Spirit of Aloha | Features | September/October 2007

Observations
By: David K. Choo

Chewing the Fat

PHOTO: H. KIEFER / PHOTOCUISINE / CORBIS PHOTO: DARRELL ISHII

There used to be a food cart parked near the ‘Ewa corner of Bishop and King Streets in downtown Honolulu. If I had peered out of my cubicle, I could probably have seen the cart from my office window, four floors up, but I never bothered.

I also didn’t bother to stop by and sample the vendor’s food (empanadas, I think) as I rushed out of the office for lunch, usually to visit one of the same three or four eateries. Everyone else seemed to be doing the same, as the poor guy just smiled and nodded as we passed by in a blur. All of us worker bees were too busy to stop and try some­thing new.

After several weeks, the food cart moved across the street to Tamarind Square, where there were larger crowds. However, they walked by just as fast. I haven’t seen the food cart for weeks now. I think it’s moved on to another corner somewhere.

A year ago, I would have spotted the em­panada man as soon as he set up shop. I would have sampled every one of his meat pies, and I would have chatted with him, asking about his food, where he was from, getting his life’s story in a five-minute conversation.

A year ago, I was an outgoing and daring urban explorer, seeking out the new and ex- citing, unusual and mundane. I was a food critic, and set out two or three days a week to taste Honolulu’s fast and affordable lunchtime food, usually at hole-in-the-wall establishments run by people like the empanada man. I wrote a weekly dining column called “Choo on This” for the Downown Planet, a free weekly newspaper dis­tributed throughout metro Honolulu, from Kali­hi to Kaimukī.

I wrote “Choo on This” from May 2003 until July 2006, when the Planet was suddenly and unexpectedly shut down. I’ll admit that the week after it closed, I breathed a little sigh of relief. It’s not easy penning a weekly dining column 52 times a year, year after year. Most of the time you eat alone. All of the time, you write alone. But it didn’t take long for me to miss “Choo on This.” Sure, I missed all those free lunches, but even more I missed the slightly offbeat urban world that I would have never discovered otherwise. Most of all, I missed the person I became when I ate and wrote.

It’s amazing how daring and outgoing you are when you have an assignment, a deadline and an expense account. When your editor and readers are count­ing on you and someone else is paying, even if it’s only a $7 or $8 tab, you order boldly and eat with purpose. When I visited a new place, I’d try the signature dish or a menu item that struck me as unusual and provocative. I rarely hesitated.

Once a co-worker told me about a tasty Viet­namese snail soup. She couldn’t remember the name of the restaurant, but she knew it was on King Street in Chinatown. So at lunchtime, I hit the pavement and headed ‘Ewa, reading menus taped to storefront windows along the way. When I found the 99 Cof­fee Shop and its bun oc, a spicy snail soup, I reveled in my Amazing Race-like ability to find an obscure food item. When my server informed me that they were out of snails, I was undaunted. I ordered bun rieu, a crab and to­ma­to soup, which featured, among other things, fish cake, bean sprouts, fried tofu, cubed pig’s blood, hot peppers, pig’s feet, and, of course, tomatoes and crab roe. I think I’m still digesting that meal.

Then, of course, there was fugu, the delectable and deadly blowfish, a delicacy in Japan, which I stumbled upon at Aki-No-No, a sleepy izakaya near the Univer­sity of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. As soon as I read the hiragana on the menu, I knew that I had to try the ultimate thrill food. I’m not sure what I was thinking, but I had taken my allergy medicine that morning, so I felt emboldened.

I later learned that the fugu had been processed in Japan and shipped frozen to Hawai‘i, so eating it wasn’t exactly a death-defying experience. But there was enough of a trace of the deadly neurotoxins in the fish to numb my throat and the insides of my mouth. For a moment, I was dining on the edge. (By the way, fugu tastes a little like chicken.)

Of course, not everything I ate was bizarre or thrilling. A majority of the food I tried was fairly conventional, much of it was delicious, but all of it was new—to me, at least.

I soon discovered that the most interesting aspect of my job was meeting the people who cooked the food. I’d have brief conversations with them after my meal, usually over the telephone, but sometimes across the counter. There was, for instance, Akira and Noriko Tanaka, a couple from Japan, who visited Hawai‘i five times before opening their kushiage restaurant in Puck’s Alley, near the university. Nearly everything they served was breaded, fried and stuck to the end of a bamboo skewer.

I also met Adela Visitacion and her sister Edralyn Verona, who hastily opened their Fort Street Mall restaurant Dreamers Home Style Café on their deceased father’s birthday. It had always been his dream to run a restaurant. Sev­eral doors down is Angelo Her­nandez, a native of Oak­land, Calif., who paid a similar tribute to his dad with La Taqueria de Ramiro. The lunch counter serves some of the fattest and tastiest burritos in town.

And I’ll never forget Vincent Kwon, a recovering ice addict, who was wandering the streets just a few years ago. With the help of family and friends and an unwavering belief in God, he was able to clean himself up and eventually open Grindz Restaurant. Like Kwon, several of the staff were homeless and recovering meth addicts. The food was warm and comforting, the serv­ice even more so. I watched Kwon’s team work with vigor and pride, as if their lives depended on it.

Not long ago, I asked a successful and well-known kama‘āina business executive the most important lesson he had learned doing business in Hawai‘i.

“Never take more than you give,” he said emphatically.

He then told me about working in the Wahiawā pineapple fields when he was a teenager, describing the hot, backbreaking work and the lunch breaks that never came too soon. The work crew—Japa­nese, Korean, Filipino, Hawaiian and him, a haole kid—would sit in a circle and put their kaukau tins (lunch boxes) in the middle, sharing their food.

“One day, I ate the softest, most tender teriyaki I’d ever tasted,” he said. “I asked, ‘What is this? It’s delicious.’ Everyone laughed. It turned out to be dog. But it really was good.”

That’s what was beautiful about Hawai‘i. We used to sit down together, eat each other’s food and talk. We don’t do that anymore. I know I don’t. With a wife, a young son and what will likely be a very old mortgage, I live according to schedules, budgets and travel to and from work in straight lines. I miss being curious, wandering Honolulu with an empty stomach and a full notepad. Now I eat at too many theme restaurants and order too many combo meals.

The other day, I peered out my office window, looking for the food cart. It’s long gone now. I wish I had taken the time to try one of those empanadas when I had a chance. I bet they were delicious—or, at least, interesting.

DAVID K. CHOO is editor-at-large at Hawai‘i Business magazine, which, for nearly eight years, has published his food column, “Dining with Dave.” His book Lunch Break Honolulu: 65 Great Places to Beat the Clock, a collection of his dining reviews, was published this year by Watermark Publishing.

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