Belated Mother's Day Dinner

Had finals, so we (my family) postponed Mother's Day a bit.. today we finally went out to eat at Kona Grill.

Oriental Salad w/ Macadamia Nut Chicken
Kona Grill (The Domain)
Price: $9.50 + tax/tip

*Picture soon.. need to transfer it to the computer*

Kona Grill apparently is an Arizona-based restaurant chain that recently plopped down in Austin with the opening of "The Domain", an upscale outdoor mall that opened around spring break.  The food has been described as a fusion of Asian and Hawaiian.  In addition to meat/seafood entrées, they serve pizza and sushi.  Yes.  A very interesting combination, to say the least.  They offer seating in an outdoor patio/lounge, at their sushi bar (which faces an aquarium), or in their main dining hall.  We ate in the hall, which offered a rather subdued atmosphere, a bit upscale-ish with dim lighting and dark tones overall.  My only complaint on the atmosphere was that it was a bit noisy.  Service was friendly and efficient, although they don't have any complimentary bread/finger food while you wait, so that was a bit of a letdown.  Overall price range for dishes is from $10~28, with the lower end being things like my salad and their pizzas, and the upper range dominated by fish fillets and steaks.  We discovered at the conclusion of our meal that they have weekday happy hours involving half priced pizzas and half priced sushi rolls; however as this was discovered at the end of our meal, a review of these offerings will have to wait until I have actually had a chance to try it.

From the restaurant website, my dish is described as:

napa cabbage, green onions, almonds and ramen noodles tossed in a vinegar-soy dressing with macadamia nut chicken

The simplicity of the dish almost made me wish i made it myself.  It has very finely shredded napa cabbage, chopped gren onions, and tiny bits of ramen and almonds mixed throughout.  (I actually didn't notice the fried ramen bits while I was eating the majority of the dish.)  The salad itself is very thoroughly tossed in a light, sweet dressing.  We (my sister, her husband, and myself) were trying to identify all of the ingredients of the dressing (which was described on the restaurant menu as a "sweet soy sauce dressing"), and all we could really come up with was definitely sesame seed, sugar, probably a rice vinegar of some sort, and then maybe just a hint (barely discernible, the dish is not salty at all, nor particularly brown) of light soy sauce.  Being a primarily napa cabbage salad, it was a very moist dish, and perhaps for this reason they tried to counter the wetter nature of the salad with dry, very crispy chicken.  However I found this to be the dish's primary flaw.  Chicken meat was overly dry in the beginning.  (Later pieces might have absorbed some of the dressing/water from sitting in the dish longer.)  The outer skin was a bit too crispy in mmy opinion, or at least, in pieces that were too large to be an effective crunchy counter to the salad.  That being said it was still a good dish.

All in all, this was a very good salad.  It was very light and refreshing, which one should expect from a salad.  I was left a bit hungry after eating it, but this is most likely due to the fact that the last time I had eaten anything before this was a bowl of cereal eaten some 12 hours earlier.  So! if you're ever bored on a hot summer day and wish for a cool refreshing salad, and you happen to be in The Domain at that time, I recommend dropping by Kona Grill and trying their oriental salad!  I hope you wont be disappointed, because if so, it means you probably shouldn't be reading my reviews anymore...

Overall Conclusion: One Thumb Up