774: On the Road – Hawaii with Chefs Sheldon Simeon, Ed Kenney, Robynne Maii and More!

What is the secret to making great toast? Oh, you're just going to go in with the hard-hitting questions. I'm Dan Pashman from The Sporkful. We like to say it's not for foodies, it's for eaters. We use food to learn about culture, history, and science. There was a time we looked into allegations of discrimination, and bon appetit, or when I spent three years inventing a new pasta shape. It's a complex noodle that you put together. Every episode of The Sporkful, you're going to learn something, feel something, and laugh. The Sporkful. Get it wherever you get your podcasts. Megan Rapinoe here. This week on A Touch More, we've got something for everyone. We're talking about the U.S. women Olympians taking home more medals than the men, the U.S. women's national team roster heading into the She Believes Cup, and the latest on the WNBA-CBA negotiations. Check out the latest episode of A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. Hey, it's Francis. This week we wanted to bring you back to an episode from a couple years ago because we just can't get enough of this place. Here's our show from Hawaii. I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM. Everyone dreams of going to Hawaii, right? flowers everywhere you turn, surfers cruising through massive waves, ukulele music and hula dancing. Well, a couple of weeks ago, I had the absolute pleasure of getting to see all that because of the food. Because thanks to Hawaii Public Radio, Kapiolani Community College, and the Culinary Institute of the Pacific, we got to record this episode about the unique food culture of Hawaii in front of a fantastic audience, It's the beautiful Hawaii Theater in Honolulu. And, you know, the food of Hawaii is kind of unique, like on this earth, I think. It starts with native Hawaiian food, which began with the canoe crops, literally the food that the first people brought with them in their canoes. So the canoe crops include the Staff of Life, kalo, which you might know as taro, ulu, which is breadfruit, coconuts, about two dozen species in all, plus pigs and chickens. And then through Hawaii's more recent history of plantations, migration, and overthrow and conquest, people from China, Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Portugal, the mainland of America, and more have come, settled, and created a culture and a cuisine where people just freely borrow from one another. We got into all that and more with our guests. to kick off the show we want to talk about where hawaii food is today and why it looks like such a mix of cultures with chef sheldon simeon and journalist jaina omaye so jaina is a culture and arts reporter for hawaii public radio and sheldon well he hates it when i say this but he's probably the most nationally recognized ambassador for hawaii food right now he's the chef owner of Tin Roof and Tiffany's on Maui. He's also the author of one of the best and most fun books I've ever gotten to edit, called Cook Real Hawaii. And I started by asking Sheldon how he came to cooking. Have a listen. I grew up in a house that food was highly respected. So food was surrounded me from when I was young. As young as I can think of, I was taking sips from grandpa's kaldo from the pot of soup. And, you know, I never thought I was going to be a chef, actually, growing up. I just was, food was always around us. And, you know, to culinary school, attended a leeward here and then finished up in Maui. You know, you start to kind of think of what's the chef that you want to become. And you start to look as a kid from Hawaii, you're kind of enamored by the glossy magazines and the chefs that are on TV. and Amarillo Gossi was bamming everything at that point. And I grew up watching Harry's Kitchen and that's Chef Sam Choi on TV, right? And, you know, I only did my training and all my cooking in Hawaii. And when I look to the big cities, it's like in order for my food to stand out, they're going to have to mimic that food that is going on in the big cities. But it was on Top Chef where I realized is I can cook the food of my upbringing and be proud about that and be proud about how unique Hawaii's cuisine really is and all these different cultures that has influenced it. So why in that moment did you get cold feet about cooking that food in the finale? Yeah, I don't know. It was maybe a little bit of intimidation by the chefs that surrounded me. I was a kid that I learned most of my techniques from my father, cooking in the garage at Popolo Street in Hilo, Hawaii. Yeah, working. You know, panning up food with big old spoons instead of these chefs that are putting little plushes of parsley on a beautifully sous vide venison or something like that, right? I had that feeling, it's like, does my food compare to what that is? And you start to question. And even at that time, I've been cooking for many years already. And even now there's moments, you still have to question yourself about what is Hawaii food and where do we belong in the spectrum of all the different cuisines of the world. Well, it's a big question. So I won't ask you, define this for the world. But how do you personally define what Hawaii food is? Yeah, I think the book way to answer is you split it down in two periods. When the first, the Hawaiians that came over and the first settlers and brought their cuisine, you know, the canoe crops and all of that. And then the next time is when all of the plantation immigrants came, my grandparents, the Filipinos, the Chinese and all of that. But I really think Hawaii cuisine is each individual person's experience of what their neighbors cook around