For our last vacation pre-Covid, my husband and I spent a week exploring the Big Island of Hawaiʻi — the first visit to the 50th state for both of us. The scenery and snorkeling were as spectacular as advertised. What the guidebooks didn’t prepare us for was the abundance of interesting — and often perplexing — local food options everywhere we went: nori-wrapped Spam and sticky rice snacks at mom and pop groceries, katsu chicken and mac salad plate lunches at supermarket delis, kalua pig roasted in a sand pit at the hotel-sponsored luau.
Reading Sheldon Simