At first glance, Hawai‘i regional cuisine (HRC), like other American regional cuisines, seems nothing less than a paean to the state’s diverse ethnic communities and foods and to the islands’ natural bounty, air, land, and sea.1 Given the history of the Hawaiian Islands as, first, an independent kingdom (1795–1893) and then a U.S. colony (1898–1959), however, Hawai‘i regional cuisine has a much greater significance.
Traditionally, fine dining in Hawai‘i was assumed to be continental cuisine, which was usually found at restaurants in Waikiki. These establishments had long hired French, German, or Swiss chefs with impeccable credentials, who had been trained and apprenticed in Europe and brought continental culinary techniques, values, and traditions to the islands. Their richly sauced dishes echoed classic French cuisine and were consumed with French or, later, California wines. In theory, a fine meal at La Mer, the fabled French restaurant at the Halekulani Hotel in Waikiki, was no different from a fine meal at La Côte Basque in New York City or Guy Savoy in Paris.2
In contrast, because local food—what most of Hawai‘i’s population ate—was definitely not continental, it was denigrated, overlooked, or, at best, tolerated. Indeed, local food and continental cuisine were not to be mentioned in the same breath except perhaps ironically, as when one spoke of a “local French restaurant.” Local food was denigrated simply because it was what “locals” ate.3 During the colonial period, a “local” was someone born, raised, or educated in Hawai‘i who was not Caucasian and was a member of either the indigenous Hawaiian population or one of the many groups that had immigrated to the islands to work on the plantations or ranches.4 Typically, Hawaiians, Chinese, Japanese, Puerto Ricans, Spanish, Portuguese, and Filipinos were regarded as locals. Indeed, during this time, Hawai‘i had a “rigid caste system” of racial hierarchies and distinctions, to which the colonial authorities and business elite strictly adhered.5
Every aspect of life in the colony was racialized: the inhabitants’ political, economic, and social life, as well as their education, sports, and culture. Wellborn members of the Caucasian elite attended O‘ahu College (known after 1935 as the Punahou School) or a mainland (continental U.S.) boarding school and then were sent away to an Ivy League university. After marrying someone from the local elite or the mainland, they returned to take their place in one of the five major companies, known as the “Big Five,” spending their free time playing tennis or golf and dining at one of several established Honolulu country clubs and reveling in the benefits of their superiority.6 Those Caucasians who were not so well born attended one of the English Standard Schools, and then the University of Hawai‘i.7 They then entered one of several local companies, where their race entitled them to rise to a managerial or supervisory position.
Those who were Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Portuguese, Puerto Rican, or some combination of these were locals and thus inferior. Within a century after 1778, when the first Europeans arrived in the islands, the indigenous population had dropped from somewhere between 400,000 and 1,000,000 to 40,000, owing to both the diseases brought by the visitors and the impact of the profound changes in land tenure, government, religion, and culture carried out at their urging.8 In 1893, prominent American businessmen engineered the overthrow of the native monarchy and pushed hard for the U.S. annexation of the islands, which finally took place in 1898 despite the opposition of the indigenous population.9 A decade after the islands were annexed, the remnants of the Hawaiian population were in both physical and cultural decline, and Asians were regarded by the Caucasian elite as mere “instruments of production,” akin to the “cattle of the ranges.”10 The exceptions were Hawaiians from the ali‘i, or chiefly, class—many of whom had succeeded in preserving their landholdings and married Caucasians—and locals who had succeeded in business.11 Most locals went to public elementary schools through the eighth grade and then started working at age fifteen, joining the large pool of plantation, factory, or dock workers. Some were lucky enough to be sent to one of the several private schools in Honolulu: the ‘Iolani School, Mid-Pacific Institute, the Kamehameha Schools, or the College of Saint Louis (now the Saint Louis Schools). Kamehameha was open only to Hawaiians, and although the others were open to all groups, ‘Iolani attracted many Chinese, Mid-Pacific many Japanese, and Saint Louis a combination of Hawaiian, Portuguese, and Chinese.12 Many private school graduates attended the University of Hawai‘i, and after graduating, they became teachers or entered family businesses or local companies, with a good chance of rising to a managerial position. A few attended professional schools on the mainland. Some Hawaiians and Portuguese even rose to supervisory positions on plantations.13
Race mattered politically, too. In 1917 Hawai‘i’s population of 228,771 was broken down ethnically as follows: Caucasian, 16,042; Chinese, 21,954; Filipino, 16,898; Hawaiian/part Hawaiian, 39,104; Japanese, 97,000; Portuguese, 23,753; Puerto Rican, 5,187; Spanish, 3,577; and other, 5,254.14 Even though Caucasians made up only 7 percent of the colony’s population, they nonetheless dominated the other 93 percent and were supported in doing so by 13,249 American soldiers and sailors.15 Not surprisingly, as the number of servicemen increased, so too did the interracial tension. Officers responded by sending their children to private schools in Honolulu, and enlisted men got into fights with locals, often over women.16 But even when large numbers of Hawaiians and immigrant children gained the right to vote, and thus to wield political power, many nineteenth-century notions of Caucasian superiority persisted, well into the 1950s.17
Caucasians and locals met as equals only on the colony’s playing fields, as members of a high school team or in one of the racialized sports leagues. For example, the Hawai‘i Major League consisted of single-ethnicity baseball teams: the Wanderers were the Caucasian team; the Chinese, or the Chinese Tigers, were the Chinese team; the Rising Suns (Asahi) were the Japanese team; the Braves were the Portuguese team; and the Filipinos formed a team later. To protect the racialized nature of the league, each team was allowed to have only two players of a different ethnicity.18
These racial and class hierarchies informing colonial Hawai‘i also shaped the “food supply, culinary treatments and habits of consumption.”19 In the 1800s, Caucasians continued to eat the food they always had, but now with locally sourced meat, fish, shellfish, fowl, vegetables, fruit, and dairy products.20 Their beef, mutton, pork, and poultry came from one of the many local ranches, and local meat was more highly regarded than meat packed in ice and shipped from the mainland. Their fish and shellfish were locally caught. One observer noted that “Hawaiian mullet, boiled, baked or fried, approaches in flavor the blue fish of the Atlantic coast.” Also available were locally grown tomatoes, corn, beans, cauliflower, cucumbers, carrots, turnips, potatoes, and artichokes. Caucasians even ate taro, regarding it as “far ahead of the potato in nutrient,” and enjoyed local fruit such as breadfruit, guava, and poha berries.21 That Caucasians discovered these staples of the Hawaiian diet is hardly surprising, because as David Stannard observed,
The foods and health habits of the Hawaiians were far more salubrious than those of their European contemporaries and were even superior to those of modern Americans in their diets’ nutritional value and relative lack of saturated fat, cholesterol, sugar and sodium—and, of course, in the absence from their lives of alcohol and tobacco.22
In time, even well-to-do local businessmen began to adapt the Caucasians’ diet, although they continued to eat rice and to have their meals “cooked and served in semi-American style.”
