No longer. Forget the touristy luaus with “Americanized” versions of local delicacies. These days restaurant menus in Hawaii are likely to offer such specialties as grilled opakapaka (Hawaiian snapper) in a macadamia-ginger-basil pesto, tempura of Kona lobster roll or chicken breasts stuffed with spiced mango. Mashed taro (the tuber used to make the island specialty known as poi) is the de rigueur replacement for ordinary mashed potatoes, and coconut-creme-spinach sauce is as ubiquitous as brown gravy at a Southern truck stop. “It’s everything you expect fine food to be,” says Myers. “I daresay the meals we’ve had here lately can stack up to anything we can get in San Francisco. Whatever has happened, we think it’s great.”
What’s happened is Hawaii regional cuisine, a culinary revolution launched in the early ’90s by 12 prominent island chefs, including Wong. They were anxious to declare their independence from the traditional staples of island cooking: frozen fish (because local fishermen couldn’t keep up with demand) and canned vegetables imported from the mainland. Known as HRC, the cuisine reflects Hawaii’s melting pot of Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Filipino and Korean immigrants who came to the islands to work on sugarcane and pineapple plantations. “We didn’t invent the cuisine. It was already here, in places like employee cafeterias and potlucks. We simply refined it a little,” says Peter Merriman, one of HRC’s founding chefs.
Fresh, local ingredients are a hallmark of the new cuisine. “In the early years I would place ads, asking farmers to show me their produce. They brought me seed catalogs and asked what I’d like them to grow,” recalls Merriman. Before long, HRC became part of the landscape. Literally. With sugar-cane and pineapple production on the decline, eager farmers willingly became “boutique” providers of specialty produce or livestock to the thriving restaurant and resort market.
Nowhere is the chef-farmer partnership more vibrant than on the Big Island, whose volcanic soil and 23 different microclimates are a ranching and farmland nirvana, producing everything from Kona coffee to white asparagus, free-range beef, microgreens, goat cheese, vine-ripened tomatoes, honey and, of course, every tropical fruit imaginable. And it’s not just crops growing in the ground that have caught the eye of restaurateurs. The thriving aquaculture industry, in which lobsters, prawns, abalone and seaweed are cultivated in the ocean, is taking hold in a big way. “I have colleagues from the other islands calling me, asking if I can get certain produce for them,” says Ryan Vargas, sous-chef at the Big Island’s Four Seasons Resort Hualalai.
Merriman, for one, believes he and the other HRC founders created more than a culinary movement on the islands. “I think the origins of a lot of the culinary East-West fusion going on in the rest of the country sprang from what we’ve done here,” he notes. Merriman is happy to share the accolades, though. While some restaurants hang photos of celebrities on their walls, Merriman’s eponymous restaurant in the Big Island town of Waimea boasts another “wall of fame.” Lining the entryway are framed photos of the smiling farmers and ranchers who supply his restaurant. To Merriman, they’re the real stars.
