Sweet Home Cafe

Hotpot, shabu shabu, nabe: The field of “cook-your-own in simmering soup” has expanded faster than dried noodles in broth. But one of the first hotpot restaurants in Honolulu—Sweet Home Cafe—is still the best. Many factors make it so: more than a dozen soup options (Healthy Herb and Spicy with Sour Cabbage are favorites) and a seemingly endless array of food to drop in the bubbling broth, including vivid, frozen curls of beef, pork and lamb; tofu varieties that soak up the soup like a sponge; dark, peppery, herby Chinese greens; and more in the shape of seafood balls, mushrooms and noodles. Add to that 15 different dipping sauces, and you’ve got enough possible permutations to come every day for a year (we’ve thought about it) and never taste the same soup twice. But perhaps the grandest spectacle of all? The everything-but-the-kitchen-sink shave ice that caps every meal, a gloriously messy bowl of shave ice that might include various fruit-flavored jellies, tapioca, custard, coffee flan and red beans. It arrives right around the 90-minute mark of your meal, plunked down unbidden, signaling the end of a dinner that we wish could last forever.