Hawaii epilogue: My airplane neighbors

August 25

I had a smooth flight back to New York from Denver yesterday. A window seat, just a slight delay in our departure, and a polite, tiny young woman in the middle seat who curled up and went to sleep right after takeoff and pretty much stayed that way.
It reminded me that I had one blog entry left to do about my recent trip to Hawaii.
My journey started in Newark, where rain storms delayed the flight enough to put the possibility of my connection in Phoenix very much in doubt. Worse, it gave my neighbor a chance to strike up a conversation with me.
Because people rarely start talking to each other in the air. It's on the ground, during a delay in takeoff, that the camaraderie of perceived mutual misfortune helps people to form a bond that risks keeping them inextricably linked for many hours.
Also, I had a middle seat.
In the window seat was a nurse from California in late middle age who had lived on the East Coast for many years but still thought that California was better in every way. Why she thought she should share that with me, a willing immigrant to New York from the mountain states, I don't know. Why anyone thinks that it's friendly conversation to say that where they're from — geographically, culturally, psychologically — is better than where the person they're talking to is from, or lives, or likes to be, is beyond me.
But she came from the Bay Area in the 1960s and was under the misapprehension that California is a relaxed, mellow, laissez-faire kind of place where people can do whatever they like without judgment from others. I pointed out that her native land currently has a very arch, politically correct culture that does not, in fact, encourage people to do whatever they like, whether it's drink bottled water, eat eggs that don't come from free range chickens or smoke tobacco cigarettes in public.
She had lived in Hawaii, though, and gave me the same advice that many people gave me when I told them I was going to O‘ahu.
“You should go to the Big Island!”
Well, okay, but I was only going to be in Hawaii for a few days and was, in fact, a guest of the island of O‘ahu. And, in fact, since I am a city person who enjoys exploring the cultural culinary diversity that is bred in urban cultures, Honolulu was the place for me.
Still, I thought her advice might be sound until she told me about the kukui nut lei that she bought from a merchant. It was so special to her, she said, because the merchant blessed it. Well, why wouldn’t she bless it? I’d bless it, too, if it meant you’d buy it from me, and I’d send a whole lot of aloha to go with it.
But I didn’t tell her that. Let her enjoy her kukui nut lei. I enjoy mine (not the faux one mentioned earlier, which didn't make it back to the mainland with me, but the hefty one I'd gotten some years before and lurks somewhere in my apartment).
I made my flight from Phoenix to Honolulu with minutes to spare and found myself in a middle seat, which I shared with a tremendously fat woman who had the aisle seat.
In the window was a young man who wore those little ear buds to listen to music. I didn't know they could be turned up so loud that the people around you can hear your music, but, indeed, they can be.
So that was a long flight.
The first half of the return leg was a snap, really, I had a window seat, and in the middle was an extremely limber woman from a German-speaking country. I assume that from her English-German dictionary; we didn't speak.
How did I know she was limber, then? To try to sleep better she simply folded herself in half, at the waist. This seemed to alarm the woman in the aisle seat, who would periodically interrupt her attempted repose whenever a flight attendant came by to see if she wanted anything to drink. But if she did want anything, she would merely unfold herself and ask for it.
We were delayed in Phoenix again, giving entrée for my neighbor in the middle seat (I had the window) to befriend me, which he would have done anyway as he was a very jocular conspiracy theorist of a Jehovah's Witness.
And I have to say, living as I do in a world of food writers, it was actually kind of refreshing to have someone tell me that the devil was the devil instead of high fructose corn syrup.