them, what restaurants in your own neighborhood and your community is, and what saimin is your favorite. Yeah, where do you get your manapua? And it's that connection to our community, to our farmers, to fishermen, that defines what Hawaii cuisine is. Yeah. You just brought two really interesting dishes. Just by example, I'm sure there are thousands more, right? Like our emblematic or iconic in Hawaii, right? Saimin and Manapua. Manapua looks a lot like something I grew up calling tasio bao, right? And Saimin, you took me to Palace Saimin yesterday. Yeah, we went to Palace Saimin yesterday, yeah. It's pretty killer. And I love the experience of it. And what kind of blew my mind was, oh, I'd heard about saimin through you for years. Here's my first experience sitting down to it. And I'm like, oh, this is wontonmi that I grew up with in a Cantonese tradition, only with a different noodle, with a noodle that I associate more with Japanese-style ramen. So these dishes are from specific cultures, and they bear a lot of resemblance to what they were before they came here. How did they become unique to Hawaii? In your mind, I don't mean trace the evolution of the dish. But at what point do you look at that and be like, that is ours. Right? Yeah. Well, that's what's amazing about Hawaii, right? It's this cross-pollination of cultures that come together. We no skids share each other. We use what get, my grandfather would say. Right? And yeah, it's not this, like, this is how you do it. And these dishes, they just kind of blend together because of this outpouring of sharing. We want to share. We want to invite you into our homes. And that's the culture that is here. And it showcases it in the food. And that's the one thing amazing about food. If you want to dive into somebody's heritage and their culture, look at the recipes. Look at the food. Yeah. There was this amazing, we got these really nice gifts in the dressing room. And there's these little cow-cow tins. and Chef Ed Kenney just explained to me the significance of them. It's basically like a rice lunchbox in two parts. The bottom part holds your rice and the top part holds whatever you brought to accompany the rice. Maybe if you were Korean, they were galbi or maybe there was adobo. So on the plantation, the workers would sit down and they would all take the top part, put it down on the ground in front of them or on the table in front of them and everyone would have the rice in their hands and they would all share with one another's dishes. and I was like, is that really true? That's such a good story. And everyone in the room was like, no one told me different. So I think that spirit of sharing and true, we come from a different place but we're here in the same place and we're here together is really I mean, it's what we want to believe America is. Right? And so, Dana, let me turn to you because your reporting I think gives us a lot of insight into the many communities of Hawaii. You've written a lot about ethnic cultural festivals and how they have adapted and evolved over time and also specifically through the era of COVID. What do these festivals show you about the evolution of these many different communities in Hawaii? Well, I think one of my favorite topics to cover is the ethnic and cultural festivals because I think it's truly a reflection of our diverse communities kind of coming together for a common goal. And so it's interesting. I'm sure everybody in this room has been to the Okinawan Festival, Mary Monarch, Filipino Festa. You go there, and you don't only see Okinawans at the Okinawan Festival or Filipinos at the Filipino Festival. I think there's this embrace of different cultures and wanting to learn about them. And I think in turn, for me, that's really inspired me to learn more about my own heritage and my culture. So what was your question again? I'm sorry. I'm used to being on that side. Well, the question is, how have they evolved and what has that taught you about the community? Yes, that was the question. Okay. I'm sorry, guys. I got notes, so I'm cheating too. It's fine. I think a big part of the festivals are that they're doing two things at once. They're trying to keep traditions alive and they're juggling that with making changes, with newer generations coming in and kind of taking over for their grandparents who used to run the festivals. So I think that's kind of like a push and pull thing for some of them. In my reporting, it's kind of like you want to perpetuate your heritage and your grandparents' traditions, but you also see opportunities to expand and do things a little differently. How has that played out in your own life? Because I remember when we first talked, you told me this really interesting thing of your grandmother would make sure you watch sumo and other things that really spoke to you of a Japanese culture. And yet you've also danced hula since you were a little girl. Tell me about how, well, just tell me about your own story and how you see that kind of push and pull. I think like many kids growing up in Hawaii, I grew up in a multi-generational home where my grandma lived with us. And so my grandma, like you mentioned, she lived in Japan, I think from when she was 5 to like 22. So as you can imagine, just the things that she would do was just natural for her to speak Japanese or cook my favorite Japanese foods or practice calligraphy. So I think in that way, it was very intentional on her part to make sure that like the culture was still alive in our household and that I learned who I am and where I came from. And on the other end of that, I also danced hula with a little coaxing from my mom. And I've continued, I'm in my 30s now and I