Food & Drink 2008: A Mele of Taste
Stuck in New York as I write this: No good kim chee, no poi at all. I could try and drown my sorrows in a Brooklyn lager, but the ales pale at the thought of Brew Moon. Lower Manhattan has a much bigger, livelier Chinatown, with restaurant fish, produce and fowl yanked fresh off the street markets and the last urban butchers who carve up whole animals. But there’s no smell of tropical flowers, none of the faded, creaky charm of Nu’uanu, Pauahi and River streets by day and the way they catch the harbor fog, patrolled by ghosts, at night.
Little Italy is the best in the nation, but getting littler all the time. Honolulu’s Italian scene has nowhere to go but up, and Pasta Basta sets a high bar. We can knock back a brew at Chelsea Brewing Company at Pier 59 on the Hudson River, where, in summer, paddlers practice in real Hawaiian outrigger canoes. But Manhattan has no oceanfront dining, whereas Honolulu is city and Hamptons wrapped into one.
Of course, the Weekly has cheated in this issue by including the culinary pleasures of the North Shore, which has resisted becoming Honolulu’s Hamptons thanks to Defend O’ahu Coaltion, North Shore Community Land Trust, Keep the Country Country and the Trust for Public Land, which are saving agricultural lands.
Many of us would never have been been in Hawai’i without agriculture, namely, the plantations that drew our forbearers here to work. Foodies at the start of the culinary revolution (local, organic, slow) spoke of “food with a face on it,” meaning that we should meet the farmers who grow our food, learn how and where it was grown. Now, farmers’ markets throughout the islands are giving shoppers that opportunity every week, and new ones are opening all the time.
Early on, I learned the connection between food and the earth from my grandfather, Lawrence Kang, who took us kids along with him to buy head and won bok cabbage, cucumber and radishes from the Kaka’ako greenmarket and Waipahu farm stands. Although truckloads of farm-fresh vegetables were delivered every week to his factory, which made Halm’s Kim Chee, he always ran out of something and welcomed the excuse to get away and gossip with farmers. He had started out working on the pineapple plantation, and left to run his own business, which, rather like a farmer, he sold when none of his offspring would take it on.
Today, some things have changed in ways my grandfather would have approved. Young people are interested in farming, and new small food businesses are a growing trend. Now that industrial agricultural is closing down, the islands have a huge opportunity to pursue diversified, sustainable agriculture on these lands. That includes the restoration of traditional farming methods for taro and sweet potato and even fish. Food and drink is memory, culture, community. It’s the ties that bind and release us from the daily grind, and when it’s local and ‘ono. Enjoy.
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