Maui Restaurants and Hotels

Market Fresh Bistro, a small restaurant with a shady patio, was the choice, and I made another one when I ordered a very special eggs benedict: seared blackened ahi, topped with local eggs that had yolks of impossibly bright orange, and a light and bright hollandaise.

When I checked into my luxurious cottage, I very much appreciated that the room set up not only included the expected high end coffee maker, and fresh creamer in the fridge, but local coffee beans, whole, and a grinder. It’s going to be very hard for me to appreciate room equipped with foil packets of stale ground coffee in the future. Other hotels take note! This is what a true coffee aficionado wants. The only thing that could have made it better would have been a French press.

The hotel’s restaurant, I have heard it said, is not what it used to be. This was my first time there, and so I can’t compare it to the past, but I admit to being surprised by the complaint: I found everything to be fresh and well-prepared. The kitchen displayed a great deal of creativity with the wide availability of fresh ahi -- I enjoyed it at lunch on a Cobb salad, at dinner as an appetizer, both sashimi’d and tartared on a wonton crisp, and as an entrée wrapped in nori. An extensive and well-selected wine list accompanies.

This is a fruit farm, but if you’re picturing wandering among tame and orderly rows of pineapples, think again: this is a rain forest, and the owners believe in making use of proximity. What appears like dense rain forest is yielding delicious and exotic fruit varieties, certified organic and non-GMO. For some varieties, ONO is one of a very few providers that makes this available.

You want to arrive on time, because the heart of the experience is a fruit tasting. If you’re not wild about fruit, the thought of eating fruit for an hour can at first strike you as tedious. But think expansively: coffee is a fruit. Chocolate is a fruit. Some things that you never heard of are fruits: star apple (not to be confused with star fruit), egg fruit, durian, rambuton, take their place on your plate, as they are freshly sliced before your eyes, along with more conventional fruits: papaya and banana.

The tasting ends with a sampling of ONO’s house made preserves, which simply have to be sampled to be believed. It is hard to imagine that much flavor making its way into something that looks like jam. It’s hard to resist stocking up, but the good news is that while ONO cannot ship fruit to the mainland, they can ship their preserves.