Most immigrants still preferred to eat those foods to which they were accustomed.23 Accordingly, Portuguese made bread as they did in the old country, and Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos made rice the center of their meal, supplementing it with local fish, pork, chicken, duck, and homegrown vegetables when they were available. Those who lived near towns or cities such as Honolulu, Lihu‘e, Wailuku, or Hilo could buy locally made bean curd, bean paste, soy sauce, sausages, fish sauce (bagoong), and even noodles. Hawaiians and part-Hawaiians stuck to their traditional diet as well, eating poi, catching local fish, and gathering seaweed (limu) at nearby beaches.24
The first restaurant in the islands, Warren House, opened in 1819 at the corner of Hotel and Bethel Streets in Honolulu. The second restaurant was Butler’s Coffee House, nearby in Warren Square, which began serving meals in 1836.25 Most of the restaurants that opened between 1850 and 1900 were owned by Chinese. Some combined a bakery and a coffee shop, as did Po Hee Hong’s in Hanapepe, Kauai; several were grocery or dry goods stores that had canteens, as was the case with Hew’s Store and Restaurant in Paia, Maui; and a few were saloons that also served food.26 Since most of their customers were not Chinese, these restaurants served Hawaiian and Western as well as Chinese fare. In the late 1800s, Honolulu had two notable Chinese restaurants: Wo Fat opened in Honolulu in 1882 and Sun Yun Woo in 1892. Both served Cantonese food.27
Beginning in the 1920s, more restaurants in Honolulu catered to both the local population and servicemen stationed on O‘ahu. The first of these, the American Café, opened in 1923.28 Sakazo Fujika, an immigrant from Hiroshima, started the Diamond Ice Cream Parlor at the eastern end of Kalakaua Avenue, which served chili con carne, hamburger steak, beef stew, and pies. Later, Fujika renamed his restaurant the Unique Lunch Room and added to his menu Hawaiian dishes like lau lau, lomi lomi salmon, and pipikaula.29 In 1927 George C. Knapp and Elwood L. Christiansen opened the first drive-in restaurant in Hawai‘i, at the corner of Kalakaua and Ala Wai Boulevards.30 In 1929 Pang Yat Chong opened a Chinese restaurant in Waikiki called Lau Yee Chai, which, with its beautiful and well-decorated interior, attracted both locals and tourists.31 In the 1930s, many more restaurants could be found in Honolulu and its environs, and like the American Café, many were owned and operated by the children of immigrants from the Okinawan community of Oroku.32 In 1939 Spencer and Clifton Weaver opened the Swanky Franky hot dog stands, and from this modest beginning, they created a veritable restaurant empire that, by 1987, numbered twenty-three restaurants on O‘ahu and Maui.33 After World War II, when people dined out they usually went to a Spencecliff or one of the many Okinawan-run restaurants that opened in the 1940s and 1950s. By the 1960s the top fine-dining choices were in Waikiki: Canlis, a Spencecliff restaurant; Michel’s, a French restaurant; and P. Y. Chong’s Lau Yee Chai.34
Besides the distinctions between fine dining and local restaurants, the other peculiarity of the colony’s culinary and gastronomic life was that much of the food was imported. The best of the fine-dining establishments, however, served locally sourced foods. For example, a menu from the Alexander Young Hotel, dated February 28, 1928, included “Baked Island Pond Mullet, Normandy Pommes Hollandaise,” “Fresh Island String Beans,” and “Hawaiian Banana Fritters.” Two decades later, Richard Kimball, the owner of the Halekulani Hotel, took great pride in serving locally caught fish and locally grown vegetables and fruit. But even his kitchens served mahimahi from local waters that had been frozen after being cleaned and fileted.35 In fact, much of what was served, even in the top restaurants, was imported, and this was especially true of both meat and vegetables.36
The diets of the local population also consisted of local and imported foods. They could not afford to do otherwise. Most local families ate fish that they caught or were given; chicken, pigs, rabbits, and ducks that they had raised; vegetables that they grew or bought; and fruit that they picked. Even their poi, bean curd, bean paste, soy sauce, dried shrimp, fish sauce, sausages, and noodles were made locally. But the plantation stores always stocked rice and canned goods, and although they were relatively expensive, most families kept a small supply of canned corned beef, luncheon meat, vienna sausage, tuna, and vegetables.37 Of course, canned foods were also “American,” and their consumption in the islands would have been applauded by reformers on the mainland who worked to wean immigrants away from their traditional diets.38
This short history makes clear that the relationship of fine dining and local food before Hawai‘i became a state cannot be understood apart from the racialized nature of life in the colony. It explains why Caucasians and locals ate what they ate, the distinction between “fine dining” and “local food,” and Hawai‘i’s dependence on imported food products and canned goods.
On August 27, 1991, the regime of fine dining in Hawai‘i began to change. Fourteen chefs based in Hawai‘i gathered at the Maui Prince Hotel in the resort town of Wailea on the island of Maui.39 They were meeting for the “First Hawaiian Culinary Symposium,”40 the idea of three chefs—Roger Dikon, Peter Merriman, and Alan Wong—who earlier had flown to Kaua‘i to cook together and celebrate Jean-Marie Josselin’s birthday at his new restaurant, A Pacific Café. While they were there, they talked about finding a way to meet more often. Merriman remembered that he and other chefs often visited one another’s restaurants and that he would
fly to Roy’s place [Roy Yamaguchi, the founder of Roy’s Restaurants] and cook for a night and fly home. What it really entailed was that you’d fly in there midday and you’d cook your ass off; you had to cook dinner for 150 people that night, go out and have a few beers, and then fly back to your restaurant in the morning.41
“I realized,” Merriman continued, “that we were at a disadvantage because we were islands … ’cause in cities guys can meet at one particular bar. Chefs often do that.”42 Although he then was relatively young, he had watched chefs interact in this way when he worked in restaurants on the East Coast and Europe.
Dikon, Merriman, and Wong all had lived and worked elsewhere. Merriman was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, had gone to a culinary school on the East Coast, and had worked in that area and in Germany before being hired as a saucier at Maui’s Mauna Lani Bay Hotel in 1983.43 Dikon had moved to Hawai‘i in 1978 from Florida, and Wong had returned to the islands in 1986 after five years of training on the East Coast, including three years at New York City’s iconic French restaurant Lutèce.44
Dikon offered his hotel, the Maui Prince, as a meeting place, and Merriman suggested calling the gathering a symposium, a word whose meaning he later confessed he was not sure of at the time. He knew that the word meant “a place where there was a lot of eating and drinking,” and he thought, “That’s for us.”45 Thirteen other chefs attended the meeting.
