Local Flavor

You’ve got to admire a place that sells sushi in gas stations and convenience stores. Even if it is Spam sushi.

Hawaii is the land of the world’s highest mountains, but most of their height is below sea level. It has some of the driest spots on Earth, and some of the wettest. It’s a place where every yin has its yang, and any aspect that people love about Hawaii is what other people say they hate.

Sure, Hawaii is the Spam capital of the world. It is fast-food heaven, and all-you-can-eats are the hot spots in the tourist areas. But if there is one thing I have learned in my decades as a food critic, it’s that the places with the worst food also sometimes have the best.

I set out to prove this first on the Big Island.

“Why did you come to Hilo?” our waitress at the Seaside Restaurant asked, her voice disbelieving. “Oahu is the place to be.”

The Seaside looks like a roadhouse, with bare Formica tables in an unadorned dining room adjoined by a porch. The kitchen is no grander than that of a standard tract home, and one evening nearly every party of diners had a baby sleeping on someone’s shoulder. Nothing fancy here.

The important part of the restaurant is outdoors, the 30-acre pond where three generations of the Nakagawa family have raised mullet, trout, perch and catfish for the table. You can’t get fish fresher, though it’s plunked on a plate with two scoops of rice and a mound of canned corn. Side dishes aside, the fish is as fresh as you’ll ever find, respectfully sauteed in garlic butter with capers. Ocean fish such as mahi-mahi, ahi and ono are also available, but locals prefer the small, bony and utterly tasty fish. To set them off properly, drink the delicious local Kona beer. We were told that Kona’s secret is that its bottles are sprayed with yeasts before they are filled, so the flavor develops in the glass when it is poured. If so, it works well.

We couldn’t bear to be on an island, particularly one with so much Japanese influence, without immediately tracking down some sushi. Sure enough, barely a block from Hilo’s public fish auction is Nihon Restaurant and Cultural Center, a second-floor restaurant overlooking the bay. The ahi (tuna) roll is coated with chopped macadamia nuts; the choice of hand rolls includes poke--Hawaii’s local specialty of diced, marinated and herbed raw fish--and even soft-shell crabs were in season in the dead of winter, ready to be fried and rolled in rice. Though we ordered a la carte, we were also tempted by the bargain-priced business person’s lunch (that might include shrimp tempura or chicken teriyaki) at $9.95.

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Of course, most business people in Hawaii, as well as nonbusiness people, are generally found in small cafes or food stands eating what is called a plate lunch. Plate-lunch places, no matter how small, offer a wide choice of Japanese teriyakis, Korean bulgogi or grilled short ribs, Polynesian kahlua pig (a cousin to shredded pork barbecue) or laulau (fish or meat with taro tops, wrapped and steamed in banana or ti leaves) or vinegary stewed pork adobo from the Philippines. The common theme is rice, two scoops of it, and salad, usually macaroni but sometimes potato. A plate lunch is a farmhand-size serving for $3 to $6 nearly everywhere, though nowhere better than at Kenkel’s roadside stand on Hawaii Route 72 in Waimanalo, northeast of Honolulu.

Yes, this is a rice culture. Even at breakfast, instead of piling eggs and meat and sauce on English muffins as mainlanders do for their morning eggs Benedict, Hawaiians eat loco moco. Rice is the base, piled with a hamburger, a fried egg and doused with gravy.

Rice is also the key to the Hawaiian breakfast mystery. Around dawn, the tourist hotels are a hive of activity. Oceanfront gardens are already busy with tai chi, jogging and ocean watching. The coffee shops are bustling. But all the breakfasters in sight are haoles--Caucasians. Where are those busloads of Korean and Japanese tourists? They’re in the hotel’s Chinese restaurant, eating an early morning banquet of rice gruel, pickles, dumplings and stir-fried vegetables--the typical Chinese breakfast.

With such a mingling of cultures, how could Hawaii not be a fascinating place to eat? The trick is to avoid the showcases and seek out the ethnic nibbles. The famous Kilauea Lodge, near Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island, is seductively wood-paneled and fireplace-warmed. But apart from its fine, densely flavored soups the food was merely decent, the seafood tasted as if it had been frozen and the fruit sauces lent a repetitious sweetness to everything.