Steak at the beachhouse, and faux kukui nut leis

Pretending it's June 21

Steakhouses don’t tend to be hotbeds of innovation, not because their chefs and owners lack creativity, but because, for the most part, their guests don’t want them to be innovative. When you go to a steakhouse, generally, you go to eat a steak. It should be delicious. The wine should be red and loud, because a steak can handle it. The chef should cook the steak properly and otherwise stay out of the way.
Since my job is to spot trends and to observe innovations, steakhouses are not usually useful places for me to go for work. Unless it's using some new cut of beef or serving it on Himalayan rock salt (like David Burke does) or getting unusually funky with the sides (BLT), there’s not a lot to learn, trendwise, from a steakhouse.
So I wondered why I had been booked to eat at the Beachhouse, the Moana Surfrider’s restaurant. I mean, I didn’t resent it. I like steak, I like eating on the beach in Waikiki, letting my mind empty itself of troubles while watching the sunset. That’s all right. But this is my job, after all. I must learn while I dine.
I did learn that I was wearing a faux kukui nut lei. Kukui is what Hawaiians call candle nuts — just like they call passion fruit lilikoi and have to say “mahalo” instead of thank you and “aloha” instead of hello or goodbye. They polish the nuts and string them together into leis. I got one a few years ago when I was on Mau‘i and staying at the Ka‘anapali Beach Hotel, as a guest of that island’s visitors bureau, so I thought something was amiss when I was handed one at the Royal Hawaiian and it didn’t weigh anything. Because kukui nuts have some heft.
I wasn’t sure it was okay for me to wear a lei. Did Hawaiians actually do it, or would I look like a touristy idiot?
I’d actually asked my taxi driver about it the night before on the way to dinner at Chef Mavro (yes, I have a rented car, and I already knew how to get there even without the GPS, but I planned on having wine with dinner, and it is bad form for food writers to get DUIs). He was a Vietnamese fellow who had been in Hawaii for a number of years. He said leis made of kukui nuts or seashells were sort of like neckties, to be worn by men as a way of dressing up.
Flower leis were for women, he said.
But in Mau‘i I had been greeted on my arrival with a nice-smelling tuberose lei.
“Welcome to Mau‘i. Please sign here to confirm that you have received your lei greeting,” said the woman who draped it around my neck, proffering her clipboard. It kind of dampened the effect, but I appreciated the gesture anyway.
I won’t say I was disappointed that I wasn’t adorned with a nice smelling lei when I arrived in O‘ahu, because that’s really looking a gift horse in the mouth, but, well, here I am mentioning it.
The Mau‘i bureau also rented me a Mustang convertible. It was a different economic time, I know, I’m just saying.
Anyway, I had my faux-kukui nut lei in my pocket in the taxi on the way to Chef Mavro. When the taxi driver said it was okay to wear, I put it on. I asked my dining companion, Mavro’s wife Donna, if it was okay to wear, and she confirmed that it was in fact a good accessory.
My server at the Beachhouse also said it was fine for me to wear it, but asked if perhaps those were faux kukui nuts.
I shrugged my shoulders. He reached out and touched them for less than a second and said, very politely, mind you, “Yeah, those are fake.”
And there was something interesting and trendy at Beachhouse: the wine list.
They’d just revamped it, clearly with the economy in mind, offering bottles to people who might want some wine with their steak but not if they were going to have to sell a kidney to pay for a bottle.
One way to do that is to stack the list with what people in the wine business call "fighting varietals,” wines that are just a step or two pricewise from jug wines and make up the bulk of the wine market. Often they’re brands big enough to advertise on television. You’ve heard of them all, and so has everyone else, and so they have a certain appeal for people who want wine without fussing about it. I think there should be more wines like that.
But instead the folks at Beachhouse stacked their list with relatively obscure wines that, because of their obscurity, aren’t in such high demand and so they can buy them cheaply. I asked them to pick a couple with the food I ate, so I had a 2007 Domaine la Bauvade Côtes du Rhône (a red one), with my Kona lobster bisque with crème fraîche and green onion crouton.
And with my Moyer Farms 20-ounce rib eye, I had a 2006 (red, obviously) Clos la Coutale from Cahors, in Southwestern France.
I also had a Mau‘i onion and hamakua mushroom sauté that wasn’t your typical steakhouse fair either.
I hadn’t expected that.

To view all the blog entries about my trip to O‘ahu, click here.

Because it’s not all about fine dining

June 21 (that's not when I'm writing this, but when the events told herein took place),



