Spirit of Aloha | Features | May/June 2004

Food from the Heart
A Brief History of Hawaiian Cuisine
By Jerry Hopkins

Spam is the soul food, but Hawai'i regional cuisine is now on the world map

My cardiologist wants me to stop writing about food, especially since spending two weeks in Hawai'i rediscovering what's called "Local Food."

Consider his dilemma. He's trying to keep my cholesterol level below 200 and five minutes from downtown Honolulu there's a place called Masu's Massive Plate Lunch. The "plate lunch" is an outgrowth of the Japanese lunch box, called bento, and Paul Masuoka is the champion of this cultural phenomenon. Consider, as Exhibit A, "Masu's Massive Banzai Bento," a meal that includes (quoting the menu) "Charcoal Broiled Sirloin Steak, Teriyaki Sauce, Fried Shrimp Tempura, Kalua Pig, Fried Chicken, Baked Spam, Shoyu Hot Dogs, and Crab Lobster Potato Salad." All for just $6.85.

When I showed the menu to my doc, I thought he was going to have a heart attack.

Masu is not a culinary aberration. In Hawai'i, he's a folk hero-a popular disc jockey gave him the "Massive" part of his name-and people all over the Islands, in mom-and-pop joints and in the plate lunch wagons that roll up every noontime wherever the lunch crowds work, are his acolytes. There's always a choice of plates, but all feature Western protein (stew, meat loaf, chicken) swimming in gravy with two ice cream scoops of steamed rice and one of macaroni salad. The quantity of food is Western; the rice, style of cooking (katsu, teriyaki, Korean barbecue) and the chopsticks are all Asian.

I told my physician to take two nitroglycerin pills and call me in the morning.

It wasn't always this good in Hawai'i. The truth is, back when Hawai'i really was a paradise-before the first humans arrived about 700 A.D.-there was nothing to eat.

Oh, there were fish in the sea, but on land there were only some fiddlehead ferns, a little fruit in the mountains and the occasional bird, blown off course from the closest landfall, some 2,500 miles away. That's what made Hawai'i's pre-human cuisine virtually nonexistent. Its remoteness.

Then the migrations began. First, the Polynesians sailed from the Marquesas and Tahiti with seeds and cuttings for taro, breadfruit, sweet potato, sugar cane, coconut, mountain apple and plenty of protein: chickens, pigs and dogs. Thus, the first "local" cuisine was formed. The dogs, by the way, were fed a vegetarian diet and generally were cooked for royal feasts, their teeth strung together later to form rattles men wore on their ankles while dancing the ancient hula.

The second migration started in 1820, with the arrival of missionaries from New England, followed by whalers, plantation owners and ranchers, who introduced Western tastes in food and drink, bringing cabbage, beans, coffee, watermelon, pineapple, white potatoes, tomatoes, grapes and, notably, cattle and distilled spirits. Hawai'i was beginning to sound like everywhere else.

The third migration came ashore in two waves, first from southern China, Okinawa, Korea, the Azores, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, from about 1850 up to the 1930s, to work in the sugar and pineapple fields, and from the 1970s, refugees from Southeast Asia, mainly Vietnamese, Thai and Laotian. With their meager belongings, they all packed their individual food preferences.

The result is one of history's most remarkable creole cuisines, and purest creole language, "pidgin," where food is called "grinds" and when enjoyed declared 'ono (Hawaiian for delicious) or "da kine" (pidgin for "the best") or food that "broke da mout." Inevitably, and sometimes humorously, the two are as blended as the races that created them. In The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawai'i's Culinary Heritage, Rachel Laudan was tickled to find that the "vastly popular Japanese rice ball, the musubi, and the universally used soy sauce, called shoyu in Hawai'i, are celebrated in greeting cards declaring, 'It musubi your birthday,' or 'Shoyu care'.

"But it is more than a matter of jokes and greeting cards," according to Lauden, Hawai'i's first true food historian. "In a society that has little in common except the language 'pidgin,' where neither religion, nor literature, nor art, nor music, nor social customs, nor a long shared history provide a common ground, local food serves as an important, indeed essential, basis that glues the diverse peoples of Hawai'i together."

Many of these people go to Ono Hawaiian Foods, a hole-in-the-wall just 10 minutes by cab from Waikïkï that was founded 40 years ago by a Japanese woman and her Korean husband. When I lived in the Islands some years ago, the combo plate was my favorite, because it included both kalua pig (oven-baked with liquid smoke to a sugary tenderness) and laulau (chicken or pork baked inside a fist-size ball of taro leaves). Other dishes included lomilomi salmon (salmon belly finely chopped with tomatoes and green onion), a hubcap-size plate of rice or a bowl of poi, the pureed taro root that looks and tastes a bit like library paste but goes down superbly with sea salt and thick slices of Maui onion, always served on the side.

