Wei Wei Bar-B-Q

Homemade noodles, manapua and buffet are popular attractions at Pukalani restaurant

By BONNIE FRIEDMAN, Contributing Writer Most folks are familiar with the enormously popular Wei Wei Bar-B-Q & Noodle House in Wailuku. Opened 13 years ago (is that possible?!), it caught on quickly and is now, in the words of owner Shao Wei Xiao (known as "Wei"), a very busy and successful restaurant. If you haven't eaten lunch there or grabbed a takeout order for an easy dinner at home, it's a safe bet you've probably enjoyed at least one of the restaurant's favorites at a neighbor's potluck or a family party. The roast duck, char siu and, most especially, the big aluminum pans of house cake noodle fly out the door for every sort of special occasion.

What some folks may not know about is Wei Wei's second location in the Pukalani Terrace Center. The bright, comfortable, neighborhood-style restaurant will celebrate its second anniversary in May.

"Upcountry really had no good Asian food so we started thinking about it a long time ago," says Wei, who laughed when I asked if he'd named the restaurants after himself (yes, he did!).

"People knew us. It's not so hard to expand a popular business." It was simply a matter of finding the right location. The space, smack dab in the middle of the Upcountry shopping center anchored on one end by Bank of Hawaii and at the other by Foodland, turned out to be exactly what he'd been looking for. He says he sells a lot of "snacks" - manapua, rice cakes, quick bites - as customers dash in and out of Wei Wei as they move through their shopping center errand lists. The new big seller is baked char siu manapua.

The one big difference between the two restaurants is the buffet in Pukalani. Customers create their own one-, two-, three- or more-entree combination plates from a steam table filled with beef, pork, chicken, shrimp and vegetable dishes. The regular menu is the same as the one offered in Wailuku -with a wide variety of Cantonese-style dishes and island-style barbecue dishes. The barbecue short ribs, sweet and sour ribs, and barbecue teri steak, chicken and pork are meat lovers' go-to choices. There are always specials - roast duck and char siu with rice, kau yuk & ginger chicken with rice and house udon with char siu and teri chicken on one recent Saturday. Miniplates that include one scoop of rice and one scoop of mac salad with protein choices like hamburger steak, chicken katsu or cutlet, and mahimahi - are plenty filling for those with smaller appetites. Even your finicky 5-year-old will stop whining - with a hamburger or grilled cheese or a tuna sandwich. Yes, of course, with fries.

Nothing makes Wei's face light up like talk of noodles.

"We make all our own noodles," Wei says with an accomplished cook's true sense of pride. "The noodles for the house cake noodle, house fried noodle, Singapore noodles, saimin, even the udon noodles, all homemade."

A native of Canton who came to Maui in 1985, he learned to cook in his native China where he also learned the art of noodle-making. Oh, he can pull noodles - that showy way noodle makers start with a ball of dough and end up with hundreds of strands of many-yard-long noodles. But he prefers - and it's much more practical and takes much less room - to make them in a way similar to pasta, by kneading the dough and cutting them by machine.

"You have to be very strong to make noodles that way," he says.

Wei's noodles in all their incarnations, are indeed, delicious. It's no wonder Wei Wei is best known for house cake noodle - crunchy squares of noodles topped with a saucy combination of vegetables, chicken, shrimp, char siu and calamari. I've enjoyed this specialty more times than I can count. But I'd never had the house fried noodle and it's my new favorite. A bunch of light, puffy, quick-fried noodles swirled into a nest that holds the same combination of ingredients as top the cake noodle.

Wei sums up his culinary philosophy by saying that "Quality is number one. I teach the cooks, ˜You need to eat what you cook and like it if you expect the customers to eat it and like it.' " Try it. You'll like it.