Fine dining is all well and good, but it doesn’t give you a complete picture of what a community has to offer when it comes to food. And although, in my limited experience, Honolulu’s fine dining restaurants manage to refract Hawaiian culture through their unique prism, the city’s more down-to-earth restaurants really show the city's culinary character.
In an earlier entry I mentioned the magical pork adobo plate lunch that I had at Pee Wee Drive In.
I took the picture in this entry at Soon’s Kal Bi Drive In, a place hidden behind a supermarket at a strip mall. It was recommended by my old friend Steve Martin (not the commedian and banjo player, a different one), who went there, I believe, when he was in the navy, lo these many years ago (I’m gonna say the 1980s, definitely during the Cold War). He now lives in Bangkok where he is a world expert on antique opium paraphernalia. (Why not?)
Steve was following my Twitter updates and insisted (in a Direct Message, indicating his sense of its importance) that I try the place.
Twitter proved quite useful on my trip, as Hawaiians I’d never met offered recommendations of places to try, mostly @HIwrite, who suggested Yama’s Fish Market for Hawaiian takeout, Choon Chun Chicken or Choi’s Garden for Korean, and in general Hiroshi Eurasion Tapas and Town Kaimuki
@HIwrite said other recommendations I’d received were “tried + true”: Helena's, Rainbow Drive-In (for loco moco) and Diamond Head Market.
@honoluluacademy asked me to visit it's Pavilion Café.
But instead I followed the advice of my friends, and had Soon's Kal Bi kalbi plate lunch.
To reiterate what a plate lunch is, it’s any sort of protein served, often in a segmented TV-dinner-style tray, with two scoops of rice and macaroni salad. But at Soon’s, instead of serving macaroni salad, they served a sort of mixed kimchi, with a bunch of pickled vegetables all combined together and to be eaten with the grilled short ribs and rice. It was all very tasty, although I'm no expert on kalbi, and I realized as I ate it that I couldn’t find similar food in New York (or at least, I hadn't).
The next day I checked out my friend Jonathan Ray’s recommendation for Thai food: Mekong 2, where, on his recommendation, I ordered the Evil Jungle Prince plate lunch. And there, along with the two scoops of rice, was green papaya salad. The style of service that wasn’t the restaurant’s only adjustment to locals’ tastes. The curry itself was similar to a Thai massaman curry, but it definitely had a certain brown-gravy quality that reminded me very much of loco moco, which is basically salisbury steak on rice with brown gravy, topped with a sunny-side-up egg.
I had it at a food court for breakfast.

To view all the blog entries about my trip to O‘ahu, click here.

Dinner at Mavro

July 6

Let me discuss again why I am not a restaurant critic and don’t recommend restaurants to my readers (although I did just express delight at the deliciousness of my lunchtime baby octopus).
Saturday night dinner during my visit to O‘ahu (two weeks ago, I know) was at Chef Mavro, where I dined with the chef's wife, Donna Jung, and was given a grand tasting menu that I shall detail in a moment.
As far as I could tell, everyone was getting great service, but it’s hard to tell when you’re eating with the chef’s wife, when the chef is in the kitchen, at the very least looking after every plate that comes your way, and later coming out to chat.
Often when chefs come out to chat they’re very polite but rather standoffish, but given the fact that we’d spent the previous day at the harbor, trudging through a watercress farm and eating malasadas, that would have been weird. And I don’t think it’s Mavro’s style. So he just plopped into a spare chair (because when you’re me — or one of hundreds or possibly thousands of people like me — even when there’s just two people dining, you’re usually seated at a four-top) and hung out for awhile after the main dinner rush had ended.
During dessert, Mavro commented on one of the trendiest flavors going these days. “Maple is a magic flavor,” he said. Like Vanilla or lilikoi (which is what Hawaiians call passion fruit; they can't help themselves) it adds an ineffable flavor that you can't necessarily itentify, but you know that it’s delicious.
I’d put nutmeg in that category, too, but you’ll start to think I’m obsessed with the spice.
Indeed, maybe I am.
We ended up closing the place down and Mavro gave me a ride back to the Royal Hawaiian in his Lotus, and I really, really should have taken a picture of my inelegant exit from that low-slung vehicle, just to show you how self-deprecating I can be.

What I ate and drank (hold on to your hat):

Abalone ceviche, croquettes of cod, red chimichuri, essence of cilantro
Craggy Range 2008 Sauvignong Blanc (Martinborough, New Zealand)

Striped olive oil-marinated marlin (nairagi) with poached quail egg, sunchoke chips, big wave tomato confit and hanapepe salt
Domaine Laroche 2006 Chablis St. Martin (Burgundy, France)

Hudson Valley Foie Gras torchon with cocoa nib and candied pecan crust, pickled grapes, citrus infused celery and toasted Portuguese sweet bread
Fitz Ritter 2007 Gewürtztraminer, Spätlese, (Pfalz,Germany)

Day boat catch with caramelized baby fennel, picholine olive purée and sauce monégasque
Planetz 2006 Cometa (Sicily, Italy)

Crispy rice flake crusted flouner fillet with braised green papaya, broccolini florets and tamarind curry
Vollrads 2004 Riesling (Rheingau, Germany)

Keahole lobster pot au feu with spring vegetable gribiche and calamansi accented crutacean jus
Marc Colin 2006 Saint Aubin premier cru La Chatenière (Burgundy, France)

Kurobuta pork “a la malais” — a roasted rack, crispy shank with sweet and sour watermelon, ginger dressing and caramelized pork jus
Nicolas Potel 2006 vielles vignes Morey-Saint-Denis (what can I say? the sommelier likes Burgundy; it’s not a crime)

