Spirit of Aloha | Features | September/October 2007

Home Is Where the Hulihuli Is
By: Dennis Hollier

Photography by Olivier Koning

The joy of Hawai‘i’s roadside food

I never knew the name of the cook. We just called her the Manapua Lady. She was an aged Chinese woman who parked her battered white lunch wagon in the sand, within earshot of the surf at Sandy Beach. Back then, hers was just one of a half-dozen or so lunch wagons scattered along that stretch of Ka­lani­ana‘ole Highway. Nothing about it seemed auspicious. Her menu was scrib­bled on white-board with a Magic Marker. She lashed a plastic trash bin to the bumper of her truck with a coat hanger to keep the wind from blowing it away.

Cardboard boxes of candy bars weighed down a pile of napkins on the counter. And you collected your lukewarm sodas from a great white cooler that she left to swelter in the sun.

But the Manapua Lady was our salvation. After a day of bodysurfing in Sandy’s apocalyptic shore break, we never failed to stop at her window. Of course, part of it was hunger. The hours treading water, the frantic paddling to catch a wave, the inevitable pummeling in the sand—all of it made us ravenous by the end of the day. But, more than ap­petite, it was a mood that predisposed us toward her food. A kind of elation, born out of a magical mix of youth and wind and sea—and, now and then, a perfect view of Makapu‘u reflected in the barrel of a right-hand break.

The old woman offered up the same selection of plate lunches as the other trucks along the beach, though hers al­ways seemed a little more exquisite to us. We came for the teriyaki beef, which we told ourselves was just a little better caramelized than the others. We swore by her shoyu chicken, which we were sure was more tender and less cloying. And her short ribs just fell off the bone. But mostly we came for the manapua.

The Manapua Lady’s steamed buns were homemade. She and her sister made them every morning according to an old family recipe, and the difference was obvious—the char siu filling a little meatier than in most manapua, the sauce a little saltier. She put Chinese mushrooms in the filling, too—big, black, tender, ear-shaped mushrooms wadded up inside. And sometimes you’d find a whole quail’s egg in the center, hardboiled by the steam. Even now, after more than 30 years, I get nostalgic for those manapua. One of them, purchased at the end of a perfect day of eight-foot faces and big glassy tubes, may have been the best meal I ever ate.

So much of what we love about roadside food has to do with serendipity, the delicious element of surprise. We find good things in unexpected places: a battered lunch wagon, a shack by the side of the road, a makeshift stand in the bed of a truck, a hand-painted sign that draws us off the highway to the back door of a ramshackle home. The simple act of discovery flavors the food. Few things taste better than yielding to an impulse.

Take a weekend drive along Windward O‘ahu to get a sense of the possibilities. In a church parking lot in Kāne‘ohe, you can find hulihuli chick­en, marinated, and roast­ed over coals right in front of you. At Windward Mall, just a little farther north, a man in a plywood cart sells a plate lunch of sizzling grilled steak and salad. Next to him, the ladies in the Leonard’s Bakery truck in­termittently sell fried malassadas—Ha­wai‘i’s answer to the doughnut—toss­ed in sugar while they’re still hot.

Out in the country, the roadside food becomes even homier. In Ka‘a‘awa, an old faded sign in someone’s front yard advertises fresh garden greens. In Punalu‘u, a couple of young girls sell home­made cookies on a card table in their driveway. Often they wander off, leaving their customers to pay on the honor method. In Hau‘ula, two old Ha­wai­ian men make back the gas money for their boat by selling fresh ‘ahi steaks from the previous night’s fishing trip. As summer sets in, little signs along the road point you toward the homes of people with pickled mango for sale.

If you prefer your mango fresh, fruit stands dot the highway leading to the North Shore. Some also sells hats and bags woven from lauhala. Others occasionally sell fried banana lumpia. All of them offer ice cold coconuts from which you can drink. For years, a neighbor of mine kept a flask of rum in his glove box for these occasions. It gave him an excuse to sing calypso on the long drive home from Sunset Beach.

