Cultural meltingpot lends flavour to Hawaiian food

A mix of races has brought Hawaii a cuisine that is as delicious as it is diverse. COLIN MOORE tastes the difference.


Hawaii is like a Heinz dog - you know, the breed that, as with the soup, comes in 57 varieties. Hawaii is the most isolated major island group on earth but it overcomes that with a slice of almost every environment you can find, from snow-capped mountains to tepid coral-fringed lagoons.

The archipelago is so diverse that it includes 21 of the 22 different climatic zones found on earth and the islands support a staggering 88 identifiably distinct ecosystems.

Despite that diversity, most of its flora and fauna are distinctly Hawaiian - and so are its people.

The first Hawaiians were Polynesian adventurers who sailed their canoes from the Marquesas. They were followed in the 18th and 19th centuries by 350,000 immigrants - Japanese, Chinese, Afro-Americans and caucasian Americans, Filipinos, Portuguese, Puerto Ricans, Koreans, Scots, Scandinavians, Germans, Gailicians, Spaniards, Russians, and Polynesians from other Pacific Islands.

They brought their culture and their food and created the most racially mixed people, and perhaps the most beautiful, on earth.

The Hawaiians developed their own special cuisine, an eclectic blend that borrows liberally from the islands' many ethnic groups and has been dubbed Pacific Rim or Hawaii regional cuisine.

In Hawaii you might find, as I did at the Maui Tropical Plantation cafe, barbecued spareribs as the special of the day - and hear the elderly American tourist at the next table complain to the waitress that he "didn't come all this way to eat spareribs."

The traditional Hawaiian feast is the luau, a sort of Polynesian buffet based on pork, fish and vegetables, such as taro, cooked in an earth oven. A staple dish is the finger-licking poi, a porridge-like dip made from cooked taro corms mashed with water.

At most restaurants the offerings are more creative - grilled shrimp with taro chips, perhaps, or wok-charred yellowfin tuna with island greens, or Peking duck in ginger and passionfruit sauce.

The islands' distinctive cuisine has prompted the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau to use food for tourism promotion in a way that, as far as I am aware, no other destination is doing.

Last year the bureau spearheaded its New Zealand sales mission with award-winning chef Glenn Chu, owner of Indigo restaurant in Honolulu.

Chu's specialty is Eurasian dishes, a wonderful blend of fresh island produce and seafood in a style that balances traditional Chinese and contemporary European cooking.

This year the bureau brought Fred DeAngelo, executive chef at the Palomino Euro Bistro in Honolulu, to Sky City to mastermind a week of the flavours of Hawaii.

DeAngelo's original dishes are a mix of traditional Hawaiian with the flavours of the Mediterranean. At the Palomino you can order whole island snapper with macadamia nut pistachio butter, Kauai sweet shrimp scampi, crab stuffed mahi-mahi with macadamia nut beurre blanc, and opah with curry beurre blanc and mango chutney.

The Hyatt Regency in Waikiki offers guests the dining alternatives of Musashi, a restaurant with Japanese cuisine; The Colony, a seafood and steakhouse; and the Texas Rock'n'Roll Sushi Bar, which combines barbeque spareribs and sushi. As well, there's Ciao Mein, a mix of Italian and Chinese cuisine that has earned its chefs heaps of food awards - and using chopsticks to eat something slightly Italian is certainly a novel experience.

Sam Choy looms large among Hawaiian chefs, partly because his bulk is that of a man who likes his food and partly because of his television cooking show, Sam Choy's Kitchen.

The show is filmed at Choy's Diamond Head Restaurant which Choy opened in 1995. His Hawaiian Regional cuisine has such appetisers as baked Portuguese sausage-crusted oysters topped with Hawaiian chilli pepper remoulade; grilled prawns on a bed of wasabi-scented twice-baked mashed potato and chiso tomato nage; and grilled fillet of beef smothered with garlicky escargot butter on steamed rice, topped with an egg sunny side up and shiitake mushroom cream sauce.

Well, you get the idea - and perhaps why Choy is larger than life.

Our media group are there for the appetisers - and they really are appetising. From there we move to the Golden Dragon, a Chinese restaurant at the Hilton Hawaiian Village hotel in Waikiki with a reputation for Cantonese cuisine and the Szechuan specialties of chef Steve Chiang.

The food is superb, but I am a little distracted by having a heavily-accented, blonde-haired Swedish student in a Chinese costume explain the characteristics of one born in the Year of the Rooster and what the coming Chinese year will hold for me. Her name is Pia and she is studying at the University of Hawaii.

The incongruity of her part-time job seems an utterly appropriate way to conclude a taste of Hawaiian cuisine.