As most of you know, my sleep schedule has been fairly backwards while Ed is in Afghanistan.  It’s gotten to the point where I usually wake up around 5:30pm and stay up all night, and into the next morning, usually sleeping at around 10:30am.  Well, around 6:00am this morning, the craving for a traditional Japanese-style breakfast struck me, and I became fixated on it.  Knowing that my roommate, Gabe, had wanted to get breakfast with me this morning, I waited for him to wake up before suggesting we try Yoshitsune Restaurant, which came recommended on Yelp when I searched for Japanese-style breakfast places in the throes of my craving.

Yoshitsune is located within the Park Shore hotel in Waikiki, across the street from the Honolulu Zoo parking lot (now $0.25/15 minutes on the meters). It has a small, quiet location inside the hotel lobby, and once you’re inside it feels very traditional and comfortable. We were greeted by our very friendly hostess, who quickly sat us down after we said we were there for breakfast, and brought us tea almost immediately.

The green tea was delicate, but flavorful, and the perfect temperature. After we made our orders (broiled salmon for me, misoyaki butterfish for Gabe), we sat enjoying our tea. Before long, she brought out our pickled vegetables.

The tsukemono was delicious, tasting less like the extremely salty bottled stuff often found in take-out bentos here, and more like how my grandmother used to make it at home for us. I probably ate it too quickly to be proper, but it was exactly what I’d been wanting.

However, as far as packaged things go, she did include a little packet of the teriyaki flavored nori that I always love to munch on. Then came the miso soup, which was also very good. She told us that she would refill our soup bowls as much as we wanted, much to Gabe’s delight.

Then came the rice, eggs, and fish. Now, when we made our orders, she asked me if I could handle raw eggs, and I said I could, immediately thinking of cracking raw eggs into ramen, or maybe the runny egg of a loco moco. She seemed surprised, and Gabe said that he’d like his cooked, and as she returned to the kitchen I began to doubt my bravado, but decided to go with it for the sake of the experience. Once she came back with a room-temperature raw egg in a bowl, she explained that I was to crack the egg into the bowl, add some shoyu, and then pour it over my rice. This is what it looked like:

The flavor wasn’t bad at all, but it was the texture of the raw egg whites that got to me. Sadly, the rice wasn’t hot enough to even slightly cook the egg, but I still managed to consume the entire bowl with the help of salty hijiki seaweed and bites of ume (pickled, salty apricot) to distract me from the texture with extreme flavors.

As for my broiled salmon, it was quite satisfactory. It came from the kitchen quite hot, with the skin crispy and crackling. It was even mostly without bones, much to my pleasure as I watched Gabe pick several tiny bones out of his butterfish.

Finally, we ended the meal with a dessert of fresh Maui Gold pineapple. We had told our hostess we were both from Maui, so she served us our pineapple with a wink. It was the perfect sweetness without being too acidic, and was a great way to finish up.

My broiled salmon was $14, while Gabe’s misoyaki butterfish was $18. Not too bad, and it was a filling meal, but just not practical as a common meal for our college/post-college budgets. I really need to start cooking more Japanese food at home.

In the meantime, if you ever find yourself with a craving for Japanese breakfast like I did, I can definitely recommend Yoshitsune as an option for satisfaction! There were a few other places recommended to me on Twitter that I will eventually try, and if I do I will post about it here!

Yoshitsune serves breakfast until 10:30am, but they also serve lunch and dinner!

Yoshitsune Restaurant
2586 Kalakaua Avenue
Honolulu, HI 96815-6614
(808) 926-5616