Happy Birthday to Me !! - Peace Cafe (Honolulu, HI)

The Apple Banana Cinnamon Mochi was delicious!

Today is my birthday!!! This week I met up with my mom in Honolulu, HI to celebrate :)  For dinner we headed to Peace Cafe, an all-vegan and pretty much all macrobiotic cafe.  They have a variety of ciabatta bread sandwiches and brown rice entrees.  They use organic and local ingredients and try their best to always offer a variety of choices with alternating seasonal specials, miso soups, mochi flavors, and muffins.  

Find their menu on a huge chalk board!  If you read the bottom left corner you can see that they support a greener way of eating by encouraging customers to bring their own drink and food containers.  I also like how you can order their sandwiches with brown rice instead of the ciabatta bread.  Extra bonus is that they serve grain coffee!

 They always have a counter full of homemade goodies like candied nuts, muffins, and kettled chips.

 They make their own granola and serve Kusmi Teas.  You can also see that they won the Silver Honolulu Hale Aina Award for Best Vegetarian Restaurant.

Their Mauna Kea Ice Tea is their most popular drink and very refreshing.  It's a green tea from the Big Island.

I had their most popular dish, the Heart and Seoul.  This is a vegan take on the korean bi bim bap with a choice of either house flavored TVP or fresh tofu.  It comes with vinegar flavored shaved carrots, sprouts, and kale, with arugula.  Although this dish usually comes with a scoop of spicy miso paste right on top, I opted out to make it a little more macro.  I also went for the fresh tofu which was probably the best thing about this dish.  Although this is a great macrobiotic set-up I feel that it was definitely lacking in a few areas.  First, the arugula seemed to be just a filler for the plate and I thought it would have done better with some other fresh greens or even a hearty kaboucha squash.  Second, the carrots also seemed like a filler because it was shaved really thin.  All in all it really just felt like I was eating a bunch of sides on a plate.  The sprouts were very good and like I said, so was that amazing homemade fresh tofu, but it needs a little more.  I blame Inaka Restaurant for spoiling me so :P

My mom had the newest entree addition, the BBQ Tempeh Plate.  The tempeh is topped with bbq sauce served with vegan coleslaw, cornbread, and black and brown rice.  

The Macroveg:  "I tasted each and thought this was better than my dish!  The bbq sauce had the perfect tang, the bread grainy and warm, and the coleslaw light and flavorful.  What I think it needed was more greens, perhaps some collard greens to emphasize that southern style."

  

MOM:  "The bbq sauce was good and I liked the coleslaw.  I know what regular bbq sauce tastes like and what I liked about this one was that it was not overly strong and tangy.  It was totally unexpected because I thought it would be a bland sauce.  I also appreciated how it was not spicy.  There was nothing special about the tempeh itself, but the sauce saved it.  I normally like my coleslaw, yes non-vegan coleslaw :S, quite sour and vinegary and Peace Cafe's coleslaw did not disappoint.  I also loved the crunchiness of the cabbage.  The cornbread is not as flavorful as my usual cornbread but it completed the dish.  The salad greens was definitely a filler which I did not eat.  Overall I give it a B for a vegan meal :P"   

  

Their desserts include mochi, cookies, and homemade vegan ice cream made with coconut milk.  You can order an affogato with a shot of espresso, one of their premade sundaes, or choose your own toppings.  Their ice cream flavors include vanilla bean, chocolate, and avocado.

We decided on the Berry Granola which comes with two scoops of their vegan ice cream, berry sauce and granola.  We had a scoop each of vanilla and chocolate.

 The Macroveg: "The ice cream was really good, I just wish the servings were bigger.  It was served in a really small shot glass looking cup.  It was also made it hard to eat with a spoon.  There was hardly any sauce and the granola was gone in one bite.  I liked the vanilla bean more than the chocolate [we ordered 2 scoops of vanilla but they ran out] but the combination of the chocolate with the vanilla was great."


MOM: "It was good, the ice cream was more flavorful than expected.  BUT very small servings of everything.  I liked the chocolate better."

Peace Cafe is a great place with the right mentality for trying to get us all to achieve peaceful harmony with other living things.  You see a lot of Japanese tourists stopping by to dine here probably because the cafe is japanese owned and word is spreading about their simple delicious meals.  However, as stated previously, they do tend to fall short on some of their dishes with plate fillers.  Also another biggy is that they were out of a lot of things come dinner time: miso soup, ice cream flavors, muffins, tempeh musubi, and mauna kea ice teas [my mom and I got the last ones].  So expect some limited options for dinner time and possible waiting for a table because the cafe is small.  Is it a must go to for Honolulu Hi?  I would say it's a nice stop if you've exhausted other better eats on the island like Down to Earth and Kale's [future blog entries on these places coming soon!], but Peace Cafe is probably a better place for lunch than dinner.  Parking can be found in a small parking lot behind the cafe or street parking right outside.  

Because a big winner of our dinner tonight was the bbq sauce on my Mom's BBQ tempeh dish, here's a macrobiotic bbq sauce recipe for you to try ;)

Macro Red BBQ Sauce 

1 C Red Sauce (6 carrots, 1 small beet, and 1 celery boiled for 10-15mins and blended)

1/4 C apple cider vinegar

1/4 C soy sauce

2 Tbsp onion, minced

2 Tbsp brown rice syrup

1 Tbsp wet mustard

1 Tbsp sesame oil

1/4 tsp basil

1/4 tsp oregano

1/4 tsp cumin

1/16 tsp cayenne pepper powder

Mix all ingredients well.  Tempeh can be marinated in sauce before broiling or broil tempeh and scoop sauce on top.

The Peace Cafe

2239 S. King St.

Honolulu, HI 96826

808-951-7555

info@peacecafehawaii.com

Mon-Sat: 11am-9pm

Sun:  11am-3pm