Wagyu strip loin, burgundy braised veal cheek, “no eggs no butter béarnaise,” boulangère potatoes and essence of sumida watercress
(and just when you think he’s a Burgundy whore, he pulls out the Bordeau) Clos du Marquis 2003 St. Julien

“Return from Marrakesh” — chick pea crusted mountain meadow lamb loin with bulghur wheat, dates and upcountry vegetables in yogurt-garlic sauce
Dashe 2007 Zinfandel, Dry Creek Valley (Sonoma, California)

Big Island goat cheese blanc manger toppe with cranberry, marcona almonds and hirabara baby greens
Jean-Maurice Rauffault 2007 Chinon Les Galuches (Loire, France)

The Grand Dessert: star anise pavlova filled with maple-marinated berries, served with berry jus and hibiscus ice cake
Jorge Ordoñez 2006 seleccion especial, (Malaga, Spain)


Lilikoi malasads with guava coulis and pineapple-cocnut ice cream
Five year Blandy’s Malmsey Madeira (Portugal)

chocolate tofu: Valrhona filling, sesame crust, macha sauce and buttermilk ice cream
Domaine de Jau 2006 Banyuls (France)

To view all the blog entries about my trip to O‘ahu, click here.

More pictures of nutmeg, and my trip to the north shore.

July 3

Boy, Hawaiians sure get up early. Or maybe farmers do, I don’t know, but my second morning in Hawaii I had a 7:45 a.m. appointment with Dean Okimoto, one of the founders of the Kapi‘olani Community College Farmers Market.
My directions for getting there were so easy that I didn’t even turn on the GPS, and in fact it was very easy to find, the only surprise being how far away I had to park at 7:30 in the morning. The place was packed.
I strolled around the market a bit and took pictures of nutmeg, as you can see in the first picture.
The second picture is just a detail from the first picture, because about a third of this blog’s readers are New Yorkers, and they’ve probably never seen a nutmeg fruit before.
Other than the nutmeg and a couple of other somewhat exotic fruits such as soursop — and mango and papaya if you count them — and the fact that the weather was more perfect than at most farmers markets, it was pretty much a farmers market. Dean explained that the inspiration for the venture came from time he spent in San Francisco. And indeed, it did have a sort of Bay Area vibe somehow, and lots of temperate-climate vegetables.
Those are new crops in Hawaii, Dean explained, driven in part by chefs who want to use more local produce, and by farmers who have been priced out of the pineapple and sugar cane markets by lower production costs elsewhere in the tropics (everywhere in the tropics, I would think, except maybe Singapore).
Dean himself is the head of Nalo Farms, which specializes in salad greens (indeed, I’d had some the night before at Orchids). I asked if it was a challenge to grow lettuce that wasn’t bitter, as the tropical sun tends to do that to lettuce, and he said that, indeed, it was, and in the summer they had to harvest the greens at a younger age than at other times of the year.
So that was interesting.
I snacked around a bit — a little pulled pork sandwich made by the culinary school students, some curry musubi, a bit of roasted corn.
There was a lot of prepared food at the farmers market, which I guess is okay, but Dean said they had 60 merchants at the market and a waiting list of 40 more who wanted to display their wares. I'd think I'd want to give priority to the farmers who are selling their own stuff, but I’ve never tried to run a farmers market, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Then it was time to check out of the Halekulani and move about a block over the the Royal Hawaiian, a procedure that, given the one-way streets and the fact that neither the GPS nor I were sure, exactly, what little unmarked side alley we were supposed to drive down to find the hotel, took about half an hour. In fact, I tried at first to check into the Sheraton Waikiki, which is considerably less upscale than the Halekulani (or, as it turns out, the Royal Hawaiian). Sheraton owns the Royal Hawaiian, too, so the receptionists, even while managing a patient herd of tourists standing in line, were able to direct me to my proper hotel.
“The pink one,” one of them said.
The Royal Hawaiian is, indeed, pink. And there's no typical front desk there at which to check in. Instead there are several fairly opulent desks. You are supposed to sit down at one end, across from the uniformed hotel employee who will help you while you sip a light, refreshing beverage presented to you as you sit down. It’s very civilized.