Alan Wong (more about him later) the much-celebrated former chef of CanoeHouse at the Mauna Lani Bay Hotel on the Big Island, went on to open his own restaurant in Honolulu. But Wong’s invention, nori-wrapped tempura ahi, an appetizer of raw tuna wrapped in seaweed and fried in just a wisp of tempura batter, remains at CanoeHouse and could qualify as one of the great dishes of the world. Also distinguished is the lobster curry. But most of the $27 to $59 entrees were hardly more than pleasantly correct food, though served in a stunning open-air setting decorated with a wooden longboat, a wall of petroglyphs and a heart-poundingly beautiful ocean sunset.

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Most of the locally famous chefs in Hawaii are spreading themselves so thin that it shows on the plate. Sam Choy’s, in Kailua-Kona on the Big Island, has the kind of industrial-park, reverse-chic look that makes you feel you’ve discovered something. But the line of tourists outside suggests otherwise. And despite its workaday affectations, Sam Choy’s is not cheap. Entrees with a salad and a cup of soup that almost tastes canned are $10 to $30. The daily specials tend to be more expensive than the everyday menu listings.

Furthermore, while Choy’s dishes look like a party on a plate, under their big show of shredded vegetables and flowers is assembly-line cooking: stiffly overcooked fish, inedibly raw and bitter seafood laulau, all the fish and seafood in the same bland cream sauce. Sam Choy is busy signing books and greeting tours, then he’s off to supervise his new restaurant in Tokyo.

At Anne Sutherland’s Mean Cuisine, in Waimea on the Big Island, downscale in price means upscale in satisfaction. Mean Cuisine’s Thai shrimp salad sparkles, its rice-paper-wrapped summer rolls are tangy and crunchy, its smoked turkey enchiladas pack as much punch as any in New Mexico and its ono fish in caper butter is impeccable.

Yet even it is beaten out by the ono sandwich at the self-service Aloha Cafe, a converted theater in Kainaliu, also on the Big Island. It’s a flower-child sort of restaurant where you choose your veggie sandwiches and therapeutic-tasting whole-grain desserts, then find a table on the porch. The highlight of this kitchen is the juicy fresh fish lubricated with herbed mayonnaise on a big grainy roll--at canned-tuna prices.

The most interesting food is what ought to suit a busy sightseer best--food on the run: the airy sugared doughnuts hot from the fryer at the Tex Drive Inn in Honokaa on the way to the Big Island’s Waipio Valley. Rice-paper vegetarian summer rolls, sweet potato and taro salad or an organic vegetarian plate lunch, from the colorful and nutritionally correct Broke the Mouth in Hilo. (Be sure to buy a bottle or two of the restaurant’s dazzling dressings; macgado sauce, for example, is $5 for a 12-ounce jar.)

The misubis sold everywhere--wads of sticky rice topped with a slab of chopped teriyaki chicken or Spam and bound with a ribbon of black seaweed--are kept warm on the counters of convenience stores and priced at about $1.75. Convenience stores also sell plastic packets of cold Japanese rice salads, even sushi.

Safeway supermarkets stock at least half a dozen different pokes: marinated diced raw tuna in herbs and soy sauce, marinated shellfish or octopus salads and several kinds of seaweed salad. A chain of Vietnamese sandwich shops named Ba-Le sells chicken or tofu (surprisingly flavorful) layered with marinated shredded vegetables on excellent crusty French rolls, and they’re less than $4.

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A tour of Oahu’s northern beaches should be punctuated by a stop for kahlua pig or laulau, maybe for farm-raised fresh shrimp from a truck near Turtle Bay, and certainly with a shave ice--known as a snow cone elsewhere--drenched in Day-Glo syrups at Matsumoto Shave Ice in Haleiwa. There’s a reason this shop has lines when the others down the block are empty, and a passion fruit shave ice will explain it.

Hawaii isn’t all surf and sand. Nor is it all surf and turf, though menus here probably have more variations on this than anywhere in the world. After a week of cream sauces and papaya-sweetened fish steaks, I tried Alan Wong’s restaurant in Honolulu. Not a branch, not an expansion, it’s his only restaurant.

Alan Wong’s location is so unobtrusive, you have to assume that the food is the draw. The restaurant is on the top floor of a nondescript five-story building. The dining room is blandly beige and comfortable; all the color is in the open kitchen and on the plates.

