By Jeanni Ritchie
For five years Kai’s Island Grill has been one of the hottest food trucks in Louisiana. Now they’ve got a restaurant on Vernon Lake to expand their vision of bringing authentic Hawaiian food to the mainland!
I visited Kai’s last Sunday and the place was packed! Great food needs little marketing — word of mouth packed the brick-and-mortar out.
I’d ordered a traditional Hawaiian lunch plate but owner Ken Pajinag brought over an ube pancake they were serving for Sunday brunch while I waited. I watch enough Food Network to know what ube is. I just hadn’t been adventurous enough to try it. I Sam-I-Am’d it and discovered I did indeed like green eggs and ube!
But that lunch plate is what I’d come for, and being a meat and rice lover, I knew I couldn’t go wrong. The everyday lunch plate comes with your choice of meat, two scoops of rice, and their special mac salad — all with traditional Hawaiian seasonings.
I couldn’t decide between the Mauna Kea chicken with ginger aioli sauce and the beef teriyaki. I requested half and half.
Oh my! The Mauna Kea chicken was my absolute favorite, hands down, no questions asked. Then I took a bite of the teriyaki beef and immediately changed my mind. The teriyaki beef was the clear winner. As my fork went back and forth between the two, declaring a new champion every sixty seconds, it became obvious I should never judge a cooking competition.
The white rice was topped with the sweet sauces (ginger? teriyaki!) that gave it the perfect burst of flavor, and the mac salad was the perfect addition to a Sunday meal. It tasted just like something served at a dinner on the grounds. I loved it!