But it being 10:30 a.m., my room wasn’t ready.
No matter, as I was driving to the north shore anyway to have lunch at a seaside place called Ola.
“Turn right on [brief pause] *ee *oy street,” the GPS said.
“On where?" I asked it as I found myself in the wrong lane to turn onto Piikoi Street.
The GPS isn’t very good at pronouncing those hard voiced consonants, but it does provide an interactive map, and its verbal instructions are also written on the screen.
“Recalculating.” said the GPS and she started pointing me to the airport.
I thought maybe she’d had enough of me and that her next instructions were going to be: “If you think you’re so smart, get out and find a way to fly to the North Shore, dip-shit.”
But no, we headed north and without too much fuss ended up at the Turtle Bay Resort.
Ola looks like a touristy seafood shack that sells fried clams, calamari and, if you’re lucky, cold beer. But instead I had a tuna poke salad, and baby octopus with orechiette pasta in a coconut milk sauce that might have had just a whiff of curry. I was kind of shocked by its deliciousness.

Here's how the menu describes those dishes:

Ahi poke
North Shore Limu, onion, Inamona, Kahuku sea asparagus, sesame soy.

Grilled baby octopus
Orechiette pasta, spinach, Maui onion, roasted pepper, citrus, lemon grass herb oil, crab luau cream.

Oh, and the chef is Fred De Angelo.


To view all the blog entries about my trip to O‘ahu, click here.

nutmeg and mace

July 2

This is a picture of a fresh nutmeg. That thin partial layer of reddish stuff around it is the spice mace. I guess physiologically it is to nutmeg what the paper-like layer around a peanut is to the peanut.
That’s all you get from me today, but tomorrow the story of my trip to O‘ahu and my passive-aggressive relationship with the GPS will continue.

To view all the blog entries about my trip to O‘ahu, click here.

dinner with Miss Hawaii

June 26

Dinner last Friday was at Orchids, one of the restaurants at the Halekulani, and my companion was the hotel's public relations director, Erika Kauffman.
Erika looks like a California blonde, but in fact she was born in Hawaii and grew up on the Big Island (in the Kona area), where she says they didn’t bother to pack lunch for school but simply plucked whatever produce was available from nearby trees.
I later learned that Erika is a former Miss Hawaii, but she didn’t discuss it herself. I mean, how could she?
“Hi, nice to meet you. I was a Miss Hawaii."
You just sound like an idiot if you do that.
Her colleague, food & beverage dirctor Sabine Glissmann, could have mentioned it, but why would she?
Before dinner, Sabine joined Erika and me for drinks at the House without a Key, which is what they call their mostly-outdoor beachside lounge. A band of ukuleles and a standing bass played surprisingly mellow music as a hula dancer performed and I drank a cocktail of gin and guava and snacked on big-eye tuna poke sliders (with nori, Japanese pickles and wasabi mayonnaise).
Erika was big on promoting Orchids’ newest feature, Table 1. It hasn’t been launched yet, but it will basically be a chef’s table in the middle of the restaurant. The hotel’s new executive chef, Vikram Garg, will come out and chat with guests at the table, determine their likes, dislikes and mood and prepare a tasting menu for them.
Vik came out after the meal and we chatted about trends (we think pork belly’s about done) and tropical fruit. I mentioned snake fruit, an obscure and completely unappetizing sounding thing that I had in Sumatra. Vik had never heard of it, which we agreed was weird. It’s kind of an uneven oblong about the size of a small plum, with a brown, scaly skin (hence the name). At first bite it’s completely unappetizing. It looks and has the texture of garlic. It tastes a little sweet, but mostly acrid, with a tendency to dry out the mouth, but it’s addictive on some level and actually a lot of fun to eat.

What I ate (chased down with glasses of Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc):

Pacific oyster and caviar shooters served in a ginger and mango cocktail
Kona crab cappuccino topped with truffle and coconut cream
Steamed onaga sizzled with sesame oil and garnished with shiitake mushrooms, green onions, ginger, cilantro and soy
Berries and sorbet


To view all the blog entries about my trip to O‘ahu, click here.

