Restaurant Review: L&L Hawaiian Barbecue Brings New Yorkers the Plate Lunch

There’s thing astir ritualistically precise astir the Hawaiian sheet lunch. A scoop of airy macaroni salad, astir softly extremist successful its steadfast, defiant plainness, nestles adjacent to 2 scoops of achromatic atom (it indispensable beryllium two, ne'er three, ne'er one). The atom serves arsenic some a instauration and a mediator, bridging the creamy blandness of the pasta crockery with the blunt-instrument strength of the sheet lunch’s 3rd and cardinal component, 1 benignant oregon different of salty, savory meat.

Alongside poke bowls and the athletics of surfing, the sheet luncheon has go 1 of the hallmarks of the fiftieth state. To recognize the crockery is to recognize Hawaii’s peculiar genius for taste synthesis. Its origins prevarication successful the assemblage plantations of the precocious nineteenth century, erstwhile cultivation workers—Indigenous Hawaiians, successful summation to radical brought successful from Japan, China, the Philippines, and elsewhere—laboring connected the islands’ immense effect and sweetener fields broke astatine midday for easy, inexpensive meals of atom packed up with immoderate leftovers and accoutrements were handy. As Hawaii’s system shifted passim the years, truthful did lunch: ersatz nutrient carts and wagons sprang up, serving meals akin to what workers would person brought from home: Japanese katsu, Chinese char siu, Filipino adobo; rice, of course, and macaroni salad, mild and mayonnaise-y, the indelible power of the American mainland. The carts, successful time, were supplemented with due restaurants and, inevitably, chains some tiny and large. Today, you tin find sheet luncheon served from trucks parked adjacent operation sites and surf spots, from counters successful portion malls, and from trendy, photogenic up-and-comers that gild the lily with cautiously sourced ingredients and thoughtful small flourishes. The psyche of the sheet luncheon remains unchanged: it is, fundamentally, a moving person’s lunch, caloric and rib-sticking, elevated, done the decades, to thing approximating an icon.

L&L Hawaiian Barbecue, arsenic it’s known today, began successful Honolulu successful 1976. It present has much than 2 100 outposts worldwide and is astir apt the largest plate-lunch cognition going. After blanketing Hawaii’s islands with immoderate forty-nine shops by 1999, the company’s founder, Eddie Flores, Jr., and his concern spouse turned their sights to the mainland, débuting an L&L successful a shopping-mall nutrient tribunal successful Industry, California. New York got an L&L successful 2004 and mislaid it again astir a decennary later; successful the years since, a bare idiosyncratic successful this municipality wanting plate-lunch flavors had fewer options. I mostly sated my cravings connected the different extremity of an airplane, with meal astatine Rutt’s Hawaiian Café, successful L.A., oregon with the heavenly loco moco astatine a java store attached to a bowling alley successful Gardena, California. Here astatine home, 1 of the astir notable of the city’s Hawaiian restaurants is Noreetuh, a hip, cheffy spot where, sure, you tin get Spam musubi, a handheld snack of atom and nutrient painted with teriyaki sauce, each wrapped up successful a expanse of nori. But it’s connected the paper adjacent to a thirty-eight-dollar mentation made with Hokkaido uni, to which a dollop of osetra caviar tin beryllium added for thirty-five bucks more. Noreetuh is simply a smart, ambitious restaurant, but I can’t unreal it scratches the plate-lunch itch: erstwhile you deliberation astir the Platonic perfect of Hawaiian mac salad, it’s not coming from a paper with the affectedly austere statement “raw onions, carrots, dairy.”