Spirit of Aloha | Features | September/October 2006

The Last, Best Comfort Food
By John Heckathorn
Photographs by Jimmy Forrest

Why Hawai‘i’s heralded contemporary cuisine is a direct descendant of simple local food

Twenty years ago, Hawai‘i had two classes of food. One was high-end, big-deal, expensive food, the kind you had to take seriously

You ordered it out of oversize, leather-bound menus and ate it with a knife and fork. It was mainly European-style food or the Americanized version, which called itself “continental cuisine.” You may remember it: veal cordon bleu, duck à l’orange, sole Veronique.

But Hawai‘i also had local food, the things that everyone who grew up in Hawai‘i loved to eat. Local food was a multicultural mélange that included Hawaiian laulau, Chinese char siu, Japanese teriyaki, Korean kalbi, Filipino adobo—and even such anomalies as chili served with rice. (But, then, in Hawai‘i, local food is always served with rice.) You ate it off paper or plastic plates with chopsticks.

Local food was served at home and in little Formica-topped booths in local-style restaurants. It was the food people bought from lunch wagons as plate lunches—a formula that soon hardened into two scoops of rice and a scoop of macaroni salad plus whatever—everything from hamburger steak to shrimp tempura.

People from Hawai‘i tend to be passionate about local food. Like grits in the South, hoagies in Philadelphia, ribs in Kansas City, the food has become part of our regional identity.

Truth be told, local food wasn’t always good: canned vegetables, gravy from mixes, often canned meat. A lot of local food got cooked up quick and cheap.

But, 20 years ago, the high-end food in Hawai‘i wasn’t always great, either. The duck à l’orange was over-sweetened and gloppy, the veal cordon bleu often premade, the fillets of sole Veronique flown in frozen.

When the food revolution hit Hawai‘i in the late ’80s and early ’90s, we saw the beginnings of what was called Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine. Although it wasn’t clear at the outset, HRC was nothing more than high-end restaurant variations of the same flavors and tastes that gave local food its savor. Filipino lumpia showed up stuffed with shrimp and dipped in a Thai chili sauce. Japanese ponzu flavored hibachi salmon with kaiware.

At first, many people dismissed HRC as a fad.

To people who loved old high-end cuisine, HRC seemed outrageous. It wasn’t a real cuisine like, say, French, just a lot of strange stuff on the plate. Bring back the French onion soup, Caesar salad and boeuf bourguignon.

Some partisans of local food were also outraged. The thought of putting the best flavors of a plate lunch into a $12 appetizer or onto a $29 entrée plate seemed, well, heretical.

Local food wasn’t something you got in serious restaurants. Local food was comfort food. It didn’t dance all over the taste buds, like the new food pumped out of kitchens by chefs who trained in French technique, but nonetheless felt at home with miso, shoyu, ginger, garlic and chili peppers.

For partisans of old-style local food, HRC seemed like some strange foodie trend.

But it wasn’t. People in Hawai‘i took to HRC. They recognized the roots of the food and they recognized the creativity and execution. The new Hawai‘i cuisine restaurants blew away the older continental restaurants with their heavy leather-bound menus and even heavier cuisine. Suddenly, nobody was surprised to find a whole range of Asian flavors and Western flourishes on the same plate.

It wasn’t just a fad, because the sometimes-dizzying multiculturalism of Hawai‘i regional cuisine was based on a couple centuries of slowly evolving local food. Its roots grew deep in Hawai‘i history.

One of the originators of Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine—and perhaps its most celebrated current practitioner—was Alan Wong. Wong’s a chef, not a scholar, but he’s spent years studying the food eaten on Hawai‘i’s plantations.

“That’s where local food began,” he argues, “when the workers were in the fields and opened their kaukau tins and bento boxes and swapped a little teriyaki for a taste of the adobo.”

His research into the food Hawai‘i’s workers ate on the plantations led him to Hawai‘i Plantation Village, an outdoor museum made up of 32 authentic or replica plantation buildings, everything from a plantation store to Chinese, Japanese and Filipino workers’ cottages.

The village helps keep alive the memories the artifacts of Hawai‘i’s plantation past. Wong would bring his new staff, and the staff from his Japanese restaurant, to tour the village. “I want them to know the history, to explain why we cook the way we cook,” he says.

The Plantation Village turned out to be “a treasure chest,” says Wong. He read old cookbooks, interviewed surviving members of the plantation community about what they remembered eating as children. He even found people to show him how their mothers made the Filipino dish pinakbet or Puerto Rican ganduri rice.

“I wanted that point of reference,” he says. “I knew I could do something once I understood the flavors and ingredients of the basic dish.”

Do something he could. When Wong wanted to celebrate the reopening of his King Street restaurant after a month’s kitchen renovation, he decided to hold a fundraiser for the Hawai‘i Plantation Village. Not just any fundraiser, he’d do his best to recreate the cuisine of the plantations—sort of.

“People on the plantation were poor, they had a hard life,” says Wong. “Unless someone killed a pig, most of their meat was canned and their vegetables were whatever they could grow in their gardens.”

That was the historical truth. But, as Wong points out, he couldn’t sell tickets to a $125 fundraiser, then open a can of sardines and throw them on the fire with some onions, however authentic that recipe might be.

