Part of my series of where to eat in Maui. On Kihei, 808 Bistro serves some very tasty brunch items.
In case you didn’t know, TSK Eats Maui is a collection of my eating experiences when I was on vacation in Maui. Why did I decided to write this? While I don’t claim to be an expert in eating around Maui or Hawaii for that matter, I was quite frustrated when I was looking for guides on where to eat in Maui, but couldn’t find any other than the generic listings on Yelp and such. Hopefully someone will eventually find this information useful. Any foodie will know that one of the worse things that one can experience while on vacation is to waste a meal on bad food.
808 Bistro is a chain of restaurants, cafes and bistros all under the 808 branding. While I don’t know much of their exact origins, I know they are all over Hawaii and quite popular.
When we arrived at 8am, the place was already packed. The decor is open air and very casual. The wait-staff were mature, but very friendly and welcoming.
I had the whale pie, a slab of ham with cheese and lots of brown gravy, resting on top of a plate of hash browns. Ham was quite salty, I would’ve enjoyed it more if it was replaced with a burger patty like a loco moco. Nevertheless, the taste of the dish on the whole was very savoury and pleasant.
Hash browns and gravy, you can never go wrong with that, but people are not doing it enough.
The banana bread french toast was highly raved about. My experience was that it was a decent piece of banana bread, dipped in egg wash, seared and sprinkled with powdered sugar. Quite sweet on it’s own, yet still paired with a well of maple syrup. Texture was soft and wobbly. It would have been fantastic if the crust was actually crisp, but alas, it ate more like a cake. In my opinion? Overrated, can be improved.
For some reason, the missus chose the curry omelette for breakfast; A somewhat heavy hitting spiced dish for breakfast. Paired with toast and hash browns, the omelette was topped with slices of avocado, and still slightly runny within. The filling was expectedly laced with curry spices, fortunately not too spicy on the tongue. All in all not too bad, i suppose the word “curry” is somewhat rare in menus around these parts, hence quite a few tables were also allured by it, and ordered the curry omelette as well.
Coffee was decent.