Ethel's Grill: Where the chefs eat

Hamburger steak, tataki sashimi among cheap eats

By Mari Taketa

Special to The Advertiser

So Vino’s Chuck Furuya, master sommelier, is telling us how Kalihi is popping with choices for onolicious grinds, and his most favorite place is this hole-in-the-wall by the docks called Ethel’s Grill.

Uh-huh. That’s like where we get lost in all those truck yards and warehouses, looking for that place where you ship your car to the Mainland. Fun times.

Then Furuya says, it’s where the chefs eat.

What? We are so there. Which is not that easy, because Ethel’s is the kind of place you don’t see unless you’re really looking, and then what you have to look for is a big picture of a sumo wrestler. Forklifts are backing in and out next to the front door. This place? Where truckers, businessmen, young couples, dock workers, tourists from Japan and chefs eat?

We swing open the jalousie door and nearly bang it into the first of seven tables. Chef Hiroshi Fukui of Hiroshi’s Eurasian Tapas is sitting at it. “I always get the hamburger steak,” he says.

So begins the gorgefest. Nearly all complete meals run $6.75 to $7.50 with rice, miso soup, green salad and fruit punch or iced tea. That’s for a full meal with sit-down service. In one week we’ll visit three times and order nine meals. Our second tasting buddy is so blown away, the two of us break the bank and order four meals. Thirty-one dollars, cheehoo!

The green salad gives a first hint of what Furuya is talking about. No Thousand Island or Oriental on the leaves — it’s an unexpected concoction of parsley, Dijon mustard and garlic, good enough to drizzle on steak or toss a pasta salad with.

The hamburger steak ($7) is so light, a combination of lean beef and pork, that sitting in a pool of shoyu-ponzu under a snowy mound of grated daikon and peppery kaiware radish sprouts, it feels healthy. This is what the Downtown aloha shirt types are tucking their chopsticks into.

But what we really want is sitting across the table: mounds of deep-fried meat smothered in gobs of brown. Garlic pork chops ($6.75) are not so garlicky as pancake-syrupy, a very happy discovery. If sweet can blast, this is it, but the thin pork slabs hold their own against the onslaught. Garlic chicken ($6.75)? Not so much. It may be a top seller, but for us the garlic and syrup are way too strong for chicken.

The whole week shapes up like a seesaw. At Ethel’s, everything is almost elegantly light or obscenely decadent. In the first category: Ethel’s Famous Tataki Sashimi (favorite of Furuya, Roy Yamaguchi and D.K. Kodama), delicately flash-fried and topped with shoyu-pickled garlic slivers … yup, shoyu-pickled garlic. When the kitchen has plenty, like on our third visit, they give you the $5 tataki for free.

Mahi mahi ($7), egg-battered between a lemon wedge and tartar sauce, is overcooked, dry and rubbery. It’s Mayor Mufi Hannemann’s favorite, so maybe we’ve hit an off day.

Oxtail soup ($7.50; another Furuya, Yamaguchi, Kodama favorite) is grease-free and light-brothed; the fantastic tataki sashimi in the kim chee ahi donburi ($8) is better on its own because the mayo-less fish and kim chee never meld. And miso saimin (who pours eggy white miso soup over saimin?) is on our list for next time.

Now the decadent: Bubu arare-dredged mochiko chicken ($6.75), the top seller, comes with a shoyu-ponzu sauce for dunking. It’s already tender and moist; we tear apart the arare-crusted pieces with our fingers and let the ponzu zing through the fried meat.

A gargantuan bowl of spare rib saimin ($6.75) is plunked down with two kinds of homemade chili pepper water. (Who puts chili pepper water on spare ribs?) Some of the meat is dry, but the rib-infused broth is perfect and the saimin almost delicate. Shooting some heat on the sweet, fatty meat makes it awesome.

That’s the extra note we’re discovering about Ethel’s. We feel like we’re sitting at auntie’s kitchen table, the auntie who can whack in the one quirky touch to improvise filling, full-flavored comfort dishes — and then uncle the chef comes home and elevates things with a light meat patty cut with ponzu, or a parsley-Dijon salad dressing.

Which is almost exactly how Ethel’s came to be. Thirty-two years ago, Okinawa-born Ryoko and Tokyo-born Yoichi Ishii bought Ethel’s Grill on Kalihi Street. For years, Ryoko cooked and ran the restaurant — and got used to customers calling her Ethel — while Yoichi, son of a fishmonger, worked at Furusato and Kyo-Ya restaurants. When he came home to Ethel’s for good, the balance of the menu shifted.

Ah, so. But three visits, and while Yoichi is always visible in his trademark wool cap, we never see Ryoko. We hear she’s a big character, the only one who can scold Yamaguchi. Where is she?

Out for hip surgery, says daughter Minaka Urquidi, who runs the front of the house with her brother, Ban Ishii. Back in two months.

Otherwise she’d be here yelling at us.

OK then. Next time.

Ethel’s Grill
232 Kalihi St.
808-847-6467
Hours: 5:30 a.m.-2 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays
Prices: Breakfast sets $3.75-$5.50, burgers and sandwiches about $2.75, complete meals $6.75-$7.50.
Other details: Breakfast and lunch only; street parking and limited parking in building; BYOB; cash only.
Recommended dishes: Hamburger steak, garlic pork chops, Ethel’s Famous Tataki Sashimi, oxtail soup.