What is a Hawaiian Plate Lunch?
Hawaiian Plate Lunch Comes to Wichita, Kansas
On your first visit to Noble House Hawaiian Restaurant, one of the first things you will notice is that the main menu is focused around traditional Hawaiian Plate Lunches.
You also may have been confused by the term plate lunch, especially if you come to the restaurant in the evening and wanted dinner. No worries though, we’re happy to tell you that the Hawaiian Plate Lunch is a traditional island meal that is available all day and night. On the islands they even eat it for breakfast!
It doesn’t matter what time of day you stop by, as long as we’re open, you can bet we’ll have a plate lunch that you’ll love. Whether you’re craving Loco Moco, Kalua Pork, Hulihuli Chicken, Teriyaki Beef, or any other plate lunches on the menu, you’ll always be able to fill up on your favorite plate lunch!
The History of The Hawaiian Plate Lunch
The Hawaiian Plate Lunch, which is a mainstay of Hawaiian food culture, first appeared in Hawaii in it’s current form back in the 1880s. At the time laborers were in high demand by the fruit and sugar companies on the islands. As the demand grew, laborers were brought in from around the world, including China, Japan, Portugal and the Philippines. The workers didn’t eat sandwiches or things of that nature, instead they ate leftover rice and mixed it with things like canned meat, teriyaki, cold meat, scrambled eggs or pickles, with almost no salad or vegetable. At some point, macaroni salad was added to the plates, not only because it was a good bridge for national taste, but also it mixed well with most of the meats used in the plate lunches.
Once the plantation era came to an end, plate lunches began being served on-site by lunch wagons to construction workers and day laborers. Eventually it started showing up in local restaurants before the first “plate lunch” restaurants began popping up. Before long there were even a few plate lunch franchises and they made the jump to the US, where the craze spread onto the mainland.
What’s in a Hawaiian Plate Lunch?
The plate lunch has become a staple of Hawaiian eating and is similar to the Southern US “meat and threes”. The difference of course is the cultural influences, such as the pan-Asian influence, on Hawaiian cuisine and some have even traced it’s roots back to the Japanese Bento Box.
The standard Hawaiian Plate Lunch consist of two scoops of white rice, macaroni salad and an entrée. If a plate lunch has more than one entrée then it is considered a “mixed plate”. At Noble House if you get the mini then it only includes one scoop of rice.
Popular plate lunches include Chicken Katsu, which is fried boneless chicken breaded in Panko bread crumbs, Teriyaki Beef, Kālua Pork, and Laulau, which is fish wrapped in a taro leaf. A famous dish by the name of Loco Moco is a hamburger steak smothered in brown gravy and topped with a sunny side egg. This dish was clearly influenced by American culture, although you can get it with fried spam instead of hamburger if you want to keep it more traditional.
Noble House Hawaiian Serving up Plate Lunches to Wichita, KS
Noble House Hawaiian Restaurant is proud to be Wichita’s home of authentic Hawaiian plate lunch. Come visit us near the corner of W 21 Street N and Amidon. We have a wide variety of plate lunches including all the varieties mentioned above and more. In addition we have Poke, Lumpia, beverages and daily specials. It’ll make your stomach say “Mahalo”!