still dance hula. So I think it was really this like intermingling and interweaving of like my culture and my heritage and then the culture and heritage of the place I call home. So I didn't necessarily feel like they were at conflict. I think in what you were kind of used to that intermingling like I guess you don't appreciate it when you're a kid but as an adult you're like wow that really set the stage for like my passions in life. Do you ever feel a tension between hey it's great that we're all here and we're learning from one another and we sharing with one another but some of this stuff that ours like that should still kind of be ours like do you feel that or do you see that ever or is it really just like hey cool we good Joey Well, I think one of the words that I've been reflecting on a lot is authenticity. For me, I'm practically third generation. My grandparents were teenagers when they came here. Does that make me less Filipino because I was born and raised in Hawaii? and yeah I think that's tough when you're being put on a stage and saying is the food that he cooks authentic and I think for me if I could shun that word it would be alright because food evolves and it's the stories behind the food that makes it authentic applause applause applause applause but then what do you say to folks when you're like Filipinos come and eat your food and be like oh man everybody's auntie's otobo is better than y'all yeah yeah it's that pride that you have in it you know like uh it's it's tough when I'm put into situations where where you have to like defend my own heritage uh being a Filipino that's coming from Hawaii like the are you representing Hawaii you're Hawaiian well I'm not Kanaka you know but my heart is in this place because that's what I live. I live Hawaii, so I'm continually looking at ways to better define and describe my food and just make it authentic to myself. Right on. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, Jaina Omai and Sheldon Simeon. Thank you guys. Sheldon Simeon is chef of Tin Roof and Tiffany's and the author of Cook Real Hawaii. Jaina Omae is a culture and arts reporter for Hawaii Public Radio. We'll be back in a minute to talk about native Hawaiian food. I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM, American Public Media. Hey, Kara Swisher here. I want to let you know that Vox Media is returning to South by Southwest in Austin for live tapings of your favorite podcasts. Join us from March 13th through the 15th for live tapings of Today Explained, Teffy Talks, Prof G Markets, and of course, your two favorite podcasts, Pivot and On with Kara Swisher. The stage will also feature sessions from Brene Brown and Adam Grant, Marques Brownlee, Keith Lee, Vivian Tu, and Robin Arzon. It's all part of the Vox Media Podcast Stage at South by Southwest, presented by Odoo. Visit voxmedia.com slash sxsw to pre-register and get your special discount on your innovation badge. That's voxmedia.com slash sxsw to register. Really, you should register. We sell out and we hope to see you there. This week on Net Worth and Chill, I'm joined by Her First 100K, aka Tori Dunlop, a fellow personal finance creator who's changing how an entire generation thinks about money. Tori's journey is a masterclass in turning personal finance wins into a platform that empowers millions. She opens up about the real strategy behind hitting that six-figure milestone without the typical privileged blind advice and how she's redefining what it means to be a wealthy woman in 2026. We're diving deep into investment strategies for real people with real budgets and why financial feminism isn't just a buzzword, it's a movement. Get ready for an unfiltered conversation about money, entrepreneurship, and what it really takes to build both personal wealth and a business empire. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash you're rich BFF. I'm Francis Lam and this is The Splendid Table, the show for curious cooks and eaters. Our show today was taped in front of a live audience in Honolulu, Hawaii, one of the great food cultures of the world. So at this point, I welcome to the stage two chefs who are proud of, but not exactly defined by the native Hawaiian heritage of their families. Robin Mai is chef-owner of FET in Chinatown, Honolulu. She's a James Beard Award winner, and she's a graduate of the Kapi'olani Community College Culinary Program. Ed Kenny is chef-owner of Mudhead Water, also a KCC grad, and a longtime leader in the Hawaii restaurant scene. And I started by asking Robin how she wound up in food. The short story is my parents' religion is education. Like good Asian parents, right? So they spent a fortune sending me to the most expensive college in the United States at the time. Was it the University of Michigan? Because it feels like it. It was Middlebury, and they reminded me constantly that it was the most expensive college. they said great she's going to major in Japanese because that's what they do at Middlebury they do languages and she'll come back to Hawaii and do something with Japanese. They sent you to Vermont to learn Japanese? Okay. Because there are a lot of Japanese speaking jobs in Hawaii right tourism so they thought okay this might. Seems like a better and cheaper place to learn the language. This might be a good investment and then I announced to them my sophomore year that I was going to major in modern dance. I don't mean to laugh. I'm sorry. I think it's beautiful that you made your choices. I mean, who does that? You did. Okay, well, the caveat was I said, well, I'm going to major in modern dance and I'm going to do pre-med. Sure. To soften the blow. But my physics teacher, my professor, he