That was 30 years ago. Nowadays, I’m sure he’d also stop for shrimp. A visit to one of the Kahuku shrimp trucks on the way back from the North Shore has become a kind of roadside food tradition in Hawai‘i. Everyone has their fa­vorite—prob­ably just the one they ate at first—but I always visit Romy’s, a little red shack with picnic tables set under a tarpaulin between the highway and the shrimp ponds. My advice: Don’t bother with the shrimp. Instead, order the big prawns sautéed in butter and chopped garlic. Romy serves them in the shell, so they’re a mess; but, since you’re coming back from the beach, you can just shower under the hose when you get home.

Every weekend, a motley assortment of vendors gathers under the banyan tree near the Hygienic Store in Kaha­lu‘u. It’s a picturesque and convenient setting, at the intersection of Kameha­meha and Kahekili Highways, where the suburbs of Kāne‘ohe begin to give way to a more rural backdrop. Most of the vendors here sell flowers, and the gravel lot is full of five-gallon buckets aflame with torch ginger and heliconia. The prices are lower and more flexible than almost anywhere else on the is­land, occasionally drawing suspicion from area farmers that most of the flowers have been rustled from their gardens. From here all the way to the North Shore, it’s not uncommon to see signs posted on the edge of farms: “Agricul­tural trespassing is a felony.”

Not all the vendors around the Hy­gienic Store are shady. For years, Keoki Halas has parked under the banyan tree every weekend to sell homemade Ha­waiian food out of the back of a pickup truck. His sandwich-board signs lining the highway have become a kind of landmark, and they give an indication of the astonishing diversity of his enterprise: hot laulau, pasteles, pickled man­go, poke. But, despite the variety in his fare, it still reflects a specialization: Everything he serves is scrupulously local.

As I was driving past one day a few weeks ago, I noticed that Keoki’s old pickup truck had given way to a freshly painted lunch wagon and a row of folding picnic tables, so I pulled in to check on the changes. Besides, it gave me an excuse to have lunch under the banyan tree. “What’s good today?” I asked Keo­ki when I got to the front of the line.

He didn’t hesitate. “The kālua pig is ‘ono,” he said, hefting an enormous bag of it. “Twelve dollars a pound.”

But I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist ordering an assortment of his other fare. “I doubt I can eat a pound of it,” I said.

“I make you one plate, then,” he said. “Want rice?”

“Yeah,” I chirped, “and give me one lau­lau, a pastele and some poke, too.” He grinned knowingly as he heaped the food on my plate.

Kālua pig is Hawai‘i’s gift to the world’s cuisine. It’s simply the porkiest pork you’ll find anywhere—the quintessence of pig. Traditionally, a pig is wrapped in ti and banana leaves and baked slowly in an imu, an underground oven. Today’s FDA rules make that an unlikely option, and most of the kālua pig you find is cooked on the stovetop with pork butt and liquid smoke. Although not traditionally prepared, it’s still delicious. Like a kid hoarding choc­olates, I decided to save the kālua pig for last.

Keoki’s most popular dish is his lau­lau—a flavorful morsel of pork or octopus, wrapped in tender taro leaf, then bundled in a ti leaf and steamed. When it’s served, you discard the ti leaf and are left with a spinachlike mass of greens surrounding a succulent filling of moist, salty meat. As a plate lunch with rice, it’s a nearly perfect meal.

The truth is there’s no such thing as bad laulau; it’s the most popular roadside food. A friend of mine swears by the laulau sold occasionally from the garage of a home in Temple Valley. Most Hawaiian restaurants also make excellent laulau, including Ono Loa, which operates out of the old Waiāhole Poi Fac­tory just up the road from the Hy­gienic Store. But there’s no denying that Keoki’s laulau is exceptional. All through the day, customers line up at his window. “Ten dollars for six,” he tells them. They almost always jump at the offer. And, like me, they add a variety of other fa­vorites to their order. It’s not unusual for customers to drop in after a day at the beach and order more than $100 worth of Hawaiian food. Most are regulars. On my last visit, a professional surfer stopped in for laulau and stayed to show Keoki pictures of his recent trip to the surf spots of Indonesia. “He’s been coming here for years,” Keo­ki said as the surfer finally drove off.

