Loco moco in Honolulu: what it is, what to order and what to avoid

Overview

Loco moco is the islands’ answer to being hungry and short of money: a bed of white rice, a hamburger patty on top of it, a fried egg on top of that, and brown gravy poured over the lot until it runs into the rice. It is eaten with a fork from a plate or a takeout box, and the point of it is the gravy-soaked rice at the bottom, not the patty. Nothing in it is exotic; what makes it Hawaiian is the logic of the plate lunch it grew up beside, where rice is the base of every meal and the meat is a topping.

It is not Honolulu’s own. The dish comes from Hilo, on the Big Island, and the story the islands tell is a good one: in 1949, at a lunch counter there, teenagers from a local sports club asked the owners for something cheaper and quicker than a sandwich, and got rice in a bowl with a patty and gravy on top. One of the boys was nicknamed “crazy”, hence loco, and moco was added because it rhymed. The broad outline — a Hilo counter, the late 1940s, hungry teenagers — is the accepted history; the details are not settled. Accounts disagree on whether the egg was there from the start or added later, and on which of the boys gave the dish its name. A second Hilo diner is sometimes named as the inventor instead, and is better known for spreading it. Honolulu took it up long ago, and today it is ordinary across Oʻahu: on the menus of drive-ins, diners and plate-lunch counters, at breakfast as much as at lunch.

What to order

The standard, and the version to start with, is the one the name means without qualification: rice, a hamburger patty, one or two fried eggs and brown gravy. Ask for it plain — “a loco moco” — and that is what arrives, usually as a plate with a scoop of macaroni salad on the side, the plate-lunch companion that comes with almost everything here.

Two choices are worth making when you order:

• The egg. Sunny side up is the classic way, and the runny yolk is part of the sauce. If you want it otherwise, say so: over easy keeps the yolk soft, over hard sets it.
• The size. Some counters offer a mini portion beside the regular, and the regular is a large meal. If you want to try more than one dish in a day, the mini is the one to ask for.

The name has become a template, and the menu words follow a pattern: what replaces the patty comes first. Spam loco swaps in slices of fried Spam, the luncheon meat Hawaiʻi eats more of per person than any other state; kalua loco uses kalua pork, pork cooked whole in an underground oven and shredded, the centrepiece of the Hawaiian feast; there are versions with fish, with Portuguese sausage and with tofu. Some counters offer a mushroom gravy beside the brown one. All of these are legitimate and local; none of them is the one to judge the dish by. Order the plain version first, because it is the one where the gravy and the rice have to do all the work, and where you can tell whether they did.

What to avoid

The thing that sinks a loco moco is the gravy, and it is easy to see. Good brown gravy here is glossy and pours: thick enough to coat, loose enough to soak into the rice. A gravy that sits on top in a set, matte layer and never reaches the rice has missed the point of the dish, which is the rice underneath, not a tidy plate.

The second is the patty. The dish was built around an ordinary hamburger patty, and a counter that makes its own will show it in an irregular shape and a browned edge. A perfectly round, uniform disc with printed grill marks has most likely come out of a freezer.

Then there is the upmarket loco moco, which is a real thing here and a different one: resort breakfast menus and some restaurants serve versions with wagyu, short rib, lobster or foie gras at several times the price of the counter plate. They can be good food, but they are a chef’s comment on the dish rather than the dish, and they tell you nothing about why the islands eat it. If the menu describes the gravy at length and the price is in the high twenties of dollars or above, you are reading that kind of menu.

Practicalities

At a drive-in, a diner or a plate-lunch counter, expect to pay roughly $10 to $20 for a regular plate; a mini portion costs less, a resort breakfast version considerably more. It is ordered at a counter and eaten at an outdoor table, in the car, or taken away in a closed foam or paper box, which is also how a great many locals eat it, so a box is no sign of a lesser version.

It is as much breakfast as lunch: plenty of counters serve it from breakfast, and a loco moco at seven in the morning is an ordinary order, not an eccentric one. It is heavy enough that it replaces a meal rather than adding to one, and it does not travel well beyond half an hour, when the rice has drunk the gravy and the egg has set. Eat it where you buy it, or nearby.

It is also the dish that makes most sense after the ocean. A morning of surfing or swimming, then rice, meat, egg and gravy, is close to the use it was invented for; the hungry teenagers of the story would recognize the order.