Roy Yamaguchi was the group’s most distinguished chef. After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 1978, he worked in Los Angeles for eight years, first at L’Ermitage, famous for its classic French cuisine, and then at Michael’s, known for its newer California version of French cuisine.46 In 1987 Yamaguchi opened his own restaurant, 385 North, in Hollywood, and later that year, the California Restaurant Writers Association named him California Chef of the Year. The food magazine Bon Appétit featured Yamaguchi in its June 1988 issue, and four months later he moved to Hawai‘i to open Roy’s in a suburb of Honolulu.47 Clearly, Yamaguchi was, as a fellow chef put it, the “rock star” of the group.48
Most of the fourteen chefs could not have anticipated what was about to happen, and none could have known what impact their August 1991 meeting would have on the fine-dining scene and much else in Hawai‘i. Indeed, most of them were only in their early thirties and trying to make their way in a notoriously demanding business. By this time, seven were chefs at major hotel restaurants, and five had their own restaurants. Nearly all were products of local, mainland, or European culinary schools, and most had apprenticed and trained at leading restaurants in the United States and Europe.49 The exception was Mark Ellman, who was self-taught and had worked as a personal chef for celebrities before Longhi’s, an Italian restaurant on Maui, hired him in 1985.50
At the August 1991 meeting, the chefs considered the unhappy state of fine dining in the islands. Of special concern was restaurants’ continuing reliance on imported fish, meat, and vegetables.51 Roger Dikon recalled that when he worked at the Kapalua Bay Hotel on Maui (from 1978 to 1986), only a quarter of the vegetables and fruit served at the hotel’s restaurants were grown locally.52 Jean-Marie Josselin, who came to Hawai‘i in 1984 from Paris via New Orleans to cook at the Hotel Hana-Maui, remembered, “I was in shock. It was so isolated. I was given frozen and canned food to cook with; it was like being in a professional kitchen twenty-five years ago.”53 Amy Ferguson, a native of Dallas who was hired as the food and beverage director at the Kona Village Resort in 1985, agreed, “Old World chefs were running the kitchen and preparing continental cuisine. Sometimes they even cooked with frozen produce.”54 She wondered why “they were serving Scandinavian buffets instead of [the] foods of Hawai‘i.”55
Several members of the group talked about what they did to remedy the problem. Roger Dikon began to frequent local swap meets and would return with “as much local produce as he could carry.”56 He also started growing his own vegetables in an 800-square-foot garden.57 In 1980, Gary Strehl, a chef at the Maui Prince, arranged with other Maui chefs to have a farmers’ cooperative grow “specialty items” for them.58 Peter Merriman remembered seeing gardeners trimming the coconut trees on the grounds of the Mauna Lani Hotel and wondered what was being done with the coconuts. When he found out that they were thrown away, he asked the gardeners if he could have the ones they cut down, and when they agreed, he had them delivered to farmers in Kealakekua, who husked them. The coconut meat was then brought to Merriman in a laundry truck that made a daily trip to Kona.59 In 1986 Philippe Padovani, the new chef at La Mer, the premier French restaurant in Hawai‘i, quickly discovered fresh vegetables and fish at the markets in Honolulu’s Chinatown.60
These stories, and others like them, raise the obvious questions: Why weren’t these chefs already using locally grown tomatoes? Why weren’t they serving lamb or beef raised on local ranches? Why weren’t they availing themselves of the islands’ locally caught fish? The Maui chefs’ success in making their own arrangements with farmers and the local produce and fish markets already suggested possible solutions. At the end of their first meeting, the chefs agreed to investigate buying from local farmers, ranchers, and fishermen and to meet again soon.
Clearly, most of the chefs at the first meeting knew that these problems could be solved. From their training and work in Europe, Josselin, Padovani, and George Mavrothalassitis knew that chefs could establish mutually beneficial working relationships with farmers. Amy Ferguson had helped found what came to be known as Southwestern Cuisine in Texas in the 1980s and had seen how such a relationship with local farmers and producers could benefit them.61 There also was the example of Alice Waters, the chef/proprietor of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, who had developed a similar working relationship with California farmers.
The chefs met again six weeks later, this time on the Big Island (Hawai‘i). According to Peter Merriman, “We literally loaded these chefs on a bus and took them from farm to farm. Because they didn’t know farms existed. I’m not gonna name names, but some of the chefs were Big Island chefs, and I’m taking them on their island saying, ‘Look, here’s a farm.’”62 Looking back, Merriman acknowledged that the key issue was finding farmers willing to grow what the chefs needed and wanted. In the old days, he recalled, chefs would work through their hotel delivery departments and simply look for the lowest price, and of course, most of what they got was imported.63 For this to change, they had to start thinking “far outside the box.”
Figure 5.1. The founding chefs of HRC. Front row: Mark Ellman, Alan Wong; Middle row: Roy Yamaguchi, Amy Ferguson Ota, Jean-Marie Josselin, George Mavrothalassitis, Beverly Gannon, Peter Merriman; Back row: Sam Choy, Philippe Padovani, Roger Dikon, Gary Strehl. Photograph courtesy of Steven Minkowski estate.
This idea of chefs establishing relationships with local farmers proved hard to realize. Merriman’s experience on the Big Island was typical. After he and his wife opened Merriman’s in December 1988, their first problem was finding farmers willing to grow produce for them. In addition, many of those who offered their services had never farmed before. The Merrimans were saved by Tane Datta, who had been at the 1991 meeting with his wife, Maureen. Datta was a recent graduate of Guilford College, with degrees in geology, environmental studies, and alternative energy, and he had been farming on the Big Island since 1979.64 He and Merriman looked over his seed catalogs, and Merriman marked the things he wanted. Datta then worked with the farmers who wanted to grow for Merriman’s restaurant, assigning crops to each of them and suggesting where and at what elevation they could grow them. Their plots were tiny—some only 6 × 40 feet—and they used French intensive-gardening techniques.65
On O‘ahu, Roy Yamaguchi developed a relationship with Dean Okimoto, a local farmer in Waimanalo. Okimoto had graduated from the University of Redlands in 1983 with a degree in political science and was working on his father’s farm, growing lettuce hydroponically. This was a very small operation, involving only three people, and Okimoto says they were on the verge of giving up when he met Yamaguchi. But Yamaguchi advised him, “Don’t quit. We’ll buy herbs from you, and I want you to start growing other things.” Okimoto thus became Yamaguchi’s go-to-farmer, growing whatever he needed. Yamaguchi then began taking Okimoto along on his demonstrations at Liberty House, a big department store in Honolulu. He would say, “Come with me … and you can explain the different greens,” Okimoto remembers. “Every time we did this, I’d get five or six calls from restaurants. That’s how our business started growing.”66
Because the new arrangements had not yet been tested, the farmers had to be willing to take risks. This was the HRC chefs’ second problem. Merriman recalled that he found a farmer willing to grow vine-ripened tomatoes for his restaurant, a rarity in those days. Or more precisely, he found a farmer who grew something other than tomatoes but who was willing to try growing them. Her name was Erin Lee, and she showed up one day at his restaurant with herbs.
So Erin comes in, and she’s got herbs. I’m talking to her … she’s a very intelligent woman, and I think, “This lady’s got it going on.” So I tell her, we’ve got enough herbs. What we really would need are vine-ripened tomatoes.” At the time everybody knew you couldn’t grow vine-ripened tomatoes because of the fruit flies. That was a known fact. … So anyway, 120 days later, here comes Erin back in my kitchen with vine-ripened tomatoes. What she figured out was that if she moved to a high-enough elevation, the fruit flies wouldn’t come up there. But it was always raining up there. So she put plastic over her tomatoes and irrigated. So she went to the wet side of Waimea and put in irrigation. … The point is that very few people go to the wet side and irrigate. She had the brains to do that. So she was selling us tomatoes for us for a number of years.67
The other farmers on the Big Island finally adopted Lee’s model. Many of them had grown flowers until South American growers took over their markets with the help of FedEx.68 This is an example of how globalizing economic forces in North and South America and a transnational firm—in this case, FedEx—affected a local economy on an island in the middle of the Pacific.
The HRC chefs’ third problem, according to Merriman, was that forging relationships with local producers took a lot of time. An example is how he began working with Herbert M. “Monty” Richards, a well-known local rancher who raised lambs on the Big Island.
