Hawaiian Barbecue Is This Late-Night Doughnut Shop’s Secret Weapon

The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.

In our quest to document the Bay Area’s sweetest and most sacred late-night haunts, let us not forget the humble doughnut shop. Temples to sweet-tooth possessors, havens for night owls and scratch lotto addicts, these fried pastry purveyors are often the only food business within a several-mile radius that’s open past midnight.

Located in a quiet Palo Alto strip mall, SH Hawaiian BBQ & Donuts isn’t a colorful, bustling hangout spot like a Bob’s. (During our visit on a recent Friday night, it was almost completely empty.) It doesn’t have the surreal weirdness of a Silver Crest Donut Shop (R.I.P.). It isn’t quite open 24 hours. It doesn’t even sell lotto scratchers.

The one thing the doughnut shop/Hawaiian barbecue hybrid is committed to, though, is feeding anyone with a case of late-night munchies — and not just with doughnuts, but noodle soups, rice bowls and full-on Hawaiian plate lunches.

The restaurant falls vaguely in the same category as the kind of Cambodian-owned doughnut shop that sells lemongrass-scented meat skewers and sticky-sweet chicken wings on the side — except the savory food menu is even broader and more eclectic. As its name indicates, the shop is best known for Hawaiian barbecue, but like other Bay Area restaurants in this genre, it rounds out its menu with a wide array of Hawaiian and Chinese American takeout standards. There’s Spam musubi, of course, along with other comfort food favorites like loco moco and kalua pork. You can order a Hawaiian-Japanese beef curry plate, a bowl of wonton soup, and about a half-dozen different variations on saimin (Hawaii’s homegrown, ramen-like noodle soup).

There’s even Vietnamese pho on the menu, even if we weren’t quite feeling frisky enough to try it on this particular visit. The dining room looks the part, too: the bottles of sriracha and sweet chili sauce (and, why not, green Tabasco) on every table, the flatscreen TV perpetually tuned to cable news, and the Christmas decorations still lit up in the middle of July. It’s a pleasantly chill late-night coffee shop vibe (though the place seems to mostly do a lot of takeout business).

In any case, if you’re in the mood for a big, meaty Hawaiian plate lunch at 2 o’clock in the morning — and you won’t believe how often I get this specific late-night craving — this is your spot. The good news is that the food at SH is as tasty as we had hoped, especially if you stick to the straightforward offerings on the barbecue side of the menu.

If you’re feeling particularly famished, go for the “BBQ Mix” plate, which for about $17 comes jam-packed with teriyaki-glazed grilled chicken, beef and kalbi-style on-the-bone short ribs, two scoops of rice, and one scoop of excellent, mayonnaise-y mac salad. The chicken and the short ribs, in particular, were excellent — juicy and flavorful with a nicely caramelized char. It was such a generous plate of food, the takeout carton still had an impressive heft to it even after we’d eaten half of it.

Maybe it was the lateness of the hour, but SH’s version of even something as ubiquitous as Spam musubi impressed us. Past midnight, where else can you get musubi where the Spam comes hot off the grill and the crisp nori is freshly toasted?

Of course, we couldn’t visit a late-night doughnut shop without scoring at least a couple of doughnuts, and in this regard too, SH’s offerings seemed to be a few notches better and more varied than the norm. In addition to the standard doughnut purveyor’s selection of crullers, cake doughnuts, variously-filled-and-glazed raised doughnuts, and breakfast sandwiches, the shop also sells trendier items — maple-bacon bars, for instance, and doughnuts topped with ube-taro, Fruity Pebbles or Cinnamon Toast Crunch. (“Some young person is affiliated with this business,” I wrote in my notes.)

In the end, I opted for a classic apple fritter — a gargantuan specimen, and one of several different fritter varieties on offer. The first bite was the best bite: those wonderfully crisp edges, rich and oily without being too sweet. The sudden urge I felt to scratch off a lotto ticket notwithstanding, it was the perfect way to close out the night.

SH Hawaiian BBQ & Donuts (3890 El Camino Real, Palo Alto) is open Mon.–Wed. 9 a.m.–2 a.m., Thu.–Sat. 8 a.m.–3 a.m. and Sun. 8 a.m.–2 a.m.