled on too!

Its a tradition, line up, place your order, and either sign your name before or after you dig into their shrimp plates. We got a spicy hot shrimp platter (no pic before we dug in) and their butter garlic shrimp platter. It may have been an off day, but at the speed they gave us the platter - less than 30seconds, we guessed the reason why the shrimp was overcooked was cuz it was probably cooked prior and left sitting in the pan to continue to cook and overcook. A few more shrimp than Mackys, and drowned nicely in garlic butter, but sadly overdone :'( Kimchee rated it a 6/10. Disappointed since they were pretty good a while back.

Still with room in our tummies, we came across a stretch of the best shrimp trucks ever... to be continued here!!

Matsumoto's Shaved Ice
Address 66-087 Kamehameha Hwy Haleiwa, HI
Phone (808) 637-4827
Hours Daily Mon-Sun 9am-6pm, except 1/1, 12/25 and Thanksgiving Day