said, Robin, this is not for you. I did the problem sets. I asked all my smart Indian friends who learned the same thing in their eighth grade that we were learning in college to help me. And he said, this is not for you. Do something else. I said what am I going to tell my parents and he said I don't know but you can't be a doctor laughter laughter laughter laughter laughter this is a true story this is a real New England tough love yes so I ended up majoring in modern dance and then again to make it more palatable it was with English non-fiction creative writing another really like, you know. As a fellow creative writing major, let me tell you. The parents don't buy it. No. And then, this is a very vivid memory. So senior year, everyone's running around going to job fairs and like, oh, Price Waterhouse, I'm going to be a consultant. Or I'm like studying for my iPads or my LSATs or all of those things. And I was in the career office and I saw a flyer for the New England Culinary Institute, which happened to be in Montpelier and I said, great I'm going to go to culinary school so I told my parents I was going to go to culinary school and then they said, well you're on your own kiddo, because they were smart and they knew they knew that these culinary programs were so expensive so they said, you have to figure it out and then I quickly realized how expensive it was so I came home and went to KCC applause applause applause applause God bless community college. Yes, and just the short story about culinary education was I just, I loved it. And then I moved to New York City, and I had this big chip on my shoulder like, oh my God, all these people, they went to the fancy culinary schools, they know more than me. And literally, it took like two hours, and I'm like, you guys don't know more than me. You guys just think you know more than me. So it was... What, fancy culinary schools are really good at producing these entitled jerks? Yes, and in debt. and in debt. They're all in debt. Really good for the reason you're in debt. Yes. And so I feel like I got a really good sort of lay in the land of culinary education and really not to be dogmatic, but culinary education belongs in community college. Pure and simple. I find it. Ed, what about you? How did you come to... Oh God, let's get to the good stuff already. we just talked about this backstage, really right behind there, and I told her that before cooking I was in commercial real estate development, and she looked at me and said, boring. And so did my wife, who's here somewhere. She realized it was very boring, and so she made me pack up my stuff and travel around the world for a year. During that time, there's one moment, light bulb moment, that I remember vividly sitting on a street corner in Hanoi, and we're sitting on milk crates and I am enjoying this steaming hot bowl of pho and there's a dozen locals around me saying things in their native tongue, probably just mocking me the whole time, but I thought I had a bunch of new friends. And at that very moment, I realized that this is what I wanted to do. Food brings us together and allows us to share those special times with people that we know and people we don't. And that's what we get to do every night on a nightly basis. We open our homes to you folks and you don't know how fulfilling that is, but thank you. Well, okay, so now that we know how you got here, let's actually turn it back even further on some level. Both of you are proud of your Native Hawaiian heritage. And so I'm going to ask the same question to both of you, but maybe I'll start with Ed. How do Native Hawaiian traditions influence your cooking? And how do they not? I think we're on this constant journey to learn and understand. Both of us, Rebenists, I'm sure you do, going to our pa'ina as kids and being with family, and you're eating these things like opihi or raw crab poke or inamono, all these kind of things, special occasion foods that we still don't see on a regular basis. Ulu is something that we're seeing everywhere, and that wasn't anything. That was one of the original canoe crops, but that's not something that we grew up with. That's breadfruit. Yeah, ulu is breadfruit. And here we are. We're kind of modern chefs. And if people want traditional Hawaiian foods, they'll go to Helena's or something like that. So we've been... Yes! We've been given the task of being kind of chef-y with these kind of indigenous foods. and Robin has a ulu dish that leans towards Indian flavors. Our ulu dish uses dao si. So I think there's a... Yeah, fermented black, Chinese fermented black beans. I think there's a certain responsibility that comes with using these native ingredients where you've got to respect them for what they were, the history, the culture, everything that went behind it. But at the same time, we've got to, like I said, be chef-y. So we're kind of right in this interesting place where we're trying to make use of as much of this as we can. Why do you feel you have to be that way? Well, I came up at a time when fusion was a bad word in this field. I remember this was probably the late 90s and fusion was brand new. And you were seeing like root beer foam with barbecue ribs and mango salsa or something. And it made no sense. And so I think a lot of us at our age still kind of have that idea of fusion as being a negative term. So anytime you fuse, technically, if you fuse two cultures, you're making fusion. But I think if it comes from a place, like Sheldon was referring to, we're all cooking from our heritage. Like the foods, like Chinese black bean, I grew up with it. I grew up with taro and stuff. So it makes sense, I feel, like we're in a position where we can