ABOVE: Chef Bancaco (left) and chef Sheldon Simeon pack vehicles with venison fried rice for distribution.
On the morning of August 8, 2023, chef Isaac Bancaco woke early, at 4:30, thinking about the wedding at the restaurant where he worked—Pacifico on the Beach in Lahaina—would be hosting for lunch that day. But the electricity was out. There was no hum from the streetlights or air conditioners, only the sound of gusty wind. He hopped on his bike, racing to Pacifico to secure the walk-in refrigerators and stash ice in coolers to preserve as much food as he could. Trees were down everywhere, and four blocks from the restaurant, a transformer and severed telephone pole hung by their wires.
Despite the outage, the wedding went ahead. Bancaco and his crew served sixty people cold cuts, bread and iced tea in lieu of a lavish lunch. After the last of the guests trickled out at 1 p.m., Bancaco sent his staff home and called off the dinner crew. Two hours later his dad—a retired fire captain in Lahaina, where most of Bancaco's family fished for sustenance—called to see if his son could pinpoint where the smoke outside was coming from. Bancaco drove to a clearing just in time to witness several small tornados heading straight for an area where four firetrucks had just put out a fire.
In a matter of seconds, Bancaco says, it looked like the wind picked up the fire and spread it across a hundred yards of dry brush. "As quickly as the wind was moving, the fire moved," he says. When he saw homes being engulfed, he fled to his own house on Front Street, packed a couple things and drove to a spot from which he could watch traffic on the main highway from across a giant field. By the time traffic let up, it was 6:30 p.m. and the fires were raging. Bancaco had to drive his truck over telephone poles and through burning brush to escape. "Once I got out I looked back and could see Front Street on fire," he says. "Besides my dad, I didn't know who got out and who didn't."
A mile away, on Lahainaluna Road, Luis Fuentes, a former Ritz-Carlton chef who owned a catering business, deli and six food trucks, had already sent his staff home and was waiting in his office for his generator to charge the walk-in refrigerator. When he saw the wind rip the roof off the building next door, he boarded up all his windows and called his wife. Then he smelled smoke. It was coming from the corner of his building.
Fuentes tried to flee in his van but got stopped after only one block on Front Street: The fire was approaching from all directions. He jumped out of his van into the thick, black smoke and helped people out of their cars. "I start telling them, 'We need to jump in the water, there's no other place to go!'" he says.
Chef Isaac Bancaco (gesturing) directs volunteers for Chef Hui, which is helping to feed people displaced by the fire that destroyed Lahaina on August 8 of last year. "We didn't have a plan for distribution, really," says Bancaco of the immediate aftermath of the fire. "All we knew was, there's six thousand West Side residents who are still out there and have no resources. The initial effort was: Get hot food in containers and let's figure it out."
Not a minute after rescuing two children and their grandmother from their car and hurrying them into the water, Bubba Gump Shrimp Company exploded. Fuentes filmed himself telling his family how much he loved them, stashed his phone in his backpack, flung it onto a wall, secured it with a rock and dived into the water. He treaded for hours along with hundreds of others, holding a 9-year-old boy, until he heard someone calling, "Help Nana! Help Nana!" He turned to see a man trying to swim with an older Filipino woman in his arms. "I helped carry Nana like a kid, you know, holding her by the waist and carrying her in," Fuentes says. But cars and more buildings began exploding, forcing them back into the water. "When those cars exploded I went underwater and I couldn't breathe," he said. "I don't know how long it took me to catch my breath. I had to drink ocean water just trying to clean my throat and mouth; it was full of debris. Once I caught my breath, I started looking for the guy and Nana ... and there was no place for them to be found."
After nine hours treading water, Fuentes was numb from his chest down and burned from his shoulders up. When he decided to leave the raging waters for the uncertainty of the smoldering shore, a woman begged him not to go, fearing he would suffocate. It was past midnight when firemen found him lying in the sand with his face buried in a pile of rocks, gasping. "I looked around and I saw things that I didn't want to see," Fuentes says. A head count revealed only thirty-nine people still alive around him.
By now the horror of that day is well known but still hard to comprehend. In a matter of hours, the town of Old Lahaina essentially disappeared. Few moments will be as enduring in the minds of Hawaii residents as the moment we heard, "Lahaina is gone." Like 9/11, 8/8 is etched into our existence forever. Losing land to wildfires is not uncommon in the United States, but the number of people relative to land lost on Maui outnumbers all other fires in the past century. Three months later, fires were still burning on Maui, and some people are still missing.
But from day one the entire community organized to meet the disaster, including a group of local chefs who sprang into action to feed those affected. Back on Oahu, on the morning after the fire, chef Mark Noguchi woke his wife, Amanda Corby-Noguchi, at 4 a.m., tears streaming down his face. Still groggy, she could not immediately process what he was saying. "Lahaina is gone, babe," he cried. "You need to get up. We need to call Sheldon."
