Black Friday

With Barack Obama and family on vacation here on Oahu, I’m sure many of you heard about the island-wide Oahu blackout we had last week Friday. Me and my brother pitched in to bring my mom home from Vegas for the Christmas week, so my in-laws cooked her a nice Christmas dinner. Unfortunately, I wasn’t aware that they had done this and had thought that her eating with us on Christmas Eve was the dinner I was asking to bring her to. I arranged for my brother to pick her up Christmas day before he went to work. Oops…

So anyway, with that a wash, they invited her to go out to dinner. Since Baby Girl had come down with a fever on Christmas Day and Mr. Pikko was feeling under the weather, me and Buddy headed out to town with Grandma and Grandpa J to the Sheraton to pick her up. We were standing around near the valet when suddenly, THOOM! The lights went out. My mom had just stepped off the elevator when the power went out, so she was pretty lucky.

The radio was out except for a few channels and from what we could hear, the whole island was out of power. People were calling in with the funniest things.

“Hi, how long will my ‘moist friends’ last in da tank?”

“My grandma is lost in Chinatown.”

“I live across the Obama compound, they no more power either!”

We had reservations for Tanaka of Tokyo at Ala Moana and since we weren’t sure whether the mall had generators, we decided to head there anyway. Turns out, they didn’t have generators and when we got there, all the chefs were at the door telling people they were closed. Bummer. On our way in, we had passed Tsukiji Fish Market and they were serving people food. Turns out they had candles on on their tables and a huge Japanese food buffet. We went back and they let us pay for four people at the buffet, warning us that if they ran out of food, that was our risk.

During our tour of the amount of food, I saw the jackpot.

KING CRAB LEGS!!

At first, when they said the buffet was $32 a head, I was like, “Oh hell no.” But king crab? Suddenly $32 seemed almost cheap. I went through and piled a plate with sushi, then went and piled a plate with about 6 of the fattest crab claws I could find. I was in heaven. Grandpa J kept a head lamp in the van, so we gave that to Buddy so that he could eat like that. It was pretty hilarious looking.

We ate by candle and flash light. I ate a lot. Somehow, being under pressure to both eat quickly and in the dark made me eat more than I normally would. Here’s some of the sushi we had.

The sushi was very yums. Their tekka maki had a LOT of fish in it as you can kind of make out. The nigiri was smaller than you usually see, but the maguro just melted in your mouth. Some of the other items to eat included chicken, butterfish, tempura, pasta, mussels, Korean veggies, and soups.

Buddy loves tobiko and so I gave him a piece of California roll. He was trying to pick all the tobiko off of the rice, which is rather silly. He’s just barely under 3 years old though, so I’ll excuse him.

Tsukiji has awesome desserts. They cut their cakes into tiny little 2 bite squares, which is a really nice, small size for sampling a ton of cakes. The guy at the dessert “bar” gave us a bunch of samples from the back to try. My favorite by far was the mini-cheesecake, but the strawberry shortcake wasn’t far behind.

After we were done eating, we wanted to take some food out and there was a TON left. Being a buffet, they had no take-out plates in house, so they told us we could take food in napkins. After watching me put oily tempuras and pieces of sushi into giant napkin balls, one of the waiters finally just gave me one of their plates, saying that they normally don’t do that, but hey. So, now I have a plate at home that belongs to Tsukiji. Since they were so hospitable, I will be sure to return to their wonderful buffet not only to eat their great food, but to return the plate so graciously given to us.

Hopefully I’ll be able to see what I’m eating without a flashlight then.