put them together. But it's still, you're still kind of walking on eggshells when you do, I think. Do you feel that sense of walking on eggshells? I think that I have the Hawaiian last name, but I always tell people that I'm like so, like the least Hawaiian person, the least Hawaiian Hawaiian person, meaning that I, my sister is the Hawaiian person. She's the one who does the hula. She's the one who studied to be a kumu. So when, as a chef, I don't ascribe of being like, I'm like a Hawaiian chef. I a chef who loves to eat all cultures food I want to eat what the grandwothers are eating And when we travel I don gravitate towards the Michelin star restaurants I want to go find the Hellenas in every single corner of the world. Because that's how I want to eat. And that's the way I grew up eating. My parents both cook, and the extraordinary thing is that I thought everyone ate delicious food every single meal at home. I thought that was normal. And so even the humblest meals at our house were so delicious and so carefully prepared and so mindful, and that's how I cook, and that's how Emily Iguchi cooks, who's our chef de cuisine. She's out here somewhere. Emily! There she is. So when it comes to using indigenous ingredients, for us it's important because things that grow here will help sustain us, and it's important that we use as much as possible that's grown here for food security reasons, for economic reasons, for political reasons. And so... But as chefs, I think what clicked for me as a chef when I was in culinary school and I started really cooking more, I'm like, oh, you know, all of a sudden you taste something completely foreign and you start putting them into categories. Right? Like this is salty, this is sweet, this is starch, this is citrus fruit. So then you start playing around with how to substitute these ingredients. And so when it comes to ulu, like, I've struggled with ulu my entire professional career because it was an ingredient that I was, quite frankly, afraid of. Because I didn't grow up eating ulu. And I've been to so many restaurants who have ulu dishes. And I was like, I just don't get it. Like, I don't like it. Like, you know what I mean? Like, you're supposed to have a ulu fry. And I'm like, there's nothing fry-like about this. It's really soft. And it's, like, sweet. And, like, you know what I mean? So, like, for me, I just didn't understand it. And then, like, I would, like, buy ulu. And then I realized, oh, my goodness, I missed the window. Right? Like, there's, it's, like, happening in real time. It's, like, living. It's breathing. It's changing. It's like a plantain. Yeah. It's a fruit. It's happening. But it can be starchy. It was, like, a potato at one point. And it can be sweet. But do you know what I mean? It's, like, happening. And I was just, like, always chasing it, always trying to keep up with the ulu. do you have a refrigerator right i know i just but it'll slow it down i know considerably right but you know how it is you can like bring product in you get excited and all of a sudden like you know a couple days go by and you're like i'm sorry oh my god but you know what i mean my mother's gonna listen to this i know i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm really we can say that we made a pack the other thing that's great about editor she knows how to use the beep but but you know i finally i i finally got smart and i'm like we have all these micronesian people that work with us they know about the hulu so i started asking them questions. And I said, what do you do with the ulu? And they tell me, and I'm like, okay, what do you do? When do we do it? And I kept on having these conversations. So, like, that's magically, that's how our ulu dish came to be. And by magically, oh, I asked one of the people who work in the kitchen to figure it out. No, you asked people that know it's going on. Jenny, you don't even have to press the beep button. That was great. But let me ask you this. This is interesting because you've chased the ulu now. Chasing the ulu, that's a memoir. But why did you feel like you had to chase it? Did you feel like there was a pressure that you had to represent native Hawaiian food in that way? I felt like it was less about being the Hawaiian part. It was more about the food security part because Ulu is going to save the world. Like, I mean, I say that sort of like just casually, but we're not the only people that eat Ulu. Ulu is eaten all over the world, and it's so nutritious. And I thought, God, why can't I figure this out? You know, and it really bugged me. Like, I just, I mean, I'm not going to even tell you how many batches of Ulu ice cream I tried to make. It was terrible. Okay, Ed, is there like an ingredient that you have chased? Is there a native tradition or ingredient that you want to work with and you don't know how or you don't know if you can put it on the menu because people won't get it? Well, all of them. I'll probably make some enemies here, but indigenous Hawaiian food definitely is not a culinary, you know, I mean, it's... You can stop yourself now. Yeah, exactly. You don't have to finish that sentence. It is probably one of the most simplest cuisines I've ever had. There's not a whole, and I love it dearly, don't get me wrong. I grew up eating these flavors, but there's not the complexities of a fresh herb, like herbal and there's not like the spices that they use in India. There's not the highs and lows of acid and fat. There's just a few years ago, fermentation and preservation were two big techniques that you saw. So I like, oh good, I'm going to do some research and find out how our ancestors preserved and fermented food. And the extent