To start, the fruit drinks are fresh and not sickly sweet, and the warm, chewy rolls come with a garlicky aioli to slather on them. You know right away this is a cut above.

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Like all the other restaurants boasting Pacific Rim food, Alan Wong’s dishes are bright and elaborate with drizzles and dots of contrasting sauces, fluffs and nests of greenery and architectural feats using fish, meats and vegetables as building blocks. He flavors with the herbed oils and tomato water and spiced vinaigrettes that every other cutting-edge chef is using. Yet unlike many, his complexity is carefully woven rather than haphazardly piled flavor upon flavor. Here is as sure a hand and as exacting an imagination as one rarely sees.

Wong’s ginger coating on onaga haunts rather than attacks the fish, and his miso sesame vinaigrette brings the fish to life. Wong’s airy rice-based cream makes you forget all those island cream sauces, and his fruit accents taste summery rather than sweet. His Dungeness crab is stir-fried in a dark explosive sauce that makes you want to lick the shells clean. Wong takes Chinese duck and guacamole with Asian spices, piles them on a crisp chip made of tapioca flour and scallions, dabs on hoisin sauce and produces a kind of unearthly nacho.

You can’t read such a menu and make sense of it (“Furikake salmon with ume shiso rice cream on linguine”), but you can trust that this chef knows what he’s doing and will tease your mouth to levels of awareness. To end the meal, he offers a playful crescendo: a tray of five Chinese porcelain spoons, each one filled with a different flavored creme bru^lee. More fun than any wine tasting.

Bringing our trip full circle, we ended at Honolulu’s airport with a snack to stave off the steamed chicken in cornstarch sludge that we’d be served high over the Pacific. We toted a large plastic tray wrapped in a delicately patterned plastic bandanna by the hostess at Restaurant Sada.

“Sushi,” guessed our rental-car clerk. Correct.

We unwrapped it on a marble bench in the open air, just in front of the security gate. We scarfed down one last big round futomaki, a salmon skin roll like none on the mainland; dewy red tuna in California rolls; and the most succulent eel, still warm from its glazing and broiling. We held up our last slabs of tuna on rice and toasted our vacation. Who needs champagne?

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GUIDEBOOK

Hawaiian Fare

On the Big Island: Aloha Cafe, Aloha Theater Building, Mamalahoa Highway (Hawaii Route 11), Kainaliu; telephone (808) 322-3383. Entrees average about $12.

Anne Sutherland’s Mean Cuisine, Opelo Plaza, Hawaii Route 19, Waimea; tel. (808) 885-6325. Entrees average less than $10.

Broke the Mouth, 55 Mamo St., Hilo; tel. (808) 934-7670. Entrees are about $5.

CanoeHouse, Mauna Lani Bay Hotel, 68-1400 Mauna Lani Drive, Kohala Coast; tel. (808) 885-6622. Entrees are $27 to $59.

Kilauea Lodge, Old Volcano Road, one mile north on the Hilo side of Volcanoes National Park; tel. (808) 967-7366. Entrees average $18 to $20.

Nihon Restaurant and Cultural Center, 123 Lihiwai St., Hilo; tel. (808) 969-1133. Business people lunches start at $9.95.

Sam Choy’s, 73-5576 Kauhola St., Kaloko Light Industrial Park, Kailua-Kona; tel. (808) 326-1545. Dinner entrees are $10 to $30.

Seaside Restaurant, 1790 Kalanianaole Ave., Hilo; tel. (808) 935-8825. Entrees with salad and dessert are $10.50 to $20.95.

Tex Drive Inn, Honokaa; tel. (808) 775-0598.

Oahu: Alan Wong’s, 1857 S. King St., 5th Floor, Honolulu; tel. (808) 949-2526. Entrees are $15 to $30.

Ba-Le, 13 locations in Honolulu. Sandwiches are less than $4.

Kenkel’s, Hawaii Route 72, Waimanalo. Plate lunches are $5 to $6.

Matsumoto Shave Ice, 66-087 Kam Highway, Haleiwa; tel. (808) 637-4827. Shave ice is $1.20 to $2.

Restaurant Sada, 1240 S. King St., Honolulu; tel. (808) 949-0646. A dinner combination runs $18.50.