The Significance of Hawaii Regional Cuisine in Postcolonial Hawai‘i
Samuel Hideo Yamashita
Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine
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 commu- nities 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, Cali- fornia 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
Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine
99
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. Well- born 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 coun- try 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 com- panies, 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 indig- enous 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 opposi- tion 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 Hawai- ians from the ali‘i, or chiefly, class—many of whom had succeeded in pre- serving their landholdings and married Caucasians—and locals who had suc- ceeded 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,
Samuel Hideo Yamashita
100
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 Portu- guese 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; Fil- ipino, 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 nonethe- less 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 prod- ucts.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 sur- prising, because as David Stannard observed,
Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine
101
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 accus- tomed.23 Accordingly, Portuguese made bread as they did in the old country, and Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos made rice the center of their meal, sup- plementing it with local fish, pork, chicken, duck, and homegrown vegetables when they were available. Those who lived near towns or cities such as Hono- lulu, 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
Hawai‘i’s First Restaurants
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 can- teens, 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 Hiro- shima, 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
Samuel Hideo Yamashita
102
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 restau- rant 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 restau- rant; 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, how- ever, 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 Haleku- lani 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 fami- lies kept a small supply of canned corned beef, luncheon meat, vienna sau- sage, tuna, and vegetables.37 Of course, canned foods were also “American,” and their consumption in the islands would have been applauded by reform- ers on the mainland who worked to wean immigrants away from their tradi- tional diets.38
Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine
103
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.
The August 1991 Meeting
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 anoth- er’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 mid- day 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. Merri- man 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
Samuel Hideo Yamashita
104
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 Cal- ifornia 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 iso- lated. 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 conti- nental cuisine. Sometimes they even cooked with frozen produce.”54 She won- dered 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
Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine
105
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’ cooper- ative 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 farm- ers 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 Hono- lulu’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 them- selves 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 ben- eficial 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 ben- efit 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 tak- ing them on their island saying, ‘Look, here’s a farm.’”62 Looking back, Merri- man 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.”
Samuel Hideo Yamashita
106
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, environ- mental 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 Mer- riman 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
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.
Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine
107
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. Yama- guchi 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 intel- ligent 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 irri- gated. 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
Samuel Hideo Yamashita
108
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 agree- ment also meant not relying solely on the big wholesalers that supplied restau- rants and hotels—the Suisan Company and Armstrong Produce. Instead, the HRC chefs were imagining a foodscape that did not really exist before 1991.