If you are in the Kona area in Hawaii, it's definitely worth the effort to make it to super J's. You can't get a more mom and pop, hole on the wall restaurant than this. After exploring town for half a day, my husband and I were ready to get some lunch. 

Inside the restaurant, there were two plastic folding tables for diners and rows of family photos, and pretty much everything else here was set up for practical purpose only, which made it so much more curious why they had a shiny plasma tv in the dining area. They served one thing mainly, and they were called "laulaus." When my husband asked what was a "laulau," the lady in the picture smiled proudly and said we may watch tv for two minutes. She turned on the tv for us while we stepped away from the cash register to watch the video.  Apparently some tv crew did a short 2 minute episode about the restaurant featuring this lady and their food, and described laulau as a type of marinade pork wrapped in a inner layer of taro leaf and a outer layer of tea leaf, slow cooked for hours. It is one of the local foods here in Hawaii. 

We were charmed instantly and ordered two plates of food with coke. While we dived into our food, the lady chatted with us. She told us that back in the old days, whenever they were short on cash, they used to make laulaus and went from door to door selling them.  She inherited this restaurant from her father, whose dream was to open a restaurant on this spot. Unfortunately, he didn't live long enough to see it finished.  Today, the family lives where the restaurant is because they work here 20 hours a day. The laulaus must be prepared the night before and cooked slowly all night long. One bite, you will taste the slow cooked goodie in all its glory:) And the reason that they chose to make laulaus? "Because that's all people wanted!" They have been making one thing for the past twenty years, so I'm betting money that they are the town's laulau experts! 

Yesterday was my first free day in weeks, it was nice to have time to cook for my dogs again, cleaned up the floors a bit and finally sent clothes to the dry cleaners! Now that my recital is over, we are in full force to work on the move. All afternoon my fiance and I had been packing his things into boxes, two is better than one when it comes to packing, and we got half his apartment packed up! We were tired by the end of it, and ran out to look at appliances for break time. Neither of us had anything, so we picked simple and basic things that looked easy enough to use without any complicated buttons, we still need a fridge though, that maybe for later!

For some reason I didn't feel like a salad after all the manual labor, since it was Tuesday I thought we could give it a try at boiling crab. We tried to get in on the weekends a couple of times but the wait made it impossible. On a regular Tuesday night, we still waited for about 40 minutes. It was quite a experience to eat there, you get a table covered in a piece of paper, no plates, no forks, and the waiter put a bib around your neck before they threw a bag of seafood dipped in sauce on your table. That little bag of shrimp was all I took picture of for the food. Right after that my hands and face were covered in hot sauce. It was good though, I liked the shrimp, but the crab? I think I make them better at home:)

Ready for some food pictures? We had a minor celebration with just a few people at Raphael, I'm in love with the crisp pork belly, I think I'm going to try and make something like it at home.