And the Hawaii story continues

June 25

When we last left off, it was Friday morning in Honolulu. With marlin, eggs and rice under my belt, along with two half malasadas, I clearly needed to figure out what to do for lunch, and how to get there without irritating my GPS too much.
I have to admit that I like how the GPS pauses before reconsidering my best route to someplace after I’ve missed an obvious turn. There’s a pause, and then an emotionless, Stephen Hawking-esque (but feminine) computerized voice says “recalculating.” The pause followed by the purely emotionless voice, to me, makes her sound kind of pissed off. It’s like she noticed I missed the turn, can’t quite believe that I ignored her, pauses for a moment to contain her rage, and then, trying not to yell, says “recalculating.”
My friend Jonathan Ray, who taught at a fancy Honolulu high school called Punahou ("Pew-na-how,” according to the GPS, who calls Kamehameha Highway “Camay-hamay-ha Highway") had fond memories of Mekong 2 for Thai food, but I thought I’d start with more local fare (not to say Hawaiian, which implies the food of ethnic Hawaiians such as poi and laulau, as opposed to the spam musubi, plate lunches, loco moco and saimin of the locals, whom you can't call “native,” even if they were born in Hawaii, because that implies ethnic Hawaiian, too).
So I ended up at Zippy’s, a local diner chain, for saimin, which is a local version of ramen. I scarfed down a small bowl at the counter and then climbed back in the car and drove down S. King St., until I could find parking. By then Mekong 2 was closed for the day, but I went nearby to the corner of S. King and Punahou (excuse me, Pew-na-how) and had an adobo plate lunch.
A plate lunch is protein — chicken teriyaki, a burger patty, a piece of salmon, what have you — often served in one of those sectioned-off TV dinner trays, with two scoops of rice and one scoop of macaroni salad. Alan Wong likes to describe that as a quintessential example of how the different groups who have settled in Hawaii have affected each other's food to create something unique in the islands.
Hawaii also has a very serious obesity and diabetes problem — among the worst in the country. Some awareness has been raised on that front, and so not only was I able to order a small saimin at Zippy’s, but also I could order a small plate lunch at Pee Wee (so-named because it's a little corner shop, not because the portions are small). So I got a big scoop of adobo — not the Mexican kind, but the Philippine kind, which is stewed pork cooked with vinegar, soy sauce &c. — with one scoop of rice and macaroni salad. I have to say, there’s something about how the mayonnaise from the macaroni salad and the juice from the adobo mixes with the rice that really is magical.
With dinner approaching, I figured I should go ahead and stop eating for awhile, so I told the GPS to take me back to the Halekulani, and she did.


To view all the blog entries about my trip to O‘ahu, click here.

