Step Up To The Plate Call It Hearty Or Call It A Heart Attack. One Thing’s Certain, Though - Hawaii’s Plate Lunch Will Fill You Up

Every day at noon, aloha shirt- and muumuu-clad Oahu office workers flock to the venerated no-frills eatery Masu’s Massive Plate Lunch for daily specials like this: “Robert Kekaula’s Two Handed Eat Till You Drop Bento,” including baked baby lobster tail, kalua pig, charcoal broiled sirloin steak, teriyaki sauce, shoyu hot dogs, baked Spam, fried chicken, fried shrimp tempura, crab potato salad and coconut cake, all for $6.85.

Welcome to plate lunch, Hawaii’s unofficial state staple. Surfers subsist on the carbohydrate-packed grinds (pidgin English for eats). Attorneys and construction workers place their orders days in advance. Hawaiian kids who go away to college on the mainland suffer withdrawal.

Weight watchers beware: You can’t sample a traditional plate lunch without blowing your diet. But this high-fat, high-calorie hybrid of American, Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Filipino fare is filling, flavorful, affordable and makes a perfect beach picnic.

A Styrofoam plate wobbles under the weight of “two scoop rice” as dense as snowballs, a mound of macaroni salad and a hefty portion of meat or fish.

If you’re feeling hard-core, try “loco moco”: a hamburger patty over rice topped with fried egg and brown gravy. (Most folks wash the meal down with Hawaii’s signature fruit punch, but beware: it’s a little like drinking bubblegum.)

Favored by residents, but omitted from most guide books, here’s a selection of Oahu plate lunch places where you’ll find a quintessentially local meal for about $6:

Masu’s Massive Plate Lunch, 1808 Liliha Street; 524-4260.

Behind the counter you’ll find Yoshiko Masuoka, who, for nearly a quarter century, has gotten up every morning before dawn to cook 100 pounds of rice and 60 pounds of homemade macaroni salad. Weighing only 65 pounds herself, her back bowed from hovering over steaming trays of chicken steeped in her secret sweet teriyaki sauce, the Japanese-born, 85-year-old Masuoka and her son, Paul, run this hopping Honolulu noon-time haunt.

It may be easier to pre-qualify for a bank loan than to secure an order of one of Masu’s specials, which are announced at the beginning of each month by way of a photocopied menu; plates must be reserved a day or more in advance and even reserved orders have a way of vanishing any time after noon. All of the regular menu items are good, except for the hamburger steak, a brick-sized slab that’s a cross between meatloaf and construction paper, with pudding-like gravy.

Clientele include a few massive Masu’s-munching men who look two scoops of mac salad away from having to check in at Kuakini Hospital down the street for heart surgery.

With carmel-colored indoor/ outdoor carpet, six folding Formica tables and buses chugging up Liliha Street just beyond the open doors, you don’t visit Masu’s for the atmosphere. But, asks Paul, “Where else are you going to get a lobster tail for seven bucks?”

Good point, especially in Hawaii, where the cost of a few groceries can dent a paycheck or vacation budget. As for Yoshiko, after she wraps up her 12-hour-plus day, she visits her neighbors at Pizza Hut to trade three plate lunches for her favorite - a large Pizza Supreme.

I Love Country Cafe, 451 Piikoi St.; 596-8108.

“Homemade just the way mom made it,” this cafe’s slogan boasts. I wish my mother had graduated from Minute Rice and learned to cook this kind of stuff: Ahi stirfry, Thai chicken curry, macadamia nut-crusted chicken breast, turkey shepherd’s pie and baked ham with cranberry demi sauce and candied sweet potatoes. It’s all served with brown rice and there’s a wide selection of salads and fresh fruit smoothies. Turkey sandwiches are made with the real thing and cost a little more than $5. Many of the plate lunches are stirfries, costing around $7.

Surrounded by Blockbuster video and blazing asphalt, this haven has grown to 25 tables due to the popularity of its fresh, healthy interpretation of plate lunch. It’s always jammed, but the team of unflappable baseball-capped employees behind the counter and the guy stir frying at the speed of light - with a clack, clack, clack and the hiss of shoyu sauce hitting the grill - have dishes ready in minutes. A good, inexpensive dinner choice.

Grace’s Inn, 1296 S. Beretania St. (locations also in Kaimuki and Aiea); 593-2202.

