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The aloha spirit
carries over from the people of Oahu to the food they eat. Plate lunches, a favorite "feel-good," fast food tradition for most locals, are served from mom and pop lunch wagons and neighborhood lunch counters. These home-cooked meals on the go are the preferred lunch staple for businessmen, laborers, students and tourists. For about $5 and a five minute wait, you can get an entree (beef teriyaki, roast pork, shoyu chicken, hamburger steak, beef curry, mahi-mahi and meat loaf are the most popular), two scoops of white rice and macaroni salad, all smothered in rich savory gravy.
Cuisine on Oahu
is as tantalizing and unique as the many different races and ethnicities of people who make up the island. A person could "eat" their way through Oahu for weeks, tasting different ethnic foods, without sampling the same flavors twice. Oahu is the only place in the world that has such a multitude of cuisines, each with an exotic historical and cultural background, and it can be found on one island. Plate lunches have been popular in Hawaii since the late '20s and early '30s, when plantation workers would bring the lunch that their wives made to work in tin boxes and pails with sections for the different dishes. The single men would either have lunch prepared by the plantation wives or they would purchase it from the plantation store nearby. This also is how lunch wagons got started by providing simple and fast meals that people could eat on the go.
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