of fermentation I found was a umeke of poi left out on the counter for years on end that you just keep adding to and it continues to bubble. And it's delicious. And preservation, I mean, nature was our icebox. So you would just go in. If you were hungry, you wanted fish, you'd catch fish. If you wanted taro, you'd pull it out of the ground. So there wasn't much need to preserve food. They would salt some okule or opelu every once in a while because during kapu season, you can't eat okule and opelu. But it's a very basic food. So we've tried to get creative with all this stuff. I think really what we need to do is go back to the basics. When I was in Tahiti, you would get voted off the island if you used canned coconut milk. And I think everyone here rarely juices their own coconuts. And when I came back from Tahiti, I said, okay, we're going to make our luau, we're going to make our kulolo with fresh coconut milk. And I realized why we don't have fresh coconuts is because if you get bonked on the head, you get sued. So all of our coconut trees don't have coconuts on them. But we did source some, and that is what elevated our food to another level. I mean, something as simple as juicing your own green coconuts compared to using canned coconut milk in Luau or Kulolo made all the difference in the world. So... Which is ironically how it would have been done. Yeah, so you are talking in a way about going back to how things were. Right, but I mean, I'm not cooking it sous vide, and I'm not aerating it. Yeah, I'm just going back to the way things were. Grating it and squeezing it. All right, well, here's to going back to the way things were. Sometimes. Thanks so much to Ed Kenney and Robin Maillie. Robin Maillie is the James Beard Award-winning chef of FET, and Ed Kenney is the chef of Mud Hen Water. We'll be back in a minute with more of the show we recorded live in Hawaii. I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM. I'm Francis Lam, and you're listening to The Splendid Table. We're coming to you from Honolulu today, recorded live on stage at the Hawaii Theater in front of a phenomenal crowd of curious cooks and eaters. For the last part of our show, we got rid of the chefs. I mean, I love chefs, but what makes a great food scene isn't just chefs, right? It's legacy businesses, it's farmers and producers, and you're probably going to need some great local chains, too. So for our last segment, we brought in a little of all of the above. Chris Kanemura is the co-owner of Fujiya Hawaii, a 70-year-old traditional Japanese mochi and confection maker. Emma Bello is a goat farmer and cheesemaker at her family's Sweetland Farm. And Kevin Yim is the vice president of marketing and communications for Zippies, a beloved chain of diners with locations all over Hawaii. Let's get back to the stage. Chris, I have had the pleasure and honor of speaking to lots of owners of legacy businesses through the course of my career. and something that they almost all have in common is, you know, it's like, I'm the third generation owner of this business and I'm not sure there's going to be a fourth. Or the other scenario is, well, you know, my granddaddy had this place and my mama had this place, so there was no way I was not going to have this place. But in either of these scenarios, it's almost more like the business chose the people rather than the other way around. Fujia was not in your family. It wasn't your mama's shop. So you chose it. Why in God's earth would you do that? Well, first of all, what is Fujiya, for people that don't know? And what did it mean to you before you bought it? Yeah, so Fujiya is a mochi company. Mainly we also do tea cookies, which is called senbei. We also make manju, which is like a pie and a ball. That's the way I can explain it. Pie and a ball. Pie and a ball. There's your next level branding, pie and a ball. So anyway, so that's what our core products that we make there. At the base, mochi is two ingredients, rice and water. It's a short grain rice. It's a sweet rice. And sugar is added. We embellish it. And then we make desserts out of it, put all different kind of goodies inside, like red bean and white bean and peanut butter, which people tend to love. Yeah. So now that we know what Fujiya makes what did this place mean to you? You know yeah in Shanghai I might have not done it had I known how hard it was going to be but you know truly they said not to buy things on emotion well there's a lot of emotion for me for Fujiya. Growing up my grandmother worked for this company called Shirakio. It's a long I guess Japanese and So the Japanese store had all kind of Japanese goods. It was in Hawaii for quite a long time. And I think she was the longest-running employee there. So she would bring home this Fujiyamochi, Fujiyasembe, and it was just connected to that. So every time I would bite into a piece of senbei or bite into a mochi, it would remind me of that childhood moment sitting at the dining table in their tiny apartment. So Fujio is very personal to me. It evokes a lot of emotions. And I think that's what it does for a lot of people that come in. They remember that. So that's my story. But when you bought this business, it didn't come with an instruction manual. Not at all. And not even a cookbook. So when we visited you the other day, you were like, we pretty much bought the business and had no idea what the recipes were. Which seems to be problematic. To some degree. So how did you find the old recipes? You know, part of it was some of our old staff came back, and they had some things in their memories which we didn't realize that they had. Then we asked them, do you remember how this thing was made? And