He tried to sell us some lamb and it was frozen, and I said we really want to get fresh lamb. He said the only way you could do that would be if you bought the whole animal. I said, OK we’ll do it. That’s how we got that tradition, which is now one of our signatures, of a different lamb dish every day. Now it’s becoming famous: snout-to-tail is the concept. I laugh about this. Yeah, snout-to-tail is the latest thing. People are using the whole animal, whole animal contact.
Merriman worked with Edwards for twenty years and continually gave him feedback on the lambs—whether they were too small, their meat was too dry, they had enough fat, and so forth.69
The HRC chefs’ agreement to buy local was revolutionary. It called into question how they had viewed their own culinary productions, and it was a new way of looking at food and their relationship with the land and the sea and with those who worked the land and who fished the local waters. This agreement also meant not relying solely on the big wholesalers that supplied restaurants and hotels—the Suisan Company and Armstrong Produce. Instead, the HRC chefs were imagining a foodscape that did not really exist before 1991.
The same core group of twelve chefs met several times in 1991/1992 and from time to time through the 1990s.70 They continued to search for farmers, fishermen, and ranchers who could grow or produce what they needed. They also arranged deliveries of sufficient quantities of each product. Then they began to use in their restaurants these locally grown vegetables, locally caught fish and gathered shellfish, and locally raised beef and lamb. They even began to highlight the “local” provenance of what they were using, fully two decades before the word locavore became popular.71
The HRC chefs had larger ambitions, however. They were aware of other regional cuisine movements on the mainland. In fact, at their first meeting, they turned to Amy Ferguson, who, as part of the founding of the Southwestern Cuisine movement, had worked with its leaders: Dean Fearing, Robert Le Grande, and Stephen Pyles. Because the HRC group knew that they needed someone to help them organize and present themselves to a larger audience, they asked her how the Southwestern Cuisine chefs organized and presented their new cuisine.72 But it was Beverly Gannon who suggested Shep Gordon, an impresario extraordinaire who was a veteran of the Los Angeles music scene and was best known as the long-time manager of the shock rock icon Alice Cooper. Gordon also was into film and had his own production company, Alive Films, whose productions included The Duelists and The Kiss of the Spider Woman. Two other things made Gordon especially attractive: first, he ran an agency that represented chefs, including the renowned French chef Roger Vergé, as well as Alice Waters and Emeril Lagasse, and, second, he lived in Kihei on the island of Maui.73 Some of those at the meeting when Gordon was introduced remember his prediction, that only some of the HRC chefs would become celebrities and that the others would need to support them.74
With the help of Gordon and many others, the Hawai‘i regional cuisine chefs quickly gained national attention. National food magazines began to feature them. Bon Appétit published more articles on Roy Yamaguchi (in 1991), as well as Alan Wong (1992) and Mark Ellman (1995). Roy Yamaguchi was inducted into the Fine Dining Hall of Fame in 1992. Janice Wald Henderson, the West Coast food writer who wrote the first article on Yamaguchi, was contracted to produce an HRC cookbook. The New Cuisine of Hawaii: Recipes from the Twelve Celebrated Chefs of Hawaii Regional Cuisine was published in 1994 and featured each of the twelve founding HRC chefs along with a sampling of their recipes. Several of the HRC chefs’ own cookbooks followed: Roy Yamaguchi’s Roy’s Feasts from Hawaii (1995), Sam Choy’s Choy of Cooking (1996), Alan Wong’s Alan Wong’s New Wave Luau (1999), and Jean-Marie Josselin’s A Taste of Hawaii: New Cooking from the Crossroads of the Pacific (2000). These five cookbooks gave a national audience a chance to look closely at the new regional cuisine from what Henderson called the “last frontier in American cooking.”75 At that point, even the local media commentators began to pay attention to the HRC chefs. One of them wrote to Hawaiian Airlines offering to design their first-class meals, and all twelve chefs contributed ideas.76 It was the beginning of HRC’s close relationship with the local airlines, which survives to this day. In November 1992 Roy Yamaguchi agreed to do a local television show on HRC, and Hawaii Cooks with Roy first aired in October 1993.
The late 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century brought more recognition to the HRC chefs. In 1999 Travel + Leisure named Amy Ferguson’s new restaurant, Oodles of Noodles, one of the fifty best restaurants in the United States, and in 2002 Gourmet named George Mavrothalassitis’s new restaurant, Chef Mavro, one of “America’s Best Restaurants.” In 2004 Sam Choy’s Kaloko restaurant was named a James Beard “American Classic,” and in 2006 Gourmet named Alan Wong’s one of the country’s top fifty restaurants. More cookbooks were published. In 2003 Roy Yamaguchi published a second cookbook, Hawaii Cooks with Roy Yamaguchi, and that same year Sam Choy and the Makaha sons published A Hawaiian Luau, which won a local book award. Finally, in 2005 Roy Yamaguchi published his third cookbook, Roy’s Fish and Seafood.
Figure 5.2. The cover of Janice Wald Henderson’s The New Cuisine of Hawaii. Reproduced with permission of Mark Ellman.
The chefs’ national exposure began to have another effect: they started appearing on national television. Amy Ferguson was featured in Julia Child’s Cooking with Master Chefs in November 1993,77 and two HRC chefs were invited to cook at the James Beard House in New York City: Roger Dikon was invited to be a guest chef there in 1995, and Gary Strehl participated in a James Beard program, “The Best Hotel Chefs in America,” in 1996. HRC chefs also were paired with leading mainland chefs. In 1997, Alan Wong cooked with his former mentor, André Soltner, the chef/owner of Lutèce in New York City, for a benefit at Kapi‘olani Community College, and the next year Wong was paired with Thomas Keller, whose French Laundry was regarded at the time as the country’s best restaurant, on “Grand Chefs on Tour.” In September 2000, Wong and Ming Tsai were featured at the Kea Lani Food and Wine Festival. The HRC chefs also started winning the most prestigious national culinary awards: three of them won the James Beard award for the “Best Chef in the Pacific Northwest”: Roy Yamaguchi (1993), Alan Wong (1996), and George Mavrothalassitis (2003). Four others were nominated for the same award but did not win: Sam Choy (1997), Jean-Marie Josselin (1997 and 2000), Beverly Gannon (2004), and Peter Merriman (2004). Merriman’s won a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence in 2006.
As all this was happening, most of the chefs moved at least once and many, two or three times, opening new restaurants and, often, more than one. Jean-Marie Josselin opened three restaurants: two on Kaua‘i (1990 and 1994), and a third in Honolulu (1997). Sam Choy had four restaurants: three in Kona (1990) and a fourth in Waikiki (1996). George Mavrothalassitis opened Chef Mavro in Honolulu 1998. Alan Wong opened Alan Wong’s in Honolulu (1995); the Pineapple Room, in the Ala Moana branch of the Liberty House department store chain, which is now a branch of Macy’s (1999); and a third restaurant in Japan (2000). But none of them came close to Roy Yamaguchi, who, by January 2003, had opened thirty-seven restaurants, five in Hawai‘i, one in Asia, one in the Pacific, and thirty on the mainland.
Within a decade of the August 1991 meeting, HRC was well on its way to being recognized as an exciting new regional cuisine and an important culinary movement in the islands. The HRC chefs had benefited from Shep Gordon’s good advice and the attention they were getting from food writers and industry organizations such as the Hawai‘i Restaurant Association. Their success has continued in the twenty-first century.
