Food Adventure: Noho's Hawaiian Cafe

So I'm pretty new to the site Yelp. I've been only using it to find restaurants and utilizing that check in feature to places I've been. The other day I received an email from Yelp about 808 restaurants in the 503. I know there's a few Hawaii eateries around in the Portland Metro area but I usually frequent the same two places, namely L & L Hawaiian BBQ and Kauai Island Grill.

When I moved to Oregon nearly 11 years ago the first local eatery I heard of was Noho's Hawaiian Cafe. Since my boyfriend now husband moved to Oregon before I did, he got the opportunity to try that place first and said it was pretty good but pricey. So when I finally moved to Oregon I never got to try out the place till just recently. The only reason it took me so long to try the place is because of the location which is 20 miles from we live and I really don't venture out to Portland much either.

Anywhoo, about the email.  It had Noho's as one of the "must" local food places to eat at. This now intrigued me more to finally go there any try it, so yesterday my hubby decided to finally take me there.  It's a nice small place and we are greeted by the waitress who knew right off the bat was a local girl from Hawaii. We went in the late afternoon so we pretty much had the place to ourselves. 

We ordered the Blalah sized ribs and teri beef to share between my hubby and I and that buggah was HUGE! We later found out that the cook noticed that we were locals from HI and hooked us up. We even got a small bowl of shoyu chicken and rice for our son for free!

The only disappointment was the mac salad. The typical plate lunch is two scoops rice, mac salad, and entree....the mac salad helps make the plate lunch ONO. The consistency of the mayo was watery and the taste was lackluster. I know great mac salad when I've had some and sorry to say this didn't make the grade for me.

That was the only negative thing I had about their food.  I must add though their staff was really nice.  Our waitress came and talk story with us and we even got to meet the owner Noho himself.  He sat down with us and chatted with us for a while as well.  I was always under the impression the owner of Noho's was just a mainland person trying to bring Hawaii local food flavor to the mainland.  My hubby and I were surprised to find out that he's a local boy from Niu Valley and he still get his pidgin accent after living in Oregon for the past 15+ years.  He was a great guy to come talk story with us out of his busy schedule.

On my Yelp review I gave them 4 out of 5 stars....1 star short for their mac salad.  I'd still go again though and try their other items.  Here's  a picture of what our meal looked like.  We didn't get to finish it all, it was that HUGE....enough for our dinner that night.