Want to see a beautiful, passionate movie about the local food movement on Oahu? Don’t miss the Ingredients Hawaii screening Feb.
Sometimes people just want dessert for lunch. If these people are in Honolulu and are geographically lucky or social network savvy, the city’s Puffettes Egg Puffs food truck is here to satisfy them six days a week.
When Cherisse Otsuko was diagnosed with gluten intolerance in 2009, her allergy meant cutting out her favorite local foods. “I really wanted mochiko chicken and mac salad so badly,” Otsuko recalls.
Chain restaurants often call to mind relentless streams of gray burgers. Not so at Loving Hut, founded by Supreme Master Ching Hai.
Pies rotating in a diner’s glass stand, pies on the neighbor’s porch, pies proffered by friends visiting for dinner. Pie is the “aloha” staple of the Midwest–a region with a casserole-style taste that can be hard to find on Oahu.
Every season comes with it’s flavors and recipes–those signature flavors that we look forward to every year–but we eventually must also bid a fond farewell. What is it about the pumpkin spice latte from Starbucks or an eggnog-flavored shake from Jack in the Box that tastes so good?
In season now, the persimmon comes in several varieties. Among them is the American persimmon, native to the US east coast, and the black persimmon from Mexico.
Cheesecake has been around since ancient Greece. When the Romans came along, they adapted the recipe, carrying it into greater Europe.
After leading the kitchen team at Roy’s for 10 years, executive chef Ronnie Nasuti received an offer he couldn’t refuse from Tiki’s Grill & Bar. Since then, Nasuti has updated the menu to include more locally sourced produce and meats.
Back home in Yokohama, I grew up eating ramen in authentic, hole-in-the-walls, with chefs tossing pigs’ bones for tonkotsu broths and making fresh noodles behind greasy, crowded counters. It’s an intimate, elbow-bumping affair of taxicab conversation with chefs and cigarette-smoking, hungry businessmen seated next to you until the food comes.
These kids can stand the heat. But for eight weeks, they’ll be staying out of the kitchen.
NOT BREAKING NEWS: There’s a lot of protesting going on. From Occupy Wall Street and anti-APEC to rioting Penn State students, it’s a pretty cacophonous news week featuring voices of all timbres.
Because local poultry farms are in flux and supplies of sustainably produced fowl are limited at this high-demand time of year, search, call and order in advance before you assume you can not only score a drive-by bird, but, given the season, have the pick of the flock at your local market. Turkeys Heirloom, humanely raised, organic, antibiotic-free, free-range turkeys will, as usual, be found at specialty stores such as Whole Foods, Kokua Market and The Source at upwards of $2 per pound.
Hawaii boasts 11 of the 13 climatic zones (as defined in Ag circles by the USDA), and each offers opportunities to grow almost every imaginable fruit, spice and vegetable variety. All over the Islands one can see vestiges of farming experiments over the decades–Russian-planted olive trees in Waikii, apple orchards in Volcano, cashew groves in Maunawili and, of course, Vineyard Boulevard, home to our first grape vines back in the 1800s.
At nearly 78 years of operation, Smith Union’s Smittys (formerly Smith’s Union Bar) is the oldest bar in Honolulu. Some of their regulars have been patronizing the bar for over 30 years.
Before moving home from Manhattan, we stuffed ourselves silly at our neighborhood brick-oven pizzeria in order to stave off cravings until we could get back to the Big Apple. Were we nuts or what?
One of the great things about European produce markets is the chance to find veggies on the verge of ready-to-eat–cooked (like potatoes), de-choked (as in artichoke) or prepared in some way that makes meal prep simpler. The home cook can cut out a few steps and make dinner more quickly without loss of quality.
Maybe September’s Eat Local Challenge got you thinking about how to vote with your dollars. Maybe it left you sitting in the shade, eating an OnoPop.
At 2,764 feet above the sea, Big Island Brewhaus is Hawaii’s highest brewery, tucked away off Mamalahoa highway where the view of Mauna Kea is epic and the chilly winds reign. In otherwise quaint and quiet Kamuela, this joint is hoppin’.
Food & Drink / It’s easy to believe that Ka Lei Marketplace is a two-time champion of Kaimuki Business Association’s Holiday Window (ʻ06 and ʻ07). The little shop looks like Christmas, Easter and country store all rolled into one.
Several weeks ago, Town put an ad in the Weekly looking for foragers of wild foods. “I had just gotten back from Northern California,” explains restaurant owner Ed Kenney.
Sometimes all that’s needed to create a movement is someone to connect the pieces together…and a little bit of money. Denise Albano and Patti Chang are attempting to do just that with their nonprofit Feed the Hunger Foundation, a microfinance organization, in which they provide small loans to low income entrepreneurs interested in making local, accessible healthy food.