Mavro and me

June 21

I have the morning off! So it’s time to update the blog.
The past two mornings have required that I be out of bed and ready to go quite a bit earlier than I'm accustomed to, but this was really no hardship as Hawaii is six hours behind New York during daylight savings time (the Aloha State does not observe the twice-yearly clock adjustment practice, so it’s five hours behind during the rest of the year).
On Friday I was picked up at 6:15 a.m. — a time I’m more likely to see from the other side, before going to bed — by chef George ”Mavro” Mavrothalassitis and his wife and publicist Donna Jung.
Donna was the main protagonist in getting me to O‘ahu. I normally see her and Mavro about once a year, when he cooks at the Beard House in early May, and she wanted me to try his food in their restaurant. So she made some calls and here I am.
We were meeting so early because they wanted to take me to the Honolulu fish auction, which starts in the very small hours of the day. The first picture in this blog entry is what the auction looks like. Those are wholesalers bidding on big-eye, or ahi, tuna. They really do have big eyes, but I didn’t have the good sense to take pictures of their eyes. I was more interested in the carcasses, which you can see in the next picture, and the flesh samples taken from each of them for the bidders to examine. One sample's from the tail, one's from the midsection and the third is like a core sample, drilled from the center of the carcass.
Mavro and I spent most of the time talking with Brooks Takenaka, general manager of the United Fishing Agency, which is what the auction company is called.
Donna took a picture of us talking, in case you need proof.
I should stop slouching.
Brooks said that in his 30 years working with the United Fishing Agency (he did various fascinating things involving marine biology before that) this year’s catch is the worst. He’s not sure why, as the Hawaiian wild fishery is one of the most strictly regulated on the planet.
And there’s no need to panic. One year of bad fishing doesn’t mean ecological breakdown.
And on Friday the catch was good. Three boats came in, and apart from ahi, there was also opah, which you can see in the next picture, and swordfish, which you can see in the picture after that.
Our conversation with Brooks focused mostly on regulation, and on how the rules that are made tend to be based much more on what sounds good than on what actually helps to protect fisheries. It is very aggravating for Brooks. I told him the story of goose farmer Jim Schiltz, who wanted to sell his geese in Whole Foods, but that self-righteous grocery chain wanted him to raise his geese on all-vegetarian diets.
Vegetarian diets became de rigueur for cattle after it was discovered that “mad cow” disease developed when cattle were fed other cattle, including their brains and other parts of their nervous system, which contained prions that catalyzed the formation of prions in the cattle’s brains, which is how they developed bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease).
Now, that’s all very gross, but what does it have to do with geese, who in fact are not ruminating herbivores like cattle, but waterfowl, for whom it’s natural to eat fish? Jim says if he didn’t give them fishmeal at specific stages in their life, a third of them would die.
So we all had a good laugh about that, and then after taking a look at some of the fishing boats, Mavro and Donna took me to Nico’s at Pier 38, a restaurant by the wharf where I had breakfast of Hawaiian coffee (hurray!) and marlin and eggs, with a scoop of rice. Donna had the same thing, while Mavro had loco-moco.
From there we went to Sumida Farm, where about 70 percent of Hawaii’s watercress is grown.
The farm is on a wetland fed by natural springs — scratch that, obviously they’re natural. They’re springs.
Anyway, a number of hard-to-find birds frequent the farm to eat insects and snails and crayfish and other creatures that live in the water in which the watercress grows (the plant itself roots itself in gravel). My first bird picture is of a black-crowned night heron. I’m not sure why it’s called a night heron, because there it was, sitting around in the middle of the day (okay, it was actually around 8 a.m., but it felt like the middle of the day to me).
The next picture, the blurry one, is of a Hawaiian stilt.
David Sumida explained that a lot of Asian cuisines use watercress as a vegetable, stir-frying the stem, for example.
The farm is on a slight grade, so water is always flowing around the cress. Their main weed is a sort of algae, that has to be removed daily, although Filipinos do eat that particular type of algae. David knows that because his workers are almost all (maybe all, but I didn’t ask) ethnic Filipinos, who make up a big chunk of the Hawaiian community. David allows his workers to have garden plots on the outskirts of the farm, and some of them let the algae grow longer and harvest it to eat.
Each plot of watercress is harvested every eight weeks. The plant is pulled up, the roots are chopped off and the rest of the plant is bound into 1-pound bunches, which are then wrapped into 35-pound bundles and vacuum chilled. They are delivered to David’s customers three times a week.
Mavro insists that it is the best watercress in the world. He’s French, so you’d think he’d declare anything French to be the best, but of course he left his hometown of Marseilles many years ago (he used to say that only Marseillais knew how to cook fish, then he learned about Japanese cuisine). One of Mavro’s early jobs in the U.S. (maybe his first, but I don’t remember) was in my hometown of Denver, at a fine-dining restaurant called Château Pyrenees, where he worked for a couple of years before being courted by the Halekulani, where he worked at its French restaurant, La Mer, before moving to Maui to work at The Four Seasons.
After we left the farm, we went to Leonard’s which is famous for its malasadas, a type of Portuguese doughnut coated in granulated sugar. There was a long line at Leonard’s which pleased us all, because it’s nice to see a restaurant doing good business.
Then we drove to Kaimana Beach, to eat them. Donna took a picture of me eating a malasada. That’s a plain one, but I also sampled one filled with haupia. In case you’re wondering, I didn’t finish either one, because, believe it or not, I do believe in practicing restraint from time to time.
Donna and Mavro dropped me off at my hotel, at around 10:30 a.m. After I regrouped, I began to explore the city.


To view all the blog entries about my trip to O‘ahu, click here.

