ABOVE: Hawaii's Kealoha Domingo has cooked with Indigenous chefs around the world and has become part of a revival of Indigenous culture through cuisine.
Kealoha Domingo did not want to be known as the Native Hawaiian chef who cooks laulau, a traditional Polynesian staple of pork and salted fish bundled in taro and ti leaves. Actually, he didn't even want to be a chef. His aunt and uncle were in the restaurant business, and Domingo saw how it drained time away from family. So he spent almost thirty years avoiding a culinary career, becoming a mechanic instead (plus, the money was way better). And yet, because his grandfather "gave us that sickness of cooking—that's what my uncle called it, a sickness—everywhere we go, we have to cook for people," he couldn't stay away from the stove. He'd moonlight from his day job as an elevator mechanic to cater for Native Hawaiian community groups and cook at special events like the Hawaii Food & Wine Festival—he likes to joke he was the only chef who both cooked at the Hawaii Convention Center and worked on its escalators.
And then, in 2019, he was laid off. He decided he would take his "expensive hobby," as he also calls it, and turn it into a business. Part of his motivation was that there were very few Native Hawaiian chefs cooking Native Hawaiian food commercially. "Not that I have anything against people doing it who are not Hawaiian, but I feel like it's important for us as Hawaiians to stand by our culture and identity," Domingo says. "I'm no expert, but I just want to take some responsibility and build the narrative in a good way."
In recent years, Indigenous chefs across the globe are reclaiming native food traditions. One of the most recognized in the United States is Sean Sherman, who opened Owamni in Minneapolis in 2021, shunning colonial ingredients like beef, wheat flour and cane sugar in favor of dishes like venison spoon bread, smoked bison rib eye and pawpaw custard with fermented berry dust. The restaurant won a James Beard Award, and in his acceptance speech Sherman, who is Oglala Lakota, said he hoped there would be Indigenous restaurants in every city one day. Their numbers are certainly growing, with restaurants including Cafe Ohlone on the University of California, Berkeley campus; Wahpepah's Kitchen in Oakland, California; and Sly Fox Den Too in rural Rhode Island. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, chefs are serving modern Indigenous cuisine in refined settings, including Hiakai in Wellington, New Zealand, and Akame in Pingtung, Taiwan.
But long before more recent restaurants were leading with their indigeneity, some of Hawaii's most beloved institutions, like Helena's Hawaiian Food, dating back to 1946, and Highway Inn, started in 1947, were serving "traditional" Hawaiian food—poi and laulau and squid luau, dishes that are part of Hawaii's food vocabulary today. Many of these restaurants, however, are not owned by Native Hawaiians, and neither are many of Hawaii's newer restaurants bearing Hawaiian names. But does that even matter? What's known as "local" food in Hawaii borrows freely from other cultures, largely a result of the plantation history that brought laborers from across the world. What's called "traditional" Hawaiian food includes chicken long rice, with its unmistakably gingery Chinese flavorings, and lomi lomi salmon, for which hardly any of the ingredients in that condiment existed in pre-contact Hawaii.
"There's a sanctity that we hold for the ingredients and a connection that we have with our food versus it being a commodity," Domingo says. "Highlighting your heritage through kai, through food," says Maori chef Monique Fiso (seen above) of Hiakai restaurant in Aotearoa (New Zealand) "is an amazing way to show people your whakapapa [genealogy] and who you are." PHOTO COURTESY OF HIAKAI
Domingo doesn't have the answers—his own wife, who is not Native Hawaiian, speaks olelo Hawaii (Hawaiian language) better than he does, and he says he loves a Zippy's saimin and fried chicken as much as any local—but he feels that representation matters. "I just think that it's important for people to understand what traditional Hawaiian food is, and how the Hawaiian perspective on food is really, really such a complex thing. There's a different level of sanctity and connection to the ingredients"—for example, the kalo plant is considered the elder brother of humankind who, when cultivated, in turn nourishes us—"that [once] you start getting into it, you're forced to understand things like conservation, environment, resource management."
Because of this, Domingo struggles to balance promotion with preservation, commercialization with conservation. To perpetuate Hawaiian culture, he wants to share it. But commercialization impacts the sources. "I agree with keeping the knowledge and the connection alive to the actual ingredients," he says. "But we just have to be very mindful about how we use it and how much of it we use. And for me, I don't want to draw attention to dishes that I don't believe are going to be sustainable. I want to be sure that the resource will be here for my kids and their kids."
