Food Quest, Day 4.5

After having lunch at Choi's Garden, we ran a few errands and decided to stop off for some shave ice.  When you consider that Hawaii has perfect weather for shave ice and my family really enjoys eating it, you would think we would take the time to get it more often.  One of the biggest deciding factors for me is both places we frequent, Shimazu on School Street and Waiola on, well, Waiola Street, have horrible parking situations.  Shimazu is on a main thoroughfare and though there is metered parking nearby, on really hot, and therefore busy days, one's chances of getting a nearby slot are rather slim.  Waiola is on a corner in a fairly quiet residential area so parking is on a wherever-you-can-squeeze-into-that-does-not-have-a-fire-hydrant basis.

On this particular occasion, we found a nice sized space immediately across the street.  So far, so good!  Though there is always a line at Waiola, the service is brisk and we were munching on icy, fruity snow in minutes.

C ordered strawberry and lilikoi, I had lychee and strawberry and T decided on mango and lime.  Waiola's best qualities are a powdery, fine-textured ice and real fruit syrups that they make themselves.  The lychee syrup was nearly clear but fine bits of tan pulp were visible against the white ice.  Yummy stuff. 

We haven't eaten at Waiola since last summer and the one thing that disappointed us this time around was all of us had a fairly substantial white core in the middle of our cones where no syrup had gotten through.  There was a time when the syrup was uniformly distributed throughout--which of course, is one of the elements desired in a shave ice. 

We have been patronizing Waiola since the kids were small and working up a hyperactive lather at Old Stadium Park, just around the corner.  One of the things we always looked forward to was the promise of shave ice before we turned homeward.  Maybe the syrup thing was just a fluke.