Grace’s is revered for its chicken katsu (around $5), a traditionally Japanese dish of breaded, deep-fried strips of chicken served with a sweet tonkatsu sauce. Be sure to ask for a side-order of the homemade kim chee - Korean-style spicy pickled cabbage. Other choices include teri beef, fried noodle plate, beef stew or beef curry. With its fluorescent, Denny’s-like decor, better to get take-out and hit the beach. (If you’re not near a beach, there’s enough salt here to start your own ocean.) Don’t plan on swimming any time soon after this meal, though.

Broke The Mouth, 1023 University Ave.; 955-5599.

Down the street from the University of Hawaii, students discuss poetry here over “healthy, locally grown, farm-fresh plate lunch,” that defies the plate lunch definition; calling this plate lunch is like calling celery bacon. But it’s a great option for vegetarians, and most ingredients are grown on the Big Island’s slopes of Mauna Kea, where the owners live.

Be sure to sample the baked whole-wheat manapuas with contents such as sweet potato curry, apple banana cinnamon, luau leaf and Szechwan eggplant. This healthier version of manapua is more like a fresh roll than the traditional Chinese-style pork-filled dumpling found throughout the islands. Plate lunches check in at around $6 and feature assorted salads. Also available are meatless hot-dogs, fresh fruit smoothies, iced ginger tea that’ll make your tongue tingle and keiki (children’s) plates. Because the manapuas are baked off-site, the place lacks a smell. But they’re so tasty you might eat enough to “broke the mouth,” as the local saying goes.

Ono Hawaiian Foods, 726 Kapahulu Ave.; 737-2275.

“Please, no get mad! No hu-hu!” a sign outside this poi purveyor begs patrons waiting in line on narrow wooden benches to get in. Ono’s (meaning delicious), serves up some of the best traditional Hawaiian food in town. Steaming laulaus (a baseball-sized bundle of taro and ti leaves wrapped around roast pig and a morsel of butterfish), are served on pale green plastic plates reminiscent of camp. Other dishes include chicken long rice (a Hawaiian version of chicken soup), kalua (roast) pig, sweet, jiggly cubes of haupia, (like coconut Jell-O) and beef jerky-like pipikaula. The day-old tangy purplish poi, made from pounded taro root, is like a cross between library-paste and yogurt. Add a teaspoon of sugar and it will grow on you. Besides, it’s packed with vitamins. Plates are under $7 and include a good sampling of Hawaiian dishes.

L&L Drive In (#20), 1471 Kapiolani Blvd. (and 24 other locations around Oahu); 943-8808.

Plate lunch junkies seem to be divided on whether the chicken katsu is better here or at Grace’s Inn. But this unadorned family-run chain was voted best plate lunch place by Honolulu Advertiser readers in its 1996 Ilima Awards, which recognize Hawaii’s best dining and entertainment spots.

Many contend it’s the home of the best hamburger steak in the islands. Established in 1959, the year of statehood, and now featuring locations all over Oahu, L&L offers a rational approach to plate lunch: the mini plate, priced under $4, which you can actually finish. The mahimahi is tender, moist and not too greasy, and the glue has been left out of the rice. “Chef’s special creations” include stir fried shrimp with garlic, fried rice with a rainbow of ingredients, and burgers under $2.

Ala Moana Poi Bowl, Ala Moana Shopping Center Food Court; 949-8444.

This maraschino-cherry-colored modified lunch wagon is a more antiseptic version of the wagons found throughout the streets of Honolulu, offering Hawaiian dishes such as laulau, kalua pig and chicken long rice. For the less adventuresome, there’s a thick beef stew and even a spaghetti plate. A two-choice combo is under $6. Wedged in the heart of the Ala Moana Shopping Center’s food court, which teems with bargain-hunting Japanese visitors and lei-laden tour bus zombies, this is a prime people-watching spot.

Cafe Haleiwa, 66-460 Kamehameha Highway (North Shore); 637-5516.

If you’ve exceeded your RDA of mac salad and feel your fat cells swelling, head for Cafe Haleiwa on the North Shore. Like its plate lunch-offering cousins, this joint specializes in food that’s good, cheap, ample and fast. And it’s more like eating at a friend’s beach hale than at a restaurant. The walls are decked with photos of surfers navigating waves as big as houses. A wooden screen door creaks and slaps open and shut, reggae music plays and surf-star wannabes mow fish tacos at Formica tables while discussing the day’s swells. Lunch specials include kiawe barbecue chicken, mahimahi sandwiches, burgers and Mexican specials, most under $6. Breakfasts, costing around $5, feature the best banana pancakes in the Northern Hemisphere.