02.18.09
Review of Hee Hing, lunch Monday December 2008
449 Kapahulu Ave., Honolulu, Hawaii, 808-735-5544
Great for: chicken corn soup, appetizers, eating decent Chinese outside Chinatown
My parents have been in America for over thirty years but they always still want Chinese food, no matter where we go. So I’ve had most of the Chinese food available on the islands of Oahu and Kaua’i, except for the expensive places. This place made it on a top 100 list for Honolulu. I can’t speak to any of the non-Chinese restaurants there besides the one at the hotel, but this was yet another example of “eh, they don’t know what they’re talking about.” I wonder if Chinese food is kind of inaccessible in the sense that we Americans eat a lot of crappy versions and consequently it’s hard to appreciate whether it’s good or not unless you’ve grown up with the good kind. But please, everybody, sweet and sour sauce is crap. It’s not authentic, it’s bad for you (did you hear about the mercury-poisoned high fructose corn syrup?) and it’s like slathering Cheez-Whiz on a good steak – unnecessary and silly. I mean, if you enjoy it, OK… but there’s a lot better stuff out there.
We started with a lovely giant pot of chicken corn soup. See, you can make non-traditional things that taste great. Cubes of chicken plus crisp corn and yummy broth with just-right streamers of egg white are a happy time. The fried shrimp wontons were also yummy, although I always wish they’d cut all that excess breading off.
Our entrée-sized dishes were not up to the same standard. The salt and pepper boneless pork chops were caramelized, somewhat too sweet but otherwise good. The teppanyaki beef with onions and peppers was better-tasting but with elastic-stringy meat. It had a good sauce for putting on the shrimp and ham fried rice (sometimes labeled yung chao chow fun), which was decent but marred by possibly expired ham. Thank goodness my brother noticed it – he said the ham tasted off and we pooh-poohed the idea until I tried it by itself and agreed with him. The rest of the ingredients hid it pretty well. The seafood and tofu stir-fry, basically giant seafood meatballs over spinach in sauce, were bizarre and lumpy-looking but actually pretty good. I tired of them quickly though.
I hate that the best Chinese food in most cities is ghettoized in the Chinatowns. Why can’t we have good normal restaurants like most other cuisines? We had a lot of dim sum in Honolulu Chinatown, which has maybe fallen off a little in quality over the ten years I’ve been going, but that’s definitely where the best places are. Even they were uneven, though in general things were tasty enough to make me gain back all the weight I lost from three months of disciplined tee-totaling. (Well, that and my mother force-feeding me noodles about every two hours and stressing me out until eating became Valium again.) Anyhow, to come back to Hee Hing, supposedly this is where the locals eat. If you’re not fussy about your Chinese food, it’s pretty good. If you are, or are Chinese, my next post is about what I consider the best option in the Honolulu area: Kapolei Chinese Restaurant.
Rating: 6.5 / 10
Our cost: $75 for 5 people, no drinks
Noise level: silent in mid-afternoon, probably somewhat noisy at night
Chance of walking in: decent.