A year after the HRC chefs announced the appearance of their new regional cuisine, they created a nonprofit entity, “Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine, Inc.”78 Well aware of Alice Waters and California cuisine, they were hoping to establish the kinds of relationships Waters had with California farmers.79
Each HRC chef described differently what he or she was doing. Sam Choy insisted that he was continuing to do what he had been doing long before 1991 and that his cooking style “developed from a love for the land and an understanding of the Hawaiian culture and the other ethnic groups who live” in Hawai‘i.80 Mark Ellman explained that his version of HRC required that he “utilize as many products grown and raised here as possible and to present them in the simplest, purest manner,” and he added, “I’d like to get back to what early Hawaiians were eating, and utilize these foods in mine.”81 Beverly Gannon declared that she was “committed to raising the level of quality of local produce. That’s what ties HRC together. It’s not about boundaries and definitions; it’s a melting-pot cuisine like the people who came here.”82 Jean-Marie Josselin agreed. “I like to think I was one of the first chefs who helped improve the quality of Hawai‘i’s products. That’s what Hawai‘i regional cuisine means to me.”83 George Mavrothalassitis’s “definition of Hawai‘i regional cuisine is to cook the food of Hawai‘i from the foods in the Hawaiian markets in a contemporary fashion.”84 Amy Ferguson’s view of Hawai‘i regional cuisine was simply “preserving food’s integrity.”85 Alan Wong saw HRC as a medium for showcasing the dishes and flavors that he grew up with, dishes that reflected his Chinese, Filipino, Hawaiian, and Japanese roots.86
Given these widely divergent views of HRC cuisine, what exactly is an HRC dish? Clearly, there is no single culinary style, since each HRC chef has his or her own version. Moreover, the chefs adapt whatever they cook to their own experience, training, and regional and national origin. But all of them hope that what will be most conspicuous about their culinary creations is that they are made with the best, locally sourced ingredients, whether greens, fish, shellfish, meat, fowl, fruits, macadamia nuts, or coffee. This insistence on using locally sourced ingredients also is typical of most regional cuisines in the United States.
HRC dishes reveal unmistakable Asian influences. This is apparent, first, in the HRC chefs’ cooking techniques: some use Chinese cooking techniques, such as stir-frying, steaming, or deep frying, or the Japanese practice of serving the freshest fish raw and thinly sliced. Most of the HRC chefs also try to create dishes with new flavors, using such Asian ingredients as soy sauce, hoisin sauce, fish sauce (nam pla), bean paste, sesame oil, Sichuan chili oil, Thai curry paste, rice-wine vinegar, five-spice powder, lemongrass, water chestnuts, dried seaweed (nori), black sesame seeds, kaffir lime leaves, perilla (shiso), and yuzu.87
From the outset, well-known Asian dishes began to appear on the menus at HRC restaurants. At first, the chefs experimented with teriyaki sauces. Several even served their own versions of sashimi, siu mai, tempura, and sushi.88 Today many of these dishes are commonly found at high-end restaurants both in Hawai‘i and on the West Coast. For example, at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago, in Los Angeles, the first-course choices include Crispy Maine Sweet Shrimp Tempura and Marinated Japanese Hamachi and Tuna Sashimi. At Providence, a Michelin-starred restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, also in Los Angeles, kampachi sashimi is almost always on the menu. Indeed, the naturalization of Asian dishes in U.S. regional cuisines may have begun in Los Angeles, but it reached a new level with Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine.
As the HRC chefs formed relationships with farmers, ranchers, fishermen, aquaculturists, and coffee growers, they added these producers’ names to their menus so that diners would know they were eating Erin Lee’s tomatoes, Nalo greens, Sumida Farm’s watercress, and Maui Cattle Company beef tenderloin and were drinking Edward Sakamoto’s vintage Kona coffees. In time, these names carried a cachet of their own, enhancing the dining experience of savvy diners at HRC restaurants. Here, too, the HRC chefs may have learned from Alice Waters and other regional cuisine chefs.
Several HRC chefs even added to their menus their own renditions of local dishes that originated with the indigenous Hawaiians or the different ethnic groups that had immigrated to the islands. Accordingly, Sam Choy made a contemporary version of the Hawaiian dish laulau, which is made by wrapping pieces of pork and fish in taro and ti leaves and then steaming it. Roy Yamaguchi serves miso-glazed fish dishes, a staple in the Japanese repertoire; Alan Wong offers his own version of lumpia, a Filipino take on the egg roll; and George Mavrothalassitis makes his own, highly refined, version of the Portuguese malasada.89 What these chefs are offering is a new and positive version of some of the most humble local dishes. Although some, like laulau, are indigenous, others—such as chazuke, chicken hekka, pinkabet, and pork hash—were brought by immigrants; and still other dishes, like the loco moco, were created later, in Hawai‘i.90 Although many had the same name as the dishes introduced to the islands by immigrants from China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines, the HRC versions of these local dishes were conspicuously more refined than the original versions. After all, they were made with the freshest and best ingredients and were prepared using sophisticated French techniques.
An example is the loco moco, a hamburger patty served on a bed of rice, smothered in brown gravy, and topped with a fried egg. Loco is Spanish or Portuguese for “crazy,” and moco was chosen because it rhymed with loco. The dish may have been invented by Mr. and Mrs. Richard Inouye, owners of the Lincoln Grill in Hilo, for teenagers eager to have “something different from American sandwiches and less time-consuming than Asian food.”91 The loco moco is now a staple at fast-food restaurants throughout the state and at Hawaiian-themed restaurants on the mainland.
Alan Wong’s loco moco has the same name and basic structure but substitutes famously expensive wagyu beef for the hamburger; uses kabayaki sauce, the thick, soy-based sauce used in a Japanese broiled-eel dish, instead of the brown gravy; and adds a fried quail egg. The wagyu beef, kabayaki sauce, and quail egg reveal Wong’s Japanese inflection of the loco moco. In fact, his rendition of the loco moco might be described as a French-trained chef’s refined Japanese riff on a humble local classic. As with this dish and so much else that HRC chefs serve, a typical dish has several linguistic layers: the name of the dish, the names of the producers of the ingredients making up the dish, and the traces of the dish’s particular cultural or national registers, which together create a culinary phenomenon of enormous complexity.
Figure 5.3. Alan Wong’s loco moco. Author’s photograph.
So who eats the new culinary creations of the HRC chefs? Just as there is no single style that all HRC chefs share, there is no ideal consumer of HRC dishes. The chefs who opened restaurants in Waikiki or other resort towns clearly were targeting tourists. Peter Merriman has several restaurants in resort towns, and not surprisingly, he uses cooking techniques (grilling) and garnishes (salsas) that would be familiar to any customer who was a fan of California cuisine or had eaten at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago or Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill. Yet Merriman, true to his HRC ideals, faithfully uses locally sourced vegetables, fish, and, when possible, meat.
In contrast, HRC chefs whose restaurants are not in Waikiki or resort towns targeted locals. One thinks of Roy Yamaguchi’s first restaurant, located in a suburb eight miles from Waikiki, or Peter Merriman’s eponymous Waimea restaurant, which is ten to thirty miles from the resort hotels on the Kona coast. Both opened in December 1988 within a day of each other.