And so, over the past few years, Domingo has walked this tightrope as a Hawaiian ambassador for Hawaiian food. At the James Beard House in New York City, he pounded paiai (mashed taro) and served it with cured ahi. At a Terra Madre conference in Turin, Italy, he presented a tomato poke with hazelnut inamona (traditionally crushed kukui, or candlenuts), and awa served in apu (coconut shell cups). He brought a papa kui ai and pohaku kui ai (board and stone poi pounder) to a Slow Food Indigenous gathering in Hualien, Taiwan. And when Sean Sherman came to visit Hawaii, they collaborated on a dinner where Domingo served ia lawalu—fish wrapped in ti leaves and flame-charred, finished with a coconut sauce tinged with ti ash—and, yes, laulau.
"Think of this as a Sunday roast reimagined through a Maori-Samoan lens," writes Monique Fiso, a chef of Maori and Samoan descent, in her book Hiakai. The facing page features roasted titi, a seabird, served alongside a pile of braised puha, a bitter green; and a taro gratin baked with coconut cream. Her book documents some of the native ingredients and foodways of Aotearoa (the Maori name for New Zealand) with modern recipes from her restaurant. Hiakai, the Maori word for hungry, began as a series of pop-ups in 2016 and then settled into a restaurant in 2018. Since its inception Fiso has created twenty-three menus without repeating a dish. Her most recent tasting menu, called Wai Tai ("ocean water"), "explores the importance of water on human existence," she says. It concludes with a semifreddo infused with wild, sun-dried seaweed and garnished with fresh peaches and strawberry umeboshi.
As a child, Fiso knew she wanted to be a chef. She worked in kitchens in New York for seven years, and when she returned home, "I noticed that there was a lack of representation of Maori and Pasifika (people of the Pacific Islands) in the dining scene, and I thought that was odd, especially considering we're in Aotearoa"—where 17 percent of the population is Maori and 8 percent is Pasifika. "I thought, 'Someone should really do something about that.' And then I thought, 'Well, hold on. You're Maori and you're a chef. Maybe you should do that.' I had trained in and learned all these other cuisines. And now I want to learn more about the kai (food) of my people, my ancestors."
"We already looked different from others because we're darker," says Alex Peng of the Indigenous Rukai people of Taiwan, where he grew up. People would always ask about his heritage, he says, so in 2015 he opened Akame in southern Taiwan to showcase the island's Indigenous cuisine, using ingredients foraged in the wild and sourced from nearby villages. PHOTO COURTESY AKAME
Except, how? For generations of Maori, like many other Indigenous peoples, two and a half centuries of colonization had severed connections to their heritage. "I found that the usual ways that you would learn about a subject in this day and age—go to the library or look online—there wasn't this plethora of information that I naively assumed would be there," Fiso says. She turned to her community, and through each hunter, horticulturist and cook, she found her way back to her roots. And in turn, her own work has inspired more Maori and Pasifika representation in Aotearoa's dining scene, from food trucks to full-scale restaurants.
But, at least for now, the Wai Tai menu will be the last. Fiso announced in February that the restaurant would close in March. "At a time of unprecedented global food crises, we want to be part of the solutions," read Hiakai's social media post. "We care deeply about the systems, security and sovereignty of kai. The challenges we collectively face are monumental but not impossible. ... Hiakai is evolving, not coming to an end."
The way to Akame isn't easy. The restaurant is in Pingtung county, the southernmost tip of Taiwan, about 180 miles south of Taipei. From the nearest high-speed rail station, you'll drive about an hour, part of it along a winding mountain road, before reaching Wutai Township, a village of Rukai people, one of the sixteen officially recognized Indigenous peoples in Taiwan. Chef Alex Peng, who is of Rukai descent, chose the location to bring diners closer to where Rukai live, where nearby venues showcase cultural artifacts and vend freshly fried millet doughnuts. "I want to introduce my Indigenous culture and way of life to others," Peng says. "And food is the key to understanding it. Because once you like my food, like my ingredients, maybe you'll be more curious and more inspired to learn more about the culture." He opened Akame, which means "grill" in the Rukai language, in 2015 and eschews the more theme-park feel of some Indigenous restaurants in Taiwan for a more subtle approach. He has served black Silkie chicken glazed with a mountain pepper miso and smoked with angelica leaf—and to slice into it, a scaled-down replica of a Rukai hunting knife. For dessert: churros dusted with Taiwan white pine needle and native cinnamon, served with locally grown chocolate.
