Curry House CoCo Ichibanya — restaurant review — Hawai’i

by Kris   ⋅   September 4, 2008   ⋅   Comment now   ⋅    RSS

Curry House CoCo Ichibanya. End of review; the name says it all. If you’ve eaten there, you know I’ve already said too much. If you haven’t, here I go.

Ichiban is japanese for “the best”, literally “#1″, and Curry House CoCo Ichibanya lives up to that name. Not only are you greeted with warm smiles and a cheery atmosphere (albeit minimal diner style booths and counter seats with blinding summer-yellow decor), you are able to build your own meal to your own tastes… a customizable curry palette for your curry palate!

Starting off with the amount of rice 200-500g (if you don’t speak up, you’ll be served the default 300g), you can select various veggies (spinach, mushrooms, wakame/seaweed), meats (stewed beef, chicken cutlet, octopus, fried oyster, clam, kalbi, shabu-shabu beef, sausage, etc), croquettes (deep-fried panko-ed potato patties)… over 29 toppings to choose from. Give them your spiciness quotient (used to be a funny limericked scale from 1-10 but now it’s just Regular/spicy or Mild) and you’re done! If it’s not hot enough, and it usually never is for us capsaicin junkies, there’s some special CoCo blend mixed pepper seasoning on the table. Help yourself to heaps of their tangy fukujin-zuke (renkon and daikon pickled in shoyu brine), also already set at each table. They also serve novelty curries with Mabo Tofu, Gyoza, Natto (fermented soybeans), and Cheddar Cheese, which my friend swears by. They also serve Udon, curried, of course, and cute kids meals with a Calpico drink and snacks. It’s like fast-food curry, seriously it’s like McDonald’s in Japan, so know your comfort food meal will be served in a flash with questionable nutritional value.

Chris and I were lucky to catch the seasonal Squid Ink curries (pictured above), available with cheese or spinach, the former being tops in our book. Lusciously creamy but not rich, it was amazing how quickly the plateful of what resembled charcoal and soot sauce disappeared! They graciously provided a caveat on how squid ink stains, and during our meal we giggled at each other’s temporary Halloween smiles, through blackened teeth and gums.

We also got some side order croquettes and a squid salad, which is your basic iceberg chunks with canned sweet corn and crispy calamari rings. Their sesame salad dressing is incredible! We used up two full bottles in a few short weeks after returning home from our previous visit. You can conveniently purchase their salad dressings, fukujinzuke, and spicy seasoning up at the counter.

Curry House CoCo Ichibanya’s curry is more like a sauce, runny and thin, generously poured over the toppings rather than simmered with them, like ma used to make. The only exception, I believe, is the stewed meats. You can’t beat their price: starting at around $5 for a waddle-worthy meal.

Some people will point out that these are not Japanese owned, but usually Korean, as they are individually franchise branches, but the curry powder is pre-prepared in Japan, so no biggie, right? They just mispronounce the boisterous “irashaimase” greeting is all. There are so many locations now, even one in Ala Moana Shopping Center and one by Puck’s Alley near UH. In college, it was McCully for late night curry excursions and parking karma tests (we always got a good spot yay!), but Chris and I also tried the Pearl Kai Shopping Center location when we were in the area. CoCo Curry House is hard to pass up! They’re a bit more chatty and lax at the latter, mostly because they speak better English I think.

They used to have a “Curry Challenge”, where if you down a mountain of 1300-2000 grams (roughly 3-4.4 POUNDS) of rice and spicy spicy curry in 20 minutes, your meal is comped and, more importantly, you’d get your polaroid snapped and pasted up on the wall, immortalized. They discontinued this, probably realizing that college kids can eat twice their weight.

TRIVIA TIME: There’s a Curry House CoCo Ichibanya PS2 videogame (Japanese only) built around customer satisfaction and food preparation. In real life, you’ll be hard-pressed to find an unhappy customer, though.

Curry House CoCo Ichibanya
McCully Shopping Center (there are six locations on O’ahu)
1960 Kapi’olani Boulevard - Honolulu, Hawaii - (808) 949-4590
HOURS: Fri-Sat 11a-11:30p, Sun-Th 11a-11p

About the Author:

Kris Kobayashi-Nelson is an avid food adventurist who has tried everything from jellyfish to sea cucumber to chicken gizzards. She despises chocolate. Curry from any country is served up plentifully at the Dreamlogic household.

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