Roy’s quickly developed a following, but Merriman’s, perhaps because it is so far away from the resort hotels, had a harder time initially, although it now attracts both locals and tourists.
Jean-Marie Josselin opened his first restaurant, A Pacific Café, in a strip mall in sleepy Kapaa on the east coast of Kauai, but it is only six miles from the largest city on the island, Lihue, and within a mile of nearby hotels and condominiums. Bev Gannon’s first restaurant, Hailimaile General Store, is the exception. It is located in Makawao on the island of Maui, twenty-five to thirty miles from the resort hotels in Wailea, Lahaina, Ka‘anapali, and Kapalua. Although one might imagine that her choice was carefully calculated, Gannon explains that the Makawao site was something of a fluke—the building went on the market when she was looking for a space for her growing catering business, and she took it.92 In 1995 she opened another restaurant, Joe’s, in the resort town of Wailea, which attracts visitors who own or rent condominiums there.
The locations of the several HRC restaurants that opened in the 1990s suggest careful planning. The best example is Alan Wong’s, which opened in April 1995 on the third floor of a nondescript office building on South King Street in the working-class McCully district. This location may reflect the marketing savvy of Frances Higa, who put up the capital for the new restaurant and, conveniently, owned the building. Higa, the founder of the very successful Zippy’s restaurant chain, knew a lot about marketing and must have recognized that the King Street location put Alan Wong’s within easy driving distance of well-to-do suburbs (Makiki and Manoa), as well as downtown Honolulu, and a short taxi ride from Waikiki. He was right. Other HRC chefs followed suit: Sam Choy opened Sam Choy’s Diamond Head in working-class Kapahulu, less than a mile from Waikiki (1995); Jean-Marie Josselin opened A Pacific Café in the new Ward Center in a Honolulu industrial district going upscale (1996); and George Mavrothalassitis opened Chef Mavro half a block from Alan Wong’s (1998). These new restaurants were within five miles of Waikiki and downtown Honolulu and quickly developed a following among both locals and tourists.
The HRC restaurants attracted a clientele willing to spend more than $100 to $200 for a dinner for two. Like the toniest restaurants in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City, their patrons were mostly local professionals, well-heeled tourists, or locals out for a special-occasion dinner. It is hardly surprising that these new restaurants did very well:
Bev Gannon’s two restaurants grossed $1,000,000 in 1990, $2,500,000 in 1995, and $5,000,000 in 1999; Sam Choy’s restaurants grossed $6,000,000 in 1996 and $10,000,000 in 1998; and Roy Yamaguchi’s empire of restaurants grossed $100,000,000 in 2006.93
Hawai‘i regional cuisine is important, I believe, for four reasons. First, HRC introduced and popularized the new calculus promoted by the new regional cuisines that began to appear in the United States in the 1970s, beginning with California cuisine and followed by other regional cuisines. The chief premise of the new regional cuisines is that food is better if it uses local ingredients.
This new culinary calculus also emphasized the importance of clean air, soil, rivers, and oceans and accordingly encouraged state and county officials to monitor local agriculture, fishing, and ranching even more carefully, as well as raising the general public awareness of the environment. This development was especially important in Hawai‘i, whose sugar and pineapple industries were declining and whose growers were having to compete with developers for thousands of acres of vacated sugarcane and pineapple fields. Today, the impact of this new calculus is apparent in the goal of many restaurants in Hawai‘i to serve food that is 90 percent locally sourced.94
Most important is that HRC affirms the local that once had been racialized and thus had been subordinated and denigrated. This “cultural denigration” of the “local” is the standard posture of colonizing regimes toward the cultures of those they dominated or enslaved.95 I have suggested that HRC’s affirmation of the local assumed many forms: first, it affirmed the local produce that the HRC chefs now use—whether vegetables, fruit, seaweed, fish, shellfish, meat, eggs, honey, macadamia nuts, or coffee. It also affirmed the local producers who grew, caught, gathered, and raised that produce. Most telling in this regard is that the producers’ names now are on the menus of many HRC restaurants. For instance, the restaurant Chef Mavro acknowledges its long relationship with the Sumida family, which has supplied it with watercress since the 1980s. But HRC also brought local dishes to the tables of Hawai‘i’s fine-dining restaurants, even the once despised foods of the urban ghettos and the plantation camps. Moreover, the retention of the untranslated names of dishes signals to diners that what they are being served is truly distinctive and like nothing else they have seen in fine-dining establishments on the mainland or elsewhere in the world.96
HRC affirmed the local in an even more dramatic way: some of the HRC chefs were locals born and raised in the post–World War II American imperium. Sam Choy and Alan Wong were born and raised in Hawai‘i. Roy Yamaguchi’s father was in the U.S. military and was stationed in postwar Japan, which meant that Yamaguchi grew up on an American military installation. Local chefs who were not Caucasian could never have reached such prominence during the colonial period or even in the early decades after Hawai‘i became the fiftieth state. But Wong and Yamaguchi had impressive credentials. They were trained on the mainland—Wong at the Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, and Yamaguchi at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. Both also had long and demanding apprenticeships at great French restaurants in the United States, Wong at Lutèce in New York City and Yamaguchi at L’Ermitage in Los Angeles. And both won James Beard awards.
Equally important to this discussion, the other nine HRC chefs who came from the mainland or Europe also affirmed the local. They, too, enthusiastically bought local produce, encouraged and featured local producers, and invented new versions of local dishes. They even began to hire locals to work in their restaurants, not just as waiters, busboys, dishwashers, and janitors, but also as sous-chefs, sauciers, and pastry chefs. Many of these locals are now emerging as new, great chefs and are being nominated for James Beard awards. In sum, the affirmation of the local, although it assumed many different forms, was the defining trait of the new culinary vision represented by Hawai‘i regional cuisine.
HRC was nothing less than a critique of the older, Eurocentric, and racist tradition of fine dining that had existed in the islands from the late nineteenth century through the 1980s. It was also a critique of those who sustained and protected that fine-dining tradition: hotel owners, restaurant managers, chefs, consumers, and food writers. As a critique of colonial Hawai‘i and its ugly vestiges, HRC was a subversion of the culinary language that originated in the metropolitan centers of the Euro-American colonial empires and that presented itself as not only superior but also universal. Read in this way, then, HRC represents an important reworking of the power relations that sustained the dominance of Euro-American culinary traditions and signaled the appearance of a new “syncretic and hybridized” and evolving regional cuisine.
Yet despite its successes, HRC has not been able to contribute in any sustained and meaningful way to the solution of the largest and most vexing postcolonial problem: the enduring legacy of the colonization of the Hawaiian islands and its genocidal impact on the indigenous population.97 As is well known, nineteenth-century European and American visitors brought diseases that wiped out most of the Hawaiian population, reducing it from four hundred thousand to a million in 1778 to forty thousand a century later.98 The visitors converted almost all the survivors to Christianity and denigrated Hawaiian values and beliefs. Finally, they also appropriated, with the cooperation of the Hawaiian chiefly class, most of the land in the islands, overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy, engineered the annexation of the islands, and undermined the Hawaiian way of life. The memory and traces of the Western impact on the islands pose a lasting challenge to every thoughtful person in the state.