they're like, yeah. It's like, okay, let's do that. So some of it was that. My partner at the time was a former president of the company for a duration. and so I brought him in and then he started to rebuild the recipes. We got new machinery and the technology got improved so that we can make the mochi better and so that's kind of how we continue to evolve it. And then we wanted to do more creative stuff and that's where it kind of is now. Did you have to make a decision to feel like hey we can put peanut butter in it which is totally not true As someone who bought this thing because of the memory and on some level because of this idea of continuing tradition then also choose to do these new flavors Were you like, should we do this? Should we not? That's a good question. A lot of the older generation understood the core products. But we wanted to pass tradition on to newer generation, introduce them to that mochi is not an old food, but that's evolving food. Peanut butter, actually, we can't take credit for that, actually came along with old Fujia and that was one of our most popular items. So you haven't been able to improve on the past. Yeah, it's hard to improve what's good already. So I love hearing this idea of introducing it to a new generation and from there I want to move to Emma for a moment because what is the average age of the American farmer at like 67 years old? I'm 32. So Emma is less than half of that number. And that's exciting. I love that there are new generations of people who want to work the land and produce food. And when we were talking to Chris, it was sort of like he chose Fujiya. You as a goat farmer, it almost sounds like the goats chose you. But tell us about how you came, about your journey from being a culinary student to now being a goat farmer and cheesemaker. So I started off from high school in the culinary field. And that's where I got my love of cooking and with my mom. And so I did a semester at Leeward. And next was summer. What are you going to do? So I found a summer job on Maui, surfing goat dairy. And I was there for three months. and it just dawned on me. It just hit me. You know, I really love working with goats more than I want to be in the back of the kitchen. And so I stayed there for a whole year and started managing interns because they were really heavy on interning people from around the world, actually. Came back and did culinary. Went to California. I worked at a much larger operation. came back and I started the farm with my family, started raising the goats, making cheese in the house. But I just got back into it slowly. We built as we needed, stopped milking 15 goats by hand because I was starting to get carpal tunnel. So I got the machine out and was milking goats. at that time about 30 of them on the machine but what is it with your relationship with the goats i mean like they're really personable they're like dogs um they'll come up to you you know they want a head scratch um they're all different one would want attention and won't be like no i'm okay like i can i can see you from where i'm at and they're just the dynamic of just them it's night and day from one to the next they're personable they're funny they're stressful are they easier to manage than the human interns or is the other way around the goats are better so a few of the guests and i have touched on this a little bit and unfortunately we haven't had a lot of time to talk about it but i do want to ask you about this important issue of food security here on the islands um i had heard that something like 85 to 90 percent of the food on the islands is imported and there is essentially at any given time about a two-week supply of food here. That seems problematic to me. I imagine it seems problematic to everyone in this room. But as a farmer and producer based here, is there a sense of community among other farmers and other producers? And is there a collective vision you share about how to produce more food here? yes and no um i could be kind of really um concentrated on my farm because i'm trying to keep it afloat with covid going on too so yes i'm i'm the dairy i'm supplying cheese and then there's the produce people and then there's the meat operations i can't do a lot of my things because the state rules. So it's hard. It's hard. There's a lot of talk, but I wish things would move forward more. What do you mean by that? What are some of the regulations or things that make things harder for you and others? Like, for example, the slaughterhouse, they don't take goats, so I can't provide goat meat. Bottle milk. There's a huge demand. I get calls almost every day, at least once or twice a week. Do you sell goat milk? So we have the machine. We need to move forward and get that bottling going. So just trying to move forward as fast as we can to produce for the islands. Let me move to Kevin for a moment. Kevin, so when we... I kind of tipped this a little bit earlier when I invited you on stage, but when we talk about the food scene of a place particularly in the media mostly folks focus on the high profile chefs or the iconic holes in the wall but I would argue that just as important if not more so are beloved local chains and probably they feed more than both the high end chefs and that one iconic hole in the wall does put together. So Ziffy's, a restaurant group since the 1960s. 1966. There are 22 locations serving like every local comfort food from Siamine to Chile. How many people does Ziffy's serve in a year? In the millions. We're a closely held private company, so I can't tell you that, but in the millions, yes. This is why you don't get the VP of communications on his interview. I need like an investigative