Alan Wong’s and why I shouldn’t drive

June 19

I am in Hawaii, guest of the O‘ahu Visitors Bureau, which has asked me to come check out the food of the island, home to most Hawaiians. I arrived last night in the Honolulu airport at a little after 5 p.m. and found my way to the rental car companies, where a vehicle was waiting for me. Did I want a GPS? They asked. It occurred to me that, being a terrible navigator, and having never been to O‘ahu before, I probably should go ahead and get one.
I soon learned that GPSes make you stupid. Or maybe it was the late hour; 5 p.m. might not sound late, but 5 p.m. in Hawaii during daylight saving's time is 11 p.m. in New York, and I had been on an airplane pretty much straight — except for a brisk walk in Phoenix from my plane that had arrived from Newark an hour late to the aircraft headed for Hawaii that was taking off on time — since around 10 a.m. (4 a.m. Hawaii time).
So I was a little punchy anyway.
I learned that the GPS gives you some good information (“go .3 miles and turn right on Kalakaua Avenue” although it has no idea which accents to stress with Hawaiian words, making for amusing mispronunciations), but not quite enough information. It doesn’t tell you when the highway is going to suddenly split into three seperate roads, or when you might be trapped in a left-turn-only lane. Normally, of course, when driving you pay attention to those things, because you’re responsible for navigating and you need to focus. With the GPS, I found myself focusing a lot less.
“Recalculating,” the navigational system would tell me when I missed a turn, or when I was shunted by my fellow drivers onto a street I hadn't actually wanted to be on.
“I was trapped in the wrong lane!” I’d tell it, but of course it didn’t care.
After that had happened twice I decided to just relax and enjoy whatever views the GPS and my own ineptitude led me to. So I toured around the harbor a bit (“recalculating...”) until I managed to inch myself past the alarmingly oblivious tourist pedestrians of Waikiki to the Halekulani hotel.
You might have seen the picture of my view from the hotel room in my last blog entry. The picture at the beginning of this entry was, to me, one of the most salient features of the restaurant where I ate dinner, Alan Wong’s. What you see there, illuminated by an oil wick, are two lovely bottles, one containing soy sauce and the other containing vinegar. Those condiments can be seen on many more humble tables in Hawaii and much of Asia. You’d likely see them in dumpling houses in China, for example. Seeing them immediately took me back to the jiaozi, or boiled dumplings, around the corner from my dormatory at Nanjing University, although there the vinegar was dark brown and malty (variations of those condiments are seen in other countries; in Thailand you'd have fish sauce with chiles in it, vinegar with chiles in it, sugar and one of a number of other condiments depending on the restaurant).
Alan has a reputation for being playful with his food, and for incorporating local elements into his cooking, but to me it seemed that his food really exemplified the food of Hawaii’s Asian communities (I’m told about 30 percent of Hawaiian residents are ethnic Japanese), brought together in fine dining style without toning down the robust flavors of those cuisines.
That’s very different from what happens most of the time when Asian influence is brought to bear on fine dining in New York. There, even in 2009, the Asian influence is usually just a whisper, and the intensity of flavors is almost always toned down to appeal to francophiles and wimps.
At Alan Wong’s the Asian influence was front-and-center.
But the food, and the restaurant itself, still seemed to me to reflect Hawaiian realities. Wine director Mark Shishido explained that the Portuguese brought the vinegar that they use to the islands. For them, it was a source of vitamin C. The staff also was a great ethnic mix, ranging from my apparently lily-white head server Rachel to the mostly Asian (and mostly young and hip looking) men who brought out and explained my food to me, to the large and maybe a little uncomfortable-looking Pacific Islander (that’s a guess) who seemed never quite sure what I wanted to do with the lemon aïoli that was served with the bread.
Probably my favorite part of the meal was the coffee list, an extraordinary menu of about 20 coffees from throughout Hawaii — at least one from every major island.
It seemed extraordinary to me, at least. The most advanced coffee list I’d ever seen on the mainland was at Spruce in San Francisco. But Mark said coffee menus were not uncommon in Honolulu.
I guess I’ll find out over the next few days.

What I ate and drank:
locavore Mai Tai (Mai Tai Rao Ae) with orgeat-like syrup made from macadamia nuts, rum distilled in Maui, Kunia pineapple, organic Paomoho farms limes and Maui sugar

Kalua pig grilled cheese sandwich on a Parmesan crisp, served over red and yellow tomato soup in a Martini glass
seafood cake of lobster, shrimp, scallop and crab over caper mayonnase and tsukemono relish
“poki-pines”: crispy won ton ahi poke balls on avocado with wasabi sauce
2004 Carneros sparkling wine

butter poached Kona lobster (raised on the big island from North Atlantic lobster eggs raised in seawater brought from 3,000 feet below the ocean’s surface) with Honda tofu, nagaimo potato cake and green onion oil
A 2007 Vouvray

ginger crusted onaga with organic Hamakua mushroom, corn and miso sesame vinaigrette
a 2006 German Riesling

Twice-cooked short ribs, soy braised and grilled kalbi style, topped with gingered shrimp and served with ko chu jang sauce, served with a side of white rice in a bowl
A 2008 Gamay Noir from Napa

Haupia (that’s a local coconut custard) sorbet with tropical fruits and lilikoi sauce, and dark chocolate “crunch” bars (no®).
a 2007 Brachetto d'Aqui

A sampling of three coffees:
Kailiawa Coffee Farm from Pahala, Ka‘u (Big Island)
2000 vintage Eddie Sakamoto from North Kona (Big Island)
Waialua Estate North Shore (O‘ahu)


To view all the blog entries about my trip to O‘ahu, click here.

The view from my room

June 19



This is the view from my room at the Halekulani hotel in Honolulu. The picture doesn’t really do it justice, of course, but I thought I’d share anyway.


To view all the blog entries about my trip to O‘ahu, click here.