1. I would like to thank those who generously shared their knowledge of the HRC movement with me: Wanda Adams, Sam Choy, Mark Ellman, Amy Ferguson, Hiroshi Fukui, Beverly Gannon, John Heckathorn, Kurt and Pam Hirabara, Joan Namkoong, Erin Lee, George Mavrothalassitis, Peter Merriman, Dean Okimoto, Edward Sakamoto, Russell Siu, Alan Wong, and Roy Yamaguchi. I am especially grateful to Michiko Kodama-Nishimoto, who caught many mistakes in an early draft of this paper, and Francine Wai, who brought the Willows to my attention; and Dana and Arash Khazeni, who gave me an old menu from Alexander Young Hotel.
2. A number of chefs at fine-dining establishments were not trained in Europe. Michel Martin, the founder/owner of Michel’s in Waikiki, was the most famous of those who had no training in classical French cuisine. Although he was raised in France, he learned his craft after he migrated to Hawai‘i as a teenager and opened his restaurant in 1942. Another exception was the chefs at the Willows, arguably the most famous fine-dining establishment in the islands from the 1940s until 1980. It opened in July 1944 on land once owned by Hawaiian royalty and initially served only until 7 p.m. because of wartime blackout regulations. Once the war ended, it became a full-fledged restaurant, and its regulars included Arthur Godfrey of Hawaii Calls, and a number of Hollywood celebrities such as Dorothy Lamour and Johnny Weismuller. Yet none of its chefs had formal culinary training: they simply liked to cook. See Wanda A. Adams, “Michel Martin, 100, Shared Fine French Cuisine with the Isles,” Honolulu Advertiser, January 19, 2008; and Wanda A. Adams, “Guide to Good Eating,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, April 9, 1961.
3. Food historian Rachel Laudan has written the definitive study of “local food.” See her The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996), 5–9, 16–103. See also Arnold Hiura, Kau Kau: Cuisine and Culture in the Hawaiian Islands (Honolulu: Watermark Publishing, 2009), 54–77.
4. See Lawrence H. Fuchs, Hawaii Pono: A Social History (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), 38, 43–46, 59–67; and Stephen Sumida, And the View from the Shore: Literary Traditions of Hawai‘i (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), xiv–xv. Haunani Kay Trask disagrees with the use of the word “local” to describe the islands’ nonindigenous population. See her “Settlers of Color and ‘Immigrant’ Hegemony: ‘Locals’ in Hawai‘i,” Amerasia Journal 26, no. 2 (summer 2000): 2; and Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, eds., Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008), 25–29.
5. Judith Kirkendall, “Hawaiian Ethnogastronomy: The Development of a Pidgin-Creole Cuisine” (PhD diss., University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, 1985), 331.
6. Fuchs, Hawaii Pono, 43–47. The Big Five firms, which were established in the nineteenth century and dominated the colony’s economic life, were C. Brewer & Co., Castle & Cooke, American Factors, Alexander & Baldwin, and Theo H. Davies. For an account of their history, see Fuchs, Hawaii Pono, 22, 53–55.
7. English Standard Schools were created in the 1920s and 1930s for Caucasian students whose parents wanted their children to have classmates who spoke standard English and not pidgin English, the local dialect. Entrance to these schools was based on examination, and most of those pupils were Caucasian. The English Standard Schools were part of a system of de facto segregation and were abolished in 1947. See Fuchs, Hawaii Pono, 274–79.
8. David H. Stannard, Before the Horror: The Population of Hawai‘i on the Eve of Western Contact (Honolulu: Social Science Research Institute, University of Hawai‘i, 1989), 7, 45, 50–75; Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawai‘i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 93–95; Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio, Dismembering Lāhui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), 1–144; Noenoe Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 39–44.
9. The overthrow of the monarchy and annexation are described well in Osorio, Dismembering Lāhui, 145–249; and Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 123–203.
10. Fuchs, Hawaii Pono, 68; Consul General Moroi, “Americanizing the Japanese in Hawaii,” Mid-Pacific Magazine, October 16, 1918; Royal Mead, “Sugar Interests in Hawaii,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 18, 1910, quoted in Fuchs, Hawaii Pono, 49.
11. Fuchs reports that “as many as thirty of the early white residents married Hawaiian women of chiefly rank.” Fuchs, Hawaii Pono, 38. See also Osorio, Dismembering Lāhui, 27, 70, 82, 87, 140, 153, 242.
12. The Kamehameha School for Boys opened in 1887, and its school for girls opened in 1894; ‘Iolani School was founded in 1863 and is affiliated with the Anglican Church of Hawai‘i; Mid-Pacific Institute was created in 1908 with the merger of the Kawaiaha‘o School for Girls and the Mills Institute for Boys; the College of St. Louis was founded in 1846 by the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary and was located first in Windward O‘ahu and, after 1881, in Honolulu.
13. Fuchs, Hawaii Pono, 3, 57–59.
14. The Friend, January 1917, 3. By 1940, the number of Caucasians had risen to 25 percent of the colony’s population. See Fuchs, Hawaii Pono, 52.
15. The military presence grew to 17,169 in 1927, 24,952 in 1937 and, after the Pearl Harbor attack, jumped to 135,907 in 1942, peaking at 406,811 in 1944. See Robert C. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1962), 10.
16. W. A. Pickering to CG, Hawaiian Department, Sub: Annual Inspection, Schofield Barracks, Territory of Hawaii, Fiscal Year 1935, June 30, 1935; Adjutant General’s Office Document Number 333.1, National Archives Record Group Inventory Entry Number 11, Record Group 159; and Joseph Y. K. Akana Interview, Waikīkī, 1900–1985, 1:11; Walter Maciejowski to Brian M. Linn, January 6, 1993, quoted in Brian McAllister Linn, Guardians of Empire: The U.S. Army and the Pacific, 1902–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 123, 126.
17. Fuchs, Hawaii Pono, 49–52.
18. Arthur Suehiro, Honolulu Stadium: Where Hawaii Played (Honolulu: Watermark Publishing, 1995), 25–117; Michael Okihiro, AJA Baseball in Hawaii: Ethnic Pride and Tradition (Honolulu: Hawai‘i Hochi, 1999), 7–43.
19. Kirkendall, “Hawaiian Ethnogastronomy,” 326, 352–55.
20. Ibid., 124–26.
21. Elinor Langton, “A Hawaiian Bill of Fare,” Paradise of the Pacific 16 (April 1903): 11.
22. Stannard adds, “It is now almost certain that Hawaiians in 1778 had life expectancies greater than their European contemporaries.” See Stannard, Before the Horror, 60–61.
23. For a detailed account of the immigrants’ food and recipes, see Laudan, The Food of Paradise, 106–59; and Hiura, Kau Kau, 26–53.
24. “What Chinese Eat,” Paradise of the Pacific 15 (April 1902): 9–10; Franklin Ng, “Food and Culture: Chinese Restaurants in Hawai‘i,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives—The Journal of the Chinese Historical Society of America (San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America with UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 2010), 113; and Hiura, Kau Kau, 4–25.
25. Robert C. Schmitt, Firsts and Almost Firsts in Hawaii, ed. Ronn Ronck (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1995), 115.
26. Ng, “Food and Culture,” 114.
27. Ng, “Food and Culture,” 115; and John Heckathorn, “Dining—The Oldest Restaurant in Hawaii and the Newest,” Honolulu, November 1987, 348–52.