reporter to like a broken in the office. Okay, so let me ask you something maybe you can talk about, which is before you worked there, what was your relationship with Zippy's like? My relationship with Zippy's was like probably everybody else in this room right now. You know, it's the place that we grew up with. It's the place where my mom took me to feed me. We had dinners, multi-generational dinners there. and as I got older and I went away to college whenever I came home the first thing I did was go eat Zippies every single local person probably has the same experience wait is that like a slogan because before you said that everyone in the audience was like you're going home and you went to Zippies everybody knows that after you get off the airplane it's next stop Zippies is that literally a slogan that's amazing Okay, go on, go on, go on. So you loved it. So I loved it because it serves the comfort food of us. The story of Zippy's is the story of Hawaii. It's about the comfort foods of Hawaii. It's the food that conceivably your mom or your grandmother, your auntie, someone would have made for you. And so it makes you feel good when you get it. Yeah, right on. And so, like I said, with 22 locations and an undisclosed number of customers every year, You do serve a whole heck of a lot of people. And when we were talking the other day, you said something that I thought was really interesting, and that when Zippy started in 1966, it was not uncommon for restaurants generally to be buying food locally. And it was in the 70s and 80s where that practice started to really decline. Tell us about that history. So brothers Francis and Charlie Higa founded Zipis in 1966. And when they were buying the foods, the inputs to be able to make for Zipis locations, they always bought from people they knew. They knew the egg farmer. They knew the beef rancher. They knew everyone who grew all the produce. And though, you know, over time, they scaled up. And it does become more difficult to buy locally in that same style as you get bigger. Sure. You know, this company has always been dedicated to supporting local because we know that when we buy from our neighbors, our neighbors are going to buy from us as well. And it's another story of Hawaii. It's always about reciprocity. But part of it is the story of scaling up, as you said, that made it more challenging. But also part of it is like agriculture in our country changed, right? Absolutely. As industrial farming took over and drove down prices, the farmers here in Hawaii could no longer compete with those prices. So therefore, the person that we used to go to to buy the produce is no longer there. That's changing slowly here in Hawaii, probably not fast enough. And so we try to buy as best as possible from local sources. As an example, 100% of the eggs that we use at Zippy's are local. how many eggs is that millions we're getting closer we're getting closer to get a number out of this guy and and the other one that we uh we talk about is our chili is very iconic yeah we make over a hundred tons of that a month that's a number i'll give another number between 50 to 100 percent of that brown beef we use in that chili and for our spaghetti meat sauces is also local, given on any given week. And so for Zippies, it was a little odd when you hear things like local gore and buying local. For our founders and for the Higa family, Jason Higa, who runs the company today, it was always just the way to do business. You know, it is really remarkable. I've only been here for a few days. and the sort of small, tight-knit community nature of it, as we talk about a way the culture works, a way the society works, has been so evident to me in just like everyone I've talked to knows someone else that I talked to earlier that day. So, I mean, again, that relational, it's a relational culture rather than a transactional culture, which is really quite beautiful also means you probably have no right to personal privacy because everyone's all in their business all the time but that's just how things work in auntie and uncle culture Benjamin, thank you so much for coming here tonight thank you to Kevin Gim Emma Bellow, Chris Connemora this is where we applaud Chris Kanemura is the co-owner of Fujiya Hawaii. Emma Bellows Goat Farm and Dairy is Sweetland Farm. And Kevin Gim is the VP of Marketing and Communications at Zippy's. If you're ever in Hawaii, go visit their stores and restaurants, including our earlier guests, Robin Mai's Fett, Ed Kenny's Mud Hen Water, and Sheldon Simeon's Tin Roof and Tiffany's. And hey, I just want to say hi to our new friend Ashley. Hey, Ashley. That's our show, live from the Hawaii Theater. We obviously barely scratched the surface of the story of Hawaii food, but I hope we've got you looking for plane tickets. Talk to you next week. The Splendid Table was created by Sally Swift and the Mozilla Casper. It's made each week by technical producer Jenny Lubty, producer Erica Romero, and managing producer Sally Swift. Lots of people to thank this week for making this trip one for the ages. special thanks to the team at Hawaii Public Radio including Valerie Yee, Liberty Peralta and multimedia producer Anandav Banerjee the Hawaii Theater Center to everyone at the Culinary Institute of the Pacific at Kapiolani Community College we had a blast with your students thanks for inviting us thanks to Hawaii Airlines Alohilani Resort Waikiki Beach and the Andaz Wailea Candice Lee Crotto, Jason Kim and Melanie Kasaka thank you for showing us your home place and very special thanks to Melanie for dreaming this whole thing up. Mahalo. Thanks for tuning in. I'm Francis Lam, and this is APM, American Public Media.