When the latest Chun Wah Kam Noodle Factory opened its doors last week, a couple of employees were dispatched to stand outside the restaurant at the corner of Pensacola and Waimanu and wave menus at drivers and pedestrians.
They needn’t have bothered. By day two, hordes had found their way to the fast-food restaurant, strategically sited to be convenient to the area’s new condo city (where some residents wish they’d stay open later for dinner), and with enough parking to make it inviting to road warriors, i.e. police officers and construction and utility crews. That said, during the lunch rush, getting in and out of the lot can be trying, especially for bad parkers. I know because I’m one of them.
Such is the power of value and a diverse menu that includes just about everything you could want from a full-service Chinese restaurant, plus a whole lot of local dishes as well. I know I was giddy from the selection. It was like being in a candy shop for adults.
Oh, where to begin?
First, take a ticket to ensure you won’t get lost in the lunchtime crowd. You can beat it if you show up before 11 a.m. If you’ve never been in a Chun Wah Kam restaurant before, you might want to make a round to check out the more than 40 entree options available daily. So much for the typical two-entree, plate lunch choices. You’ll have a hard time narrowing down the picks, so with that in mind you could opt for four entrees in miniportions for the same $10.30 you’d pay for two regular-size portions. Either way, it’s so much food that two people could make two meals out of it. (A two-entree mini plate is $6.95.)
The Chun Wah Kam Noodle Factory is an inspiring success story, having grown out of a noodle factory started by Wah Kam Chun in 1942, who immigrated from Zhong-Shan, China. His first factory was on Kukui Street in Chinatown. Today the factory is at 505 Kalihi St., where the company still turns out eight kinds of noodles and three kinds of pi, or wrappers, for restaurants and supermarkets daily.
From those humble roots, the company branched out to different varieties of classic, sweet and savory manapua, and now everything else, with nary a misstep.
For quickie, grab-and-go meals, there’s still the old standby, char siu manapua ($2) with sweet house-made roast pork with little of the fat and gristle common elsewhere. Other flavors include Thai curry chicken, garlic chicken, pizza, kalua pig and roast duck ($1.89 each). Least likely to make a mess are the lup cheong and hot dog ($1.65), the latter rolled in baked sweet bread.
When building your plate, you might as well start with the roots of the operation, the noodles. There are six options daily, and knowing people have difficulty choosing, you can order half-portions of two different types. (There are also six rice options if you’re so inclined.) Going back to the noodles, there are the requisite chow mein and chow fun offered by every Chinese fast-food restaurant. But here you can also get chewy shoyu udon, ribbony Shanghai egg noodles with bacon and thin Singapore-style noodles as well.
The entrees are a treat, as close to the real deal as you could get in a fast-food format. The only thing better would be if this could be turned into a buffet, with every option available at once. Other Chinese fast-food operations offer dishes marked by lots of chopped vegetables and scant pieces of meat, but that’s not the case here, where besides such chop suey dishes, you can choose hearty, meat-only dishes of kau yuk (pot roast pork), roast duck, ginger chicken, salt-and-pepper shell-on shrimp, deep-fried garlic sole fillets, char siu pork and crisp-skinned roast pork, the latter perhaps a bit over-crisp sometimes. Of course, the deep-fried morsels are best when you can catch them hot, but even when cool they’re still palatable.
Also a treat for the Chinese soul is the offering of a trio of char siu buns ($3.75) and duo of roast duck buns ($3.75) that is more meat than skin. The only problem with ordering the latter was a non-Chinese server who mistook the duck bun for a manapua, technically also a duck bun, but one is like an open pancake and one is enclosed, and no Chinese I know would ever confuse the two.
There are multiple tofu dishes for the vegetarian set, as well as beginner’s fare, such as beef broccoli, sweet-and-sour pork and minute chicken. I found many of the chicken dishes over-glazed and over-sauced, but have no doubt these are popular with kids at this family-oriented restaurant.
Among non-Chinese options are Okinawan shoyu pork, kalua pork with cabbage and one of my favorites, peppery fork-tender roast pork.
There is so much to this menu I have yet to explore. I think anyone would find it overwhelming to start, but at a slow and steady pace, maybe you’ll get around to everything in four months.
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Nadine Kam’s restaurant reviews are conducted anonymously and paid for by the Star-Advertiser. Reach her at nkam@staradvertiser.com.