28. Center for Oral History, The Oroku, Okinawan Connection: Local-Style Restaurants in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: Social Science Research Institute, 2004), app. A.
29. Michiko Kodama-Nishimoto, Warren Nishimoto, and Cynthia Oshiro, Talking Hawai‘i’s Story: Oral Histories of an Island People (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009), 164–67.
30. Schmitt/Ronck, First and Almost Firsts in Hawaii, 115.
31. Clarence E. Glick, Sojourners and Settlers: Chinese Migrants in Hawaii (Honolulu: Hawai‘i Chinese History Center, 1977), 80–81.
32. Center for Oral History, The Oroku, Okinawan Connection, app. A.
33. “The New Spencecliff,” Sunday Star-Bulletin / Advertiser, June 7, 1987.
34. Alan Matsuoka, “Lau Yee Chai: Not an Ordinary Chop Suey House,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, March 12, 1991.
35. “Clark’s Tour No. 8 Menu,” Alexander Young Hotel, February 10, 1928; and Center for Oral History, Waikīkī, 1900–1985. Oral Histories (Honolulu: Center for Oral History, 1985), 1726–27.
36. Center for Oral History, Waikīkī, 1731.
37. Kirkendall, “Hawaiian Ethnogastronomy, 137; Ng, “Food and Culture,” 13; and Kodama-Nishimoto et al., Talking Hawai‘i’s Story, 11, 46–48, 52–55, 72, 74–75, 83, 120, 156–57, 211–13, 225, 249, 271–72, 296–98.
38. Donna R. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 122–48.
39. Although fourteen chefs attended the August 27, 1991 meeting, two—René Boujet and John Farnsworth—did not attend subsequent meetings. The twelve who did are generally regarded as the Hawai‘i regional cuisine core group. They are (in alphabetical order) Sam Choy, Roger Dikon, Mark Ellman, Amy Ferguson, Beverly Gannon, Jean-Marie Josselin, George Mavrothalassitis, Peter Merriman, Philippe Padovani, Gary Strehl, Roy Yamaguchi, and Alan Wong. See Alan Wong, interview by Samuel H. Yamashita, March 15, 2009.
40. John Heckathorn, “Delicious Decade,” Honolulu, August 2001, 8.
41. Peter Merriman, interview by Samuel H. Yamashita, July 18, 2010.
42. Ibid.
43. Janet Wald Henderson, The New Cuisine of Hawaii: Recipes from the Twelve Celebrated Chefs of Hawaii Regional Cuisine (New York: Villard Books, 1994), 64; Merriman, interview.
44. Henderson, The New Cuisine of Hawaii, 12; Wong, interview.
45. Merriman, interview.
46. David Kamp, The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation (New York: Broadway Books, 2006), 239–41, 254–61.
47. Roy Yamaguchi, interview by Samuel H. Yamashita, July 7, 2009.
48. Merriman, interview.
49. Mark Ellman, interview by Samuel H. Yamashita, October 17, 2009; Beverly Gannon, interview by Samuel H. Yamashita, October 17, 2009; George Mavrothalassitis, interview by Samuel H. Yamashita, March 17, 2009.
50. Ellman, interview.
51. Ellman, Gannon, Mavrothalassitis, Wong, and Yamaguchi, interviews.
52. Henderson, The New Cuisine of Hawaii, 12.
53. Ibid., 44.
54. Ibid., 74; Amy Ferguson, interview by Samuel H. Yamashita, June 29, 2011.
55. Henderson, The New Cuisine of Hawaii, 74.
56. Ibid., 72.
57. Ibid., 12.
58. Ibid., 96.
59. Merriman, interview.
60. Henderson, The New Cuisine of Hawaii, 84.
61. Ferguson, interview.
62. Merriman, interview.
63. Ibid.
64. Tane Datta, interview by Samuel H. Yamashita, June 29, 2011.
65. Merriman and Datta, interviews.
66. Dean Okimoto, interview by Samuel H. Yamashita, August 9, 2009.
67. Merriman, interview; Erin Lee, interview by Samuel H. Yamashita, June 28, 2011.
68. Merriman, interview.
69. Merriman, interview.
70. Datta, interview.
71. ERS Report Summary, Washington, DC, May 2010, 1–2.
72. Ferguson and Datta, interviews.
73. Grace A. Lazzarus, “Alumni Profiles: Shep Gordon,” UB Today (fall 2007), available at www.buffalo.edu/UBT/UBT-archives/…/alumni_profiles/gordon.html.
74. Ferguson and Datta, interviews.
75. Henderson, The New Cuisine of Hawaii, xvi.
76. Gannon, interview.
77. Ferguson first met Julia Child when she was twenty-one and already a promising chef. Ferguson, interview.
78. PalmBeachPost.com, October 13, 2009.
79. Henderson, The New Cuisine of Hawaii, 96.
80. Henderson, The New Cuisine of Hawaii, 4. Choy also credits his parents for teaching him a lot about Hawaiian food. Sam Choy, interview by Samuel H. Yamashita, April 5, 2010.
81. Henderson, The New Cuisine of Hawaii, 20.
82. Ibid., 32.
83. Ibid., 44.
84. Ibid., 74.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid, 106; Wong, interview.
87. Henderson, The New Cuisine of Hawaii, 4–9, 12–18, 22–29, 32–41, 44–51, 54–63, 66–71, 74–83, 86–93, 96–103, 106–13, 118–26.
88. Ibid., 22, 70, 102, 108, 118.
89. See Sam Choy, Sam Choy’s Island Flavors (New York: Hyperion, 1999), 161; Roy Yamaguchi, Hawaii Cooks: Flavors from Roy’s Pacific Rim Kitchen (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 2003), 98–99, Roy’s Fish and Seafood (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 2005), 10, 13, Roy’s Feasts from Hawaii (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 2007), 109; and Alan Wong, Alan Wong’s New Wave Luau: Recipes from Honolulu’s Award-Winning Chef (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 1999), 18, 36.
90. Alan Wong, The Blue Tomato: The Inspiration behind the Cuisine of Alan Wong (Honolulu: Watermark Publishing, 2010), 26–27.
91. James Kelly, “Loco Moco: A Folk Dish in the Making,” Social Process 30 (1983): 62–63. For another version of the origins of the loco moco, see Center on Oral History, Tsunami Remembered: Oral Histories of Survivors and Observers in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: Center on Oral History, 2000), 1:118–20.
92. Tom Yoneyama, “Getting Their Just Desserts,” Hawaii Business 5 (1989): 34, 36; Gannon, interview.
93. Alex Salkever, “Cookbook to Perfection,” Hawaii Business (June 1998); Alex Salkever, “A Woman’s Place,” Hawaii Business (July 2000).
94. Wanda Adams, “Merriman Planning Restaurant for Kauai,” Honolulu Advertiser, December 7, 2007.
95. For a discussion of the linguistic and literary dimensions of this “cultural denigration,” see Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2001), 7–10.
96. Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back, 63.
97. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui discusses the many proposed solutions to this problem in Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 171–96; and Haunani Kay Trask describes the plan for decolonization offered by Ka Lahui Hawai‘i and its legal foundations in “Settlers of Color and ‘Immigrant’ Hegemony,” 13–21.
98. Stannard, Before the Horror, 45, 50.
