Hawaii Regional Cuisine: The First Fifteen Years (1991–2006)
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, fish- ermen, 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 high- light 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 Southwest- ern 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 com- pany, Alive Films, whose productions included The Duelists and The Kiss of the Spider Woman. Two other things made Gordon especially attractive: first,
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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 Hen- derson, 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 pub- lished 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 commen- tators began to pay attention to the HRC chefs. One of them wrote to Hawai- ian Airlines offering to design their first-class meals, and all twelve chefs con- tributed 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 Fergu- son’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 res- taurant, 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 cook- book, 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.
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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
Figure 5.2. The cover of Janice Wald Henderson’s The New Cuisine of Hawaii. Reproduced with permission of Mark Ellman.
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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 Specta- tor 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 Janu- ary 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 culi- nary movement in the islands. The HRC chefs had benefited from Shep Gor- don’s good advice and the attention they were getting from food writers and industry organizations such as the Hawai‘i Restaurant Association. Their suc- cess has continued in the twenty-first century.
Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine
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 understand- ing 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
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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 “defi- nition 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 serv- ing 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. Sev- eral 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 Tem- pura and Marinated Japanese Hamachi and Tuna Sashimi. At Providence, a Michelin-starred restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, also in Los Angeles, kampa- chi 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
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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 wrap- ping 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 ver- sion 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 substi- tutes 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 rendi- tion 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
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the traces of the dish’s particular cultural or national registers, which together create a culinary phenomenon of enormous complexity.
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 Mer- riman, 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 res- taurant, 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 condo- miniums. Bev Gannon’s first restaurant, Hailimaile General Store, is the excep- tion. 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
Figure 5.3. Alan Wong’s loco moco. Author’s photograph.
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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 sug- gest 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, con- veniently, 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 Mav- rothalassitis 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 profes- sionals, 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
Conclusions
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
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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. More- over, 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 impe- rium. Sam Choy and Alan Wong were born and raised in Hawai‘i. Roy Yama- guchi’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 prom- inence 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 appren- ticeships 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
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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 rac- ist tradition of fine dining that had existed in the islands from the late nine- teenth 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 appear- ance of a new “syncretic and hybridized” and evolving regional cuisine.
Yet despite its successes, HRC has not been able to contribute in any sus- tained and meaningful way to the solution of the largest and most vexing postcolonial problem: the enduring legacy of the colonization of the Hawai- ian 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 hun- dred thousand to a million in 1778 to forty thousand a century later.98 The vis- itors converted almost all the survivors to Christianity and denigrated Hawai- ian 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 under- mined 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.
Notes 1. I would like to thank those who generously shared their knowledge of the HRC move-
ment 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,
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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 Fujik- ane 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.