Adela's Country Eatery

Adela's Country Eatery is a takeout restaurant on Kamehameha Highway in Kaneohe, on the windward coast of Oahu, Hawaii. It is known for colourful handmade noodles in which part of the flour is replaced with island produce.

Adela Visitacion and Millie Chan opened it in 2019 at the corner of Kamehameha Highway and Lilipuna Road. The owners learned noodle-making on a trip to Hokkaido in Japan, and an earlier visit to the Big Island set them experimenting with local crops. Visitacion makes the noodles herself, mixing the dough in noodle machines brought from Japan, and the noodles are also dried and packed for sale.

Breadfruit (‘ulu), purple sweet potato (ube), taro (kalo), moringa (malunggay) and avocado go into the dough, bought from small farmers who bring their harvest to the door. Hawaii imports more than 80 per cent of its food, and the owners see their noodles as one way to rely less on imports; despite their colours, they do not taste sweet. The woman- and minority-owned shop reached the Yelp list of the Top 100 places to eat in the United States in 2023.

Taro noodles come in a creamy shrimp sauce, ube noodles with garlic shrimp, and lechon is served over green malunggay pasta. Island favourites sit beside them, among them a hamburger steak with a mushroom demi-glace, loco moco on fried rice, kalua pig with cabbage and macadamia-crusted fish. A half chicken with garlic butter for dipping is cooked to order, and ube cheesecake is the dessert regulars ask for. Portions are large and waits can be long, which matters little to customers who come for noodles found nowhere else on the island.