And this is the way it was until fairly recently. "Local food" meant a "loco moco" for breakfast-a soup bowl of rice topped with a hamburger, a fried egg and half-a-pint of brown gravy-followed by one of Masu's Angina Specials for lunch and, to get you through the afternoon before deciding what to have for supper, a bag of crack seed, preserved Chinese fruits shiny with syrup, frosted with sugar, or so salty they made it impossible to speak for half-an-hour after eating one.

Stay with me, doc. Many agreed with you. Local people loved this stuff, mind you-still do-but the standing joke about a holiday in Hawai'i was that the best food was on the jet coming to the Islands. Some said the menus in Hawai'i hotels were an argument to go to the Caribbean instead. Why, for years Dole dumped pineapple juice into Pearl Harbor, considering it a waste product, and the Royal Hawaiian Hotel had a fountain of the stuff in the lobby.

Then came the Gang of Twelve, Island chefs who found themselves calling each other all the time in their quest for the perfect, locally grown tomato. The key words are "locally grown." Before the Dishy Dozen came along-10 men and two women, from a chop suey of ethnic origins, as is appropriate in the Islands-a lot of not-very-good-food was imported along with the tourists.

"We were just a bunch of chefs who got together to drink beer and share sources for fresh food," says Beverly Gannon, one of the original group. "Most of the fish arrived frozen from Japan and the asparagus spent a week in a warehouse in Los Angeles on its way to me."

The plan devised by the chefs, a majority of them working in upmarket hotel kitchens at the time, was twofold. First, with the cooperation of the state Department of Agriculture, they produced a directory of sources, while taking advantage of the shrinking inventory of land dedicated to sugar and "pine" to encourage more farmers to grow fresh vegetables, and, significantly, guaranteeing their sale, even at high-end prices. They also commissioned local hunters to bring boar and venison from the mountains.

The second goal was to put Hawai'i cuisine on the world map. They called their "movement" Hawai'i Regional Cuisine (HRC), and it's no accident that one of the earliest photographs of the group was taken with an early supporter and sponsor: Shep Gordon, who bought his Maui beach house with money earned managing Alice Cooper, Raquel Welch and other entertainment celebrities. This was a culinary campaign aimed at creating kitchen stars-at least, that's the way Gordon saw it-and some have become just that, with or without his help.

The distance between the plate lunch and what HRC chefs now decorously arrange on their plates is vast, of course; today you get culinary architecture, tablecloths and the cup of macadamia nut coffee at the end of the meal may even cost as much as Masu's Massive You Know What. However, the chefs have not forsaken their ethnic roots.

Say howzit (pidgin again) to Sam Choy, a 350-pounder whose Chinese great-grandfather on his dad's side came to the Islands to grow taro and his German-Hawaiian great-grandfather on his mom's side immigrated to forge machinery to extract sugar cane. In what appears to be a desire to make us all as big as he is, his "sunrise specials" include a three-egg omelet with beef stew and a mound of white rice the size of half a soccer ball. For appetizers in the evening, the menu includes Baked Portuguese Sausage Crusted Oysters and Fried Brie Cheese Wonton. Order ice cream for dessert and you get a pint; another choice is ice cream pie with an Oreo cookie crust. Sam says he cooked in pots the size of kettle drums while growing up, because his father ran a catering service, so he didn't even know they made small pots until he went to culinary school. The motto on the T-shirts and aprons sold at his six restaurants-stretching from San Diego to Guam-is "Never Trust a Skinny Chef."

Hey, doc. Sam told me he has a personal trainer nowadays, and in his second book he introduced "The Choy of Low-Fat Cooking," suggesting nonfat mayonnaise and the like, although I bet he doesn't use it in his own kitchens. Of the 12 chefs in our panorama, I hasten to add that Sam is the only really big one.

Roy Yamaguchi may have the most impressive resume, with more than 30 restaurants and a toque that says "The Iron Chef," which he earned by representing Asian cooking. He's the son of a Maui-born Okinawan who met Roy's mom when he was in the U.S. Army in Japan following World War II. Roy was trained at the Culinary Institute of America, apprenticed at L'Escoffier and L'Ermitage in Los Angeles, cooked at Michael's in Santa Monica and was named California Chef of the Year before he opened the first Roy's on O'ahu in 1988. This is where young Island chefs cook in an open kitchen, wearing backward-turned baseball caps, preparing dishes with what Yamaguchi calls "strong, assertive flavors and unusual combinations."

For example, doc-and I think this will make you feel a little better-blackened Island tuna in a spicy, hot soy mustard and butter sauce (okay, ignore the butter), grilled chicken with black bean mango salsa and crispy taro, and curried lemongrass-crusted swordfish salad with red ginger-soy vinaigrette. At first, Roy called his food "Euro-Asian" and says that it might have worked to identify a mixed-blood actress in Hollywood-remember Frances Nuyen in The World of Suzie Wong?-but it confused diners. He substituted "Hawaiian Fusion" on his business cards a few years ago.

