Luau Chow: Chicken Long Rice

Travel Blog  •  Pam Mandel  •  05.12.09 | 10:33 AM ET

Photo by Randy Willis via Flickr (Creative Commons).

I admit it: I think you should go to a luau at least once. You need to see one of those big showy events where the dancers make you think impure thoughts with their suggestive hips and a shirtless guy twirls fire while drums pound. Also, there should be a huge buffet where a roast pig comes out of a hole in the ground and poi is dished up in polite amounts for the malahini (foreigners) and there’s a big gooey pan of chicken long rice.

I try to take my own advice, so on this past visit, off we went to the luau. After a little warm-up entertainment featuring hula and the soothing sounds of a band in matching Aloha shirts, the mistress of ceremonies waxed eloquent about what awaited us—poke (raw marinated fish), tarot buns (purple rolls), sweet potatoes (in a lovely shade of lavender), huli huli chicken (BBQ chicken in a sweet sauce), and a lot of nonconfrontational salad-type things. We were also meant to be enchanted by something called chicken long rice—apparently a favorite with the kids.

Chicken long rice is a Chinese immigrant to Hawaii. At its most basic, it’s a soupy noodle stir fry, made with glass noodles—bean thread noodles that turn clear when they’re cooked. I’d say it’s not an ideal buffet food as the noodles continue to slowly cook as they sit there, turning gummy and weird. The flavor reminded me of nothing so much as chicken noodle soup, and some hunting around for recipes revealed the reason for that—it’s made out of the same stuff, with an Asian twist.

We live in an area with loads of Asian supermarkets, but because I’m a sucker for noodles, I might actually have glass noodles in my kitchen already. This recipe is borrowed from Hawaii’s celebrity chef, Sam Choy, and the picture looks way better than the sticky stuff I had piled on my plate at the luau. When I get homesick for the islands, I can cue up some of those soothing sounds and whip up a batch of chicken long rice in my Seattle kitchen easily enough.

For the record, I went back for seconds of the poke, to the surprise of one of the staff (“Usually, the Japanese visitors are the only people that like that stuff!”) but I passed on a second round of chicken long rice.

Tags: Food, Islands, Luau, Restaurants, North America, United States, Hawaii, Shrinking Planet

Pam Mandel is a freelance writer and photographer from Seattle, Washington. Her work has appeared in a variety of print, radio, and web publications and she's contributed to two guidebooks, one on British Columbia and one on Hawaii. She plays the ukulele, has an internal beacon that is surprisingly capable of locating the best baked goods in town, almost any town, and speaks German with a Styrian accent. Learn more on her personal blog at Nerd's Eye View.


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