A Hawaii Story for the Inauguration. Part III of IV

On the noticeboard to the right of my computer I’ve pinned up a restaurant menu. “Welcome Rachel Laudan,” it says across the top, “October 29th 2008.”  And the restaurant staff have signed around the edges.

Never in my life did I dream that I would be welcomed to a restaurant in such a fashion.  Nor that it would be to a restaurant that made Gourmet’s list of top U.S. restaurants, nor to one run by the James Beard winner of Best Regional Chef in the Pacific Northwest.

But on October 29th last year there I was in Alan Wong’s eponymous restaurant just a few blocks north of Waikiki in Honolulu. I’d known of Alan Wong and his restaurant for years. Alan Wong is Local boy made good.  He’s a boy who grew up in Wahiawa, with one of those backgrounds so common in Hawaii: Japanese mother (who turns up in the restaurant kitchen),  Chinese, a bit of  Hawaiian.  He went to Leilehua High School in Wahiawa.    In the summers he worked in the red, dusty pine fields, $1.60 an hour, sweating off 60 pounds one summer.

Then Alan progressed through restaurant jobs, a culinary training at Kapiolani Community College, a job at the prestigious Wailae Country Club, apprenticeship at the Greenbriar, and working with Chef Soltner at Lutece in New York City.  He went back to the islands, worked in hotels, and finally, just as we were moving from Honolulu to Mexico, opened his own restaurant.  His idea was to take Local Food and the ethnic traditions of Hawaii and move them to a new level.  He did.  Now with three restaurants, two in Hawaii and one in Tokyo, he’s at the top of his profession.

When the folk at Hale Aina Ohala (an organization doing a great job exposing culinary students in isolated Hawaii to the rest of the culinary world) told me that he was going to bring many of his staff to the talk I was  to give to the culinary students at Kapiolani Community College, I was more than a bit nervous.

I’d chosen to speak on “How to Create a Regional Cuisine” and my idea was to compare the invention of French regional cuisines and the Hawaiian tourist luau in the 1930s. What ever would one of the movers and shakers in creating an upmarket regional cuisine in contemporary Hawaii make of this?  What did he think of my outsider’s attempt to understand the food of Hawaii?

As it happened, it all worked out.  Alan had the quiet confidence of someone who knew what he was doing but none of the bravado that can go along with being a chef today. We agreed to get together for a more leisurely chat later in the week.  Spam filters and dodgy mobile phones meant that we didn’t get in touch until my last day there.  That night I went to the restaurant.

I went by myself.  Partly this was because I was quite talked out, partly because I wanted to be free to taste and to observe and I have never learned the knack of combining that with conversation.  Alan seated me at the bar so that I could watch everything and started sending out an amazing dinner.

As I expected, it tasted wonderful.  But I was impressed by how accurately it mirrored but refined Local tastes.  One reason I had written about Hawaii’s food was that I thought it was wonderfully interesting, a new cuisine in the making.  And Alan’s menu took it to places I could never have dreamed of.

No wonder almost all the old friends I had talked to said that although they appreciated all the new upscale restaurants in Hawaii, they chose Alan Wong’s as their favorite.  Ginger crusted onaga, for example, hits Hawaii taste buds. So does a shooter with the tiny, much sought after limpet, opihi.

And then there was the intelligence, the jokes.  A soup and sandwich appetizer of chilled tomato soup and a hot sandwich of kalua pig with foie gras and mozarella.  One of Hawaii’s favorite seasonings, li hing mui, salty, sweet, liquoricy, that has evolved from the flavoring of crack seed, sei mui, Chinese dried and salted fruits, turned up in a vinaigrette for a whole tomato salad and in a chutney with foie gras.  These may sound like the extravagances of some demented nouvelle cuisine chef but they worked.

From the bar in front of the kitchen, I watched the calm orderly way the dishes came out.  About half way through the meal I noticed that all the staff wore baseball caps with “the Wong way” embroidered above the brim.  When they turned them back to front I thought this was very funny.  The week and the wine were beginning to do their work.

The kitchen pace lulled.  I asked one young woman where she did her culinary training.  Hilo Community College, she said.   It wasn’t well known for culinary education, she said.  Hilo is on another Hawaiian island, the Big Island, and no, the Community College is not on the national scene for its culinary program. But Alan had taken her on, she was learning more than she had ever hoped, and she loved what she was doing.

Even Wade Ueko, chef de cuisine, whom I had looked at in awe as he checked each outgoing dish, never raising his voice above a whisper, never hurrying, never stopping, had a moment to breather.  Where had he learned his skills?

Zippy’s, he said.

The perfect end to a perfect meal.

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