Aloha Everyone,
Shabu-Shabu is a Japanese hot pot dish with thin sliced meat or fresh seafoods and vegetables boiled in water. Dipping sauces can be made with soy sauce, ponzu, grated sesame seeds with chopped green onions. Taste is usually less sweet than Sukiyaki as no sugar or rice wine are added.
Shabby-Shabu, onomatopoeia, derives from the sound you make when cooking in the boiled water, “swish-swish”.
The food was excellent. But taste was far removed from the Japanese origin. First of all, the boiling water already had taste - we choice beef sauce. Then the table top range started to boil and until we asked our server to turn off the stove top, it kept on boiling.
Dipping sauce made of peanut paste, variety of chili peppers, cilantro, chopped green onion resembled Singaporean or Vietnamese.
We ordered two single portions which we weren’t able to finish. Wonderful eating experience. My mouth felt like it was on fire with so much pepper and hot food.
Our dessert from a nearby food vendor was Ube HaloHalo (Filipino dessert made of purple yam.)
Meals for two have been averaging US $20 to $25 or about US $50 per day. This amount is comparable to Greece, Turkey, Spain, as well as in Mexico and Ecuador.
Aloha -- Cathi
