Hanai Vancouver — Restaurant in Vancouver

My husband and I went with some friends to try the Ohana menu at Hanai on Commercial Drive. Ohana is a Hawaiian word which means "family"; the menu is aptly named as it is a Family style multi-course tasting menu. Oh wow...what a tasting menu! Multiple courses with multiple dishes within each course to try.

Favourites: Cucumbers with a furikake sour cream dip - We all loved this dip, including my husband who's usually not a big fan of sour cream. It was served with cucumbers but when the cucumbers ran out and we still had some dip left, I started dipping other foods on the table into it, and everything I dipped tasted even better with the furikake sour cream on it!

Vermicelli noodles with a vegetarian sauce: I'm not sure what this sauce was made of. Based on its appearance, my best guess would be olive oil and soy sauce. Whatever it was, it tasted amazing on top of the vermicelli noodles. I'm Pescatarian which is why the restaurant offered me this Vegetarian sauce. There was actually another sauce on the table for the other 3 people in our group who were all meat eaters. However, even the meat eaters tried the vegetarian sauce and seemed to like it better than their sauce. They said the Vegetarian sauce had more depth of flavor to it.

Yellow zucchini with...I don't even know what the sauce was made of but it was awesome!

Fun Rice: There was a green sauce on the table that was made up of taro, coconut milk and swiss chard. I kept eating the fun rice together with this sauce and it was a heavenly match.

The two desserts: Yes, not one but two. We were so stuffed already and then they brought out not one, but two desserts for us! One of them was called Kulolo. It actually appeared on the printed a la carte menu. It was described as "Dolce amore fior di latte, shoyu caramel, sweet kulolo." Hanai serves Hawaiian food but they seem to be borrowing a bit from the Italians for this one. Doesn't "Dolce amore" mean "sweet love" in Italian? Well, whatever they did to the Kulolo...it was sweet and I loved it! I don't have a name for the other dessert. It had about 4 different layers in it, if not more and it was divine. Hawaiians seem to enjoy using taro a lot. Taro seemed to be a recurring theme in these desserts.

They certainly took their time in serving us our food. We arrived shortly past 6:45pm and when we left the restaurant it was about 10:15pm. We were there for nearly 3 1/2 hours! Apparently there are only 2 people working in the kitchen, so I suppose that might account for the slow pace of things. Our server did notice that my little pot of hot water was low, or even empty and offered to top it up for me a couple of times. That was good. It would have been nice if they'd checked on us a bit more often though and refilled my hot water a few more times as 3 1/2 hours is an exceptionally long time to spend at a restaurant.

Service: Good. Parking: 🚗Free parking if you're lucky enough to find any, otherwise it's paid parking. Location: On Commercial Drive with lots of other...

Hanai has been a new restaurant that I’ve been meaning to try in a while. My friend was able to make a reservation for a Saturday night at 7:00pm - definitely make a reservation online because a lot of walk-ins were turned away.

The restaurant itself is quite cute and aesthetic. Service was not bad as well. But the food… it was truly just mediocre.

Shoyu beef - thinly sliced beef with cabbage underneath. This dish was pretty small for the price you’re paying, but at least tasted good.

Crab fried noodles - again, small portions, but at least yummy.

Squid luau - the server actually recommended this dish and recommended it with the bread, but wow, we didn’t even finish this dish. It was actually so unpleasant that I had to tell another server we did not like it at all. It was like 5 small tiny pieces of squid chopped up on top a huge pile of coconut Swiss chard taro sauce. Was I supposed to dip the squid in it? The sauce was like creamed spinach - was i supposed to eat the sauce? A very confusing and truly bad dish that I will tell my friends to stay away from because it really ruined our meal.

Butter mochi - the saviour of our dinner. Very tasty coconut brown butter mochi with charred pineapple pieces on top of a sweet pineapple sauce.

Oh, another tip, if you get cold easily don’t sit near the patio door. It’s a sliding door and the servers leave it open all night to get to the...

Thought I would try this restaurant because of the recent Michelin review and boy, was the food disappointing.

The ube bun was creative, but it's just a dinner roll and some seaweed flavored butter. Except that you pay for it. Makes you wonder why this is even on their menu..

Their fried capelin resembles a famous chinese food called "doh chun yu". Plenty roe fish. It's cheap and inexpensive to make, something I only picture seeing at some bargain chinese food court. My server commented how the roe taste "umami". I dont really see how.

After a lonnnnng wait, my guest and I were extra hungry.

I finally see our server coming out with the rest of our food. Being carried over in a small round dish, I couldnt help but to think to myself "wait, hold on, I did not order macaroni n cheese?" Nope, this was their version of Udon n Cheese and nothing else about it. Just an udon with lots of cheese, bechamel sauce, butter and probably more butter.

Now it possibly can't get any worse, could it?

Last dish arrives and allow me to simply describe their fried kingfish steak. It was dry, overcooked, fishy and so bland that we couldn't even finish it. At this point, we were still very hungry.

Overall, the servers were nice and we enjoyed the cocktails very much. But I wouldn't recommend eating here to any...