I might as well confess right off the bat what makes good laulau: you can’t use lean meat. It’s fat that gives flavor to the bland taro leaf. Keoki fills his laulau with hefty chunks of pork butt, carefully modulating the lean pieces with fatty morsels. If, like my wife, you don’t like fat, just push those pieces aside.

Perhaps Keoki’s greatest surprise is his poke, Hawai‘i’s answer to sashimi. Traditional poke consists of raw sea­food—‘ahi, octopus, or mussels—chopped into small pieces (poke-poke in Hawaiian) and marinated lightly in a variable mix of shoyu, chopped kukui nut, Maui onions and chili peppers. The recipes are many and varied. Whatever other ingredients poke may include, its quality depends mostly on having fresh fish. “I go to the fish auction every morning,” Keoki says. That’s reflected in his traditional ‘ahi poke, which is made with impeccably fresh yellowfin tuna. He also sells a more unusual variety of poke: smoked octopus, made with large chunks of pleasantly chewy octopus marinated in a mix of carrots, zucchini and onions. Eaten while it’s still chilled, it makes a refreshing salad.

I sat in the shade, quietly making my way through the food. When business slowed for a minute, Keoki piled a plate for himself and joined me at the picnic table. “How you like the pig?” he asked.

“It’s amazing,” I told him. “I don’t think I’ve had kālua pig this good in years.” “It’s cooked in an imu, that’s why,” he says. “A friend of mine was having one lū‘au, and I asked him if I could throw a couple of pork butts in with his pig.” It’s an unexpected bonus. A few months ago, O‘ahu’s last commercial lua, or cooking pit, which provided kālua pig to all the better Hawaiian restaurants, closed its doors. Now the restaurants are obliged to use the stovetop method, and old-fashioned lua-cooked pig has become a rarity. Keoki’s was the exception—moist, smoky, tender enough to shred with a fork, and faintly flavored by the banana leaf—it was the stuff of childhood lū‘au. Of course, it was a bittersweet discovery: It’s not a normal part of his menu. Just another of the vagaries of roadside food. You never know if it will be there the next time you drive past.

I asked Keoki about the new lunch wagon. “Where’s the pickup?” I said. He gestured abstractly behind us and told me a neighbor had called the health department about him selling food out of the bed of his truck. A little astonished, I asked him, “How long you been selling food out of that truck?” “I think, like 16 years,” he said. “I used to dive for squid out there in the bay. Now, I no dive anymore. But I sold squid out of my truck. Everyone else sold laulau, poke, pasteles.” He paus­ed for a moment to reflect. “Now they’re all gone. I took ’em all over.”

He’s quick to point out there’s no trick to success. “Just make ’em good,” he says. “Make ’em from the heart—people always come back.” He shoveled a forkful of kālua pig in his mouth and grinned again. “Ooh, da buggah’s good,” he says.

Keoki got up to help another customer, but something he said made me think about Sandy Beach and the Ma­napua Lady. She’s long gone now. The row of battered lunch wagons that used to line Kalaniana‘ole Highway is gone, too. The only lunch wagon remaining at Sandy Beach belongs to Yuni Takushi, whose family owns a variety of restaurants on O‘ahu. Yuni’s done a brisk business this summer, plying the surfers with the usual plate lunches and sodas, but she’s only had the City and County concession for about a year. When I visited a few weeks ago, she didn’t seem particularly interested in talking about manapua or old times; so, I decided just to order a teriyaki plate and eat it on the beach. But, right before I left, Yuni reached into a cooler and pulled out a nectarine. “Here, take the fruit, too,” she said, handing it to me.

I eagerly carried my food across the parking lot and sat on a bench overlooking the beach. The nectarine had stirred something in me, and I set my plate lunch down and reached in the bag for the fruit. It was cool and yielding in my fingers, and when I bit into it, the juices ran freely down my chin. I looked out to sea and thought to myself, “This is the best nectarine I’ve ever eaten.”

But what I actually said was, “Ooh, da buggah’s good.”

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