There are many things our family looks forward to when going to Hawaii and one thing is definitely the food. We’ve visited various Hawaiian islands over the years (especially Hawaii Island) and each island has specific treats we like to have in each place but shave ice is one thing we have on all our trips. On Oahu this means a stop in Haleiwa on Oahu’s North Shore for Matsumoto’s Shave Ice. On our last trip we noticed there was a menu item that wasn’t here years ago-the “ichiban special”.
What is the Ichiban Special at Matsumoto’s Shave Ice
Three of four family members picked this as our treat. The Ichiban Special is shave ice but is also has a scoop of vanilla ice cream, mochi, one flavor of syrup (we chose guava, liloki and mango)Azuki beans and a drizzle of sweetened condensed milk. You can see a bit how it’s created in this video.
But the Ichiban Special also comes in an edible waffle bowl. I was worried it might be like an ice cream waffle cone or cake cone but it was more dense/less porous and really held up even when the shave ice melted into a lot of liquid. The shave ice was as delicious as we expected. The ichiban special was perfect. And the edible bowl was the most unexpectedly tasty and entertaining part of our treat.
Would you try this shave ice special? And have you been to Matsumoto’s in Haleiwa?
(PS. Matsumoto’s looked a lot bigger than when we last visited and we were told they renovated in maybe 2014/2015. Haleiwa was a lot more built up than when we last visited this area and stayed at Turtle Bay ages ago now too. This time we rented a tiny home on the beach in the area and I’ll have more up on the blog about this soon.)
Terumi Pong is a Seattle-based family travel writer and mom of twin teenage boys. She loves coffee and pastries, shopping local and looking for greener ways to live. She is also known as Scout’s mom (Scout is a 5ish pound little black yorkie-poo)
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