Alan Wong, whose mother was Japanese-Chinese and his father Chinese-Hawaiian, grew up near O'ahu's pineapple fields, worked first as a dishwasher for Don the Beachcomber, graduated from an Island culinary school, apprenticed at Lutece in New York and opened his own restaurant in Honolulu in 1995, winning a Gourmet Top Table award four years later. Using phrases like "Culinary Melting Pot" and "New Wave Lü'au," the menu at the restaurant that bears his name offers such dishes as Spiny Lobster Wonton Ravioli in Curry Potato Sauce, and Duck Tacos with a ginger-flavored guacamole that also contains sake from his own distillery, co-owned with the rock singer Alice Cooper's manager.

"We broke away from continental cuisine," Alan says. "We became more ethnic. It's not authentic. Of course, it's not authentic. It's American!" (For more on Alan Wong, Aloha Airlines' Consulting Chef for first-class service and Enhanced Coach Class, see page 131).

One more. Beverly Gannon, one of the group's two women and one of the minority of Westerners, is a Texan who says she was raised in the Jewish tradition of "eat, eat, eat." She ran a catering business in Los Angeles, cooking for Liza Minnelli, Joey Heatherton and Ben Vereen on tour, then studied at Le Cordon Bleu in London and took classes with Marcella Hazan and Jacques Pepin, settling in Maui in 1981 to cook for vacationing rock stars who didn't want the hassle of going out to eat. She now operates the Hali'imaile General Store, a restaurant named for the 75-year-old plantation grocery, post office and dry goods market it was before she knocked out the walls, moved in seating for 130 and put bouquets on all the tables. She calls her food "Hawai'i Regional (with American and International Flavors)" and dishes such as Szechuan Barbecued Salmon topped with a sauce of caramelized onions, garlic, orange peel, Szechuan peppercorns and fresh herbs, and a rack of lamb marinated in hoisin, sesame and Oriental black beans made hers one of Gourmet's Top Tables in 1997.

Remember how surprised we were, doc, when Wolfgang Puck put duck on a pizza?

When I moved to Hawai'i in 1976, some of the best food was on those jumbo jets. A charming Frenchman named Michel had a nice place in Waikïkï, but beyond that there was only a commercial lü'au or two. Then came the Japanese tourists and, in this fashion, Hawai'i became America's sushi beachhead. But that was about it, until Bev and Roy and Sam and Alan and their pals came along, and with them people like Duc Nguyen and Keo Sananikone.

Duc was in the South Vietnamese army and escaped from Saigon a few days before the war ended in 1975. This was about the same time Keo was sneaked across the border into Thailand from Laos, with his well-connected but suddenly politically incorrect family. Today, their restaurants are generally accepted as flagships of Island Vietnamese and Thai cuisine. That means that Duc's Bistro serves Escargot Chablisienne and Veloute d'Asparagus, but cooks with nuoc mam, the tangy, fermented fish sauce that's used in Vietnam instead of salt. His coffee is also from Vietnam, now the world's largest producer of robusta and the second-largest producer to Brazil overall. Keo's, Waikïkï restaurant, with photographs at the entrance of the owner posing with visiting Hollywood stars, is known for something you'll never find in Thailand or Laos, a chicken, chili, ginger, lemon grass and coconut milk concoction called Evil Jungle Prince.

There are now 10,000 Vietnamese living in Hawai'i, and no one knows how many Thais or Laotians. Hawaiian residents of Japanese descent are the largest ethnic group, at 30 something percent. Caucasians now account for another 30 percent, and more than half of all marriages are racially mixed. Dining competition throughout the state is as fierce as it is international. When the Dishy Dozen gathered for their 10th anniversary a couple years ago, another band of chefs met simultaneously. They called themselves the HIC, for Hawai'i International Cuisine. Bev Gannon's daughter, Teresa, is in the group, as are two of Alan Wong's former sous chefs.

"Anyone in my kitchen can do four dishes," Alan Wong told me. "If I'm in town, I'm in the kitchen six days a week, but Thursday belongs to my junior chefs." In the same mood, Roy Yamaguchi promotes his chefs within his network and makes them partners to keep them from defecting. The beat, as they say in rock and roll, goes on.

Masu's Massive Plate Lunch and all those low-cost, high-fat lunch wagons are not threatened, by the way. Where Spam has become a cultural icon-Hawai'i's soul food, if you like-where there are two popular cookbooks devoted to recipes using it and 4 million cans are consumed each year, more than in any other state per capita, grease seems to be a way of life.

My cardiologist is thrilled that I'm not eating all of my meals there anymore.



During nearly 20 years of residence in Hawai'i, JERRY HOPKINS wrote more than a dozen books about the Islands, including a history of the hula, Fax to the Max and, most recently, Elvis in Hawai'i. He is also the author of the Jim Morrison biography, No One Here Gets Out Alive. He now lives in Thailand.

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