Instead he came up with nearly three dozen reinterpretations of basic plantation dishes. For instance, he turned salty, stewlike pinakbet into a steamed vegetable dish with organic soy and a sauce made from locally grown mushrooms. He turned Puerto Rican beans and rice into a ti-leaf-wrapped bundle that included chicken and shrimp seasoned with achiote.

He even tinkered with Japanese teriyaki by creating rice balls stuffed with foie gras and unagi, the Japanese eel, with slightly sweet kabayaki sauce.

The food was, of course, brilliant. But it did something else important. It demonstrated how contemporary Hawai‘i cuisine was a direct descendent of local food.

“That’s why I’m always disappointed when I eat fusion food on the Mainland,” says Wong. “The menu descriptions sound beautiful, but the tastes aren’t there. Because we in Hawai‘i actually know these flavors, they’re part of our heritage. We grew up on local food.”

No one now questions that local food can be turned into high-end cuisine. But what’s interesting is that the continuum between the two runs both ways. If high-end chefs can be inspired by local food, people who cook local food can be inspired by what’s coming out of high-end kitchens.

The Honolulu Wine Festival, a gala fundraiser for the Hawai‘i Lupus Foundation, has become one of Hawai‘i’s most intense food events. In addition to 248 wines, the event attracts a dozen-and-a-half of Honolulu’s signature chefs—Alan Wong, George Mavrothalassitis, Hiroshi Fukui, D.K. Kodama and so forth—each trying to outdo the others with small, gemlike plates of seafood.

I stood in line at one of the food stations. It was elegant, like the others, decorated with flowers, staffed by attractive young women. The food was a deft variation on an Island tradition—a classic aku poke, made with kukui nuts and seaweed, next to a not-so-classic aku tartar, made with Asian-style flavorings and drizzled with ponzu sauce.

I was about to walk away with my plate when I spotted the chef standing in the background. It was Colin Nishida.

I often see Nishida before 7 in the morning through the kitchen door of his Fort Street Bar & Grill, in a spattered apron, already at work on the beef stew and chili-orange chicken he’ll dish up plate lunch-style to hundreds of hungry office workers come midday. Fort Street Bar & Grill is not by any means a fancy restaurant. It’s grab-and-go, lunch for $6 and $7.

For the festival event, however, Nishida was resplendent in chef’s whites, with the names of both his restaurants in fancy embroidery over the pocket. “Colin, I almost didn’t recognize you,” I said.

“That’s because I have to stay clean when I wear this,” he said.

Is it a surprise to find a chef, one of whose restaurants serves local food in Styrofoam clamshells, working a high-end food event? Not in Hawai‘i, not anymore.

Nishida is used to doing gourmet events. His other restaurant, Side Street Inn, has become renowned as an after-work hangout for chefs. On any given evening you might find Roy Yamaguchi or Alan Wong at one of the booths.

Side Street Inn has become so famous that Saveur magazine sent a writer from New York to check it out. The writer loved the food and got buzzed by the cocktails, but seemed a little dismayed that Side Street was nothing fancy, just a bar with booths and Formica tables. She called it a dive, but, really, I’ve been in far worse places in the immediate neighborhood. For Honolulu, it’s respectable enough.

That’s all Nishida ever wanted. A bar, not a restaurant. He just put together a menu of local-style bar food, the kind of food people in Hawai‘i might munch while having a beer or two. One of his first items was a personal favorite, a Spam and egg sandwich.

“I grew up on local food. I serve things I like to eat,” says Nishida. But like the high-end chefs, he uses fresh, local ingredients whenever he can. The influence of the high-end chefs means that you have to take local food seriously. Nishida does.

He takes a local favorite, ‘ahi, and coats it with panko flakes (no surprise in Hawai‘i) and a little pesto (there’s the surprise). He serves it grilled over a bed of fresh, locally grown Nalo greens. And they have to be real Nalo greens, because Nalo Farms owner Dean Okimoto is often in the house.

Nishida revived an old Portuguese recipe that calls for steamed clams and linguisa, substituting Hawai‘i-style Portuguese sausage, and calls it, with Island-style irreverence, Pocho Clams.

His fried chicken takes on Korean flavorings—garlic, shoyu and chili peppers. And his barbecue ribs are done up with a far-from-traditional sauce with liliko‘i syrup.

Even his steak, one of his favorite dishes, is served Island-style: sliced into slivers, so that you eat it with chopsticks and several people can share.

Nishida cooks local food, but it’s also good food.

“Local food is evolving, I guess,” he says. “It comes from the same roots as HRC food. You just have to take what everyone has been eating all along, and add a little flair to it.”

Nishida’s not alone. Local food all over the Islands gets better every year. Because once we realized that it’s our food, good food, we can’t resist adding that little flair to it.

JOHN HECKATHORN is director of integrated media for the aio Group and a contributing editor for Honolulu magazine. Hear his radio show, Heckathorn’s “Hot Plate” on weekday evenings on KKEA and K108, a simulcast, from 6 to 7 p.m. Read his column “What the Heck?” in the Sunday Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

Features Archives