Like Peng, the chefs at Honolulu's Mud Hen Water, Ed Kenney and Alika Chung, combine global influences with native ingredients in a way that can make their cuisines hard to define. Kenney likes to say they cook from a voyaging perspective: Polynesians were skilled voyagers, and they brought with them a set of canoe crops (the very ingredients that some mistake as native plants), a starter kit that included ulu (breadfruit), kalo (taro) and kukui. "And then when they landed, they would source ingredients and cook," says Kenney. And so, on a Hawaii Tourism Authority media trip to Portland, he brought a cooler of staples—paiai, limu, ulu—and paired them with fava beans, green garlic and morels from a local farmers market. Similarly, even though Kenney's first restaurant, Town (now closed), was nominally Italian, you might find coppa di testa with pohole (fern) shoots, and grilled ahi and escarole over paiai.
But in 2009, selling paiai became a flashpoint. The state Department of Health raided Town's kitchens and threw out the hand-pounded taro on the grounds that using the board and porous stone were unhygienic. Within two years, however, a grassroots movement lobbied for an exemption to legalize paiai. Chung, who is part Native Hawaiian and part Chinese—ironically, his Chinese great-grandfather was once called the Poi King on Maui for all his taro patches—says that he, like many others, was so disconnected from Native Hawaiian food traditions that until that point he didn't even know what paiai was. "When paiai [came] back, that was an eye-opening thing for a community of people who had no idea of how to kui [pound taro]. And now we kui at the Capitol every year to open the legislative session. It's just an amazing sight to see the rotunda full of all these people pounding paiai." Being introduced to paiai "really started me down the journey of what we can do with Indigenous ingredients," Chung says.
At Mud Hen Water in Honolulu, chef and owner Ed Kenney (seen above at left) and chef Alika Chung create a modern Hawaiian cuisine with native and introduced ingredients. “You always want to move forward, but you can’t forget where you came from,” Chung says, “so we root everything in concepts and flavors from our past and from other cultures that live here.”
To that end the dishes at Mud Hen Water, which opened in 2015, have included venison laulau dressed with a sour poi vinaigrette; luau stuffed porchetta sprinkled with inamona dukkah, a cross between the Hawaiian relish made with ground kukui nut and the Egyptian spice mix; buttered ulu tossed with Chinese black beans. (Mud Hen Water is the translation of Waialae, the street in Kaimuki, where the restaurant is located: "Wai" means fresh water, and "alae" is the mud hen, an endangered native waterfowl.)
"I 100 percent identify with being Native Hawaiian," Kenney says, "but I would say I identify just as much with being Chinese or Filipino or Irish or Swedish or German. Maybe when I fill out a census or a questionnaire that says choose one, I will pick Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, just because this is my home and it's very near and dear to my heart. But it is in no way my identity." It might be why the food at Mud Hen Water, like its owner, Kenney, has never felt distinctly Native Hawaiian but simply of Hawaii, with its blend of ethnicities. The restaurant, however, is more than a combination of flavors on a plate, just as Hawaii is more than numbers in a census. It taps into something deeper: Chung says with each dish, he looks to "root it in a food memory or culture or sense of place—we're looking for that connection."
But forces in the modern world are not easily overturned. Hiakai as a restaurant is closing, due in part to the challenges of running a small business. The food truck Domingo bought a few years ago to serve "Hawaiian soul food" is still sitting in his yard, waiting to be launched. Paiai is gone from Mud Hen Water, along with other dishes like the ia lawalu that was once grilled over the open hearth—casualties of Kenney's need to streamline operations. In a world where there's a Starbucks in Rome, poke shops from Barcelona to Taipei to Mexico City and where Chicago restaurateurs trademarked the phrase "Aloha Poke" to protect their chain, preserving traditions is the rarest of ingredients.