Chef Sheldon Simeon, a former Top Chef contestant and owner of Tin Roof and Tiffany's on Maui, was already with Bancaco and several others from the hospitality industry at the University of Hawaii Maui College (UHMC), turning the culinary program's kitchen into a feeding hub, when Mark and Amanda Noguchi called. In 2020, Corby-Noguchi had run pandemic response logistics for Chef Hui—a network of chefs they formed in 2017 to do food education work—helping arrange thousands of meals per week for families in need due to COVID-19. She asked her husband if he wanted to go cook with his fellow chefs. "They have enough people cooking," she recalls him telling her. "If somebody goes, it's you."
For many of the displaced, the food Chef Hui delivered were the first hot meals they'd had since before the fire. At its peak, Chef Hui was delivering as many as twelve thousand meals a day to those in the Lahaina and Kula fire zones. (ABOVE) Volunteers prepare food in the days immediately following the fire. With cell phone towers down, there was no communication in or out of Lahaina except for first responders or those who had a two-way radio, so volunteers, including Bancaco, went door-to-door with food.
Peter Merriman, a veteran chef who helped define Hawaii Regional Cuisine in the 1980s, already had a disaster plan in place. His team at Merriman's Kapalua had been cranking out about 1,400 meals a day since October 9. "We started coordinating with Chef Hui as time went on because it became obvious that the two of us were sort of the main players," Merriman says. "The Mainland guys were leaving and we were still here."
One of Chef Hui's initiatives was to start sending not only meals but also ingredient boxes so people could cook their own food. Corby-Noguchi said Sheldon and Janice Simeon connected with Filipino farmers, who no longer had a farmers market to sell to, to source culturally appropriate food for Filipino families.
"Chef Hui was the only one who knew what bagoong, sardines in tomato sauce and pastis were," says Chef Hui hub leader Kiley Adolpho. "People would come from Wailuku just for the condiments." Bancaco said they wanted to deliver ingredients that families were used to eating, so they weren't just eating chili and rice everyday. "Those local families thrive on the ability to cook their own food," he says. Adolpho, a teacher on leave from Princess Nahienaena Elementary, is still delivering weekly meals from Tin Roof and Tiffany's and ingredient boxes—enough food to last the week—to Kelawea neighborhoods. "The chicken tinola is their favorite," Adolpho says.
Most of her deliveries are to kupuna without jobs or transportation. "Uncle John" has health issues and is on a special diet. "I hope you guys continue," he told Adolpho, "because it's so helpful for us folks who get hard time leave the house." "Uncle Richie" is partially blind after debris from the fire flew into his eye. He had trouble processing his disability paperwork and was denied Red Cross and FEMA assistance. He loves the Filipino meals and the produce box, because it allows him to help cook for his family. "The vegetables good," he says. "That's the kind we use when we cook."
There is no running water safe to drink in Lahaina—an issue officials say could take up to three years to resolve—so hub leaders deliver that, too.
Chef Greg Shepherd of Paia Bay Coffee Bar views Lahaina after a long shift delivering food in the fire zone and tracking down victims for welfare check-ins. On the day of the fire, Bancaco had watched from a similar vantage as flames engulfed his neighborhood. "Once I got out I looked back and could see Front Street on fire," he says. "Besides my dad, I didn't know who got out and who didn't."
Two hours later Carolan texted his boss to inform him that without Wi-Fi he couldn't upload his inventory and recommended closing for the day. "The road to the store is closed due to power lines and poles going down," he texted. "Wind speeds are very high, branches and rooftops falling from the sky, not to mention the fires."
Although Carolan's workplace is still standing, his parents lost their home in Lahaina. It was difficult to get lunch because everything was shut down. When a food hub opened at Lahaina Gateway Center, he and his team were grateful to be able to access these chef-made meals. "When we saw the meal we were like, 'This is the real deal!'" he said. "You could just look at the plate and see how fresh the ingredients were. Poke with microgreens, brown rice, hoio salad, kalua pork, poi."
Bancaco's home and Pacifico were only two of the 2,200 structures destroyed in Lahaina—96 percent of which were residential. Fuentes lost his main kitchen and warehouse. After delivering food from UHMC for nine weeks, he turned his food trucks into food hubs, too. He and his team continue to cook meals for the Red Cross out of his food trucks, but Fuentes fears it's not enough. He still gets calls asking if he is coming with food. "I tell you one thing," Fuentes says about his terrifying hours treading water. "It was the worst day of my life, but the worst part of that day was choosing who to help. I don't want to choose anymore."
There are roughly seven thousand people still displaced. Fuentes worries that as media attention dwindles, they'll be forgotten. "Maui still needs help," he says.