Happy Cake Cafe has been making cakes since 1967 and just recently opened up shop in Honolulu. What exactly is a Happy Cake?
I never ate at El Bulli, and now I never will, since the most influential restaurant to modernist cuisine served its last dinner on July 30. But on the same day, the documentary El Bulli: Cooking in Progress opened, offering a glimpse into the hallowed restaurant for the 2 million of us who couldn’t get reservations (actually, I never tried).
There’s a swell on the horizon. Listen closely and you’ll hear it…AUDIO INVASION 2012.
It’s been a while, but a man donning dresses and surgical gowns, spouting rap-rock assaults over a bed of crunchy guitars, has drifted back into the sunbeam of MTV like a forgotten fleck of light. With the spastic delivery of a fallen patient from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Matt Shultz, lead singer of Cage The Elephant, is channeling the preeminent poster-child of grunge–Kurt Cobain.
Boys, beaches, bags of weed. In 2010, Best Coast blazed onto the music scene with a sealed Zip-lock of 7” singles that led the indie pop duo to roll out a fatty debut record called Crazy For You.
So what do you do if you’re a band who made it big in the L.A. hardcore-punk scene with several critically acclaimed self-titled albums under your belt?
Last Thursday, Foster the People sent news through their publicist that they won’t be performing at Audio Invasion 2012 due to “unforeseen circumstances.” (They’ll return to Hawaii on March 18.) Rumors are their two Grammy noms for Best Alternative Album and Best Pop Duo/Group Performance led to their cancellation. What a let down.
On Jan. 26, members of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit (HART) Finance Committee mostly sat in silence while listening to an earful from Wynnie Joy-Hee of Mililani, who said that she had taken the bus all the way into town at 7am to address the issue of how her tax money is being spent.
HART intends to hire an executive director as early as March 1, 2012. The semi-autonomous agency is currently headed by interim executive director Toru Hamayasu, who is also a candidate for the permanent position The ED’s salary has been estimated to be within the range of $150,000 to $350,000, and HART has allotted $300,000 for the position thus far, Vice Chair Ivan Lui Kwan told the City Council Committee on Transportation on Jan.
Poor communication between the union and the teachers themselves, on top of a general sense of mistrust, were blamed for the overwhelming rejection of the Hawaii State Teacher’s Association (HSTA) contract last week–an unprecedented two-thirds voted against the union-backed contract. The president of the teachers’ union, Will Okabe, quickly took the blame, stating in a Jan.
The “war on terror” has taken a bite out of beach access on Kauai, where the Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility (PMRF) has kept five miles of westside shoreline off-limits since Sept. 11, 2001.
A bill that would require bags of roasted coffee sold in Hawaii to list the place where each type of coffee it contains was grown, and its percentage by weight in descending order, was introduced to the state legislature by Sen. Josh Green.
In September of 2011, the Weekly ran a piece highlighting one of Hawaii’s most dangerous invasive threats: the dreaded brown tree snake. Following up on Gov.
HART Board: The Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit will meet and take public testimony before convening an executive session. For more info, contact the project hotline at 566-2299 or e-mail [email: info].
[Jan. 18: “Cheap Advice”] Robert Kiyosaki did not talk, or attend.
[Dec. 21: “Underground Railroad”] The anti-rail pundits are right of course.
I propose that President Obama devote the remainder of his presidency to doing something useful, which would be to seek out all the crooks on Wall Street and Washington who have contributed to the sorry state of the economy in this country. Obviously he has not lived up to the expectations of a president and continues to perform as if Saul Alinksy was a member of his cabinet and the United Nations was his political platform.
[Dec. 21: “Underground Railroad”] Traffic follows commercial development.
[Dec. 21: “Underground Railroad”] To all those opposed to the “rail.” You are the very people who will be in gridlock on the freeway, not able to move.
I was delighted to read the new USDA guidelines requiring schools to serve meals with twice as many fruits and vegetables, more whole grains, less sodium and fat and no meat for breakfast. The guidelines were mandated by the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act signed by President Obama in December of 2010 and will go into effect within the next school year.
[Jan. 25: “Kyo-Ya-Ya”] Making an exception on zoning sets a dangerous precedence that will undoubtedly be followed by other properties.
The protests last year of Turtle Bay’s expansion plans highlight the challenge facing us in Hawaii. We need to find a way to balance the need for new, upgraded hotel and timeshare offerings that visitors are increasingly seeking with the desire by nearly all residents to protect the remaining undeveloped areas of the island.
[Jan. 25: “Gridlock”] If the plan is to create a second city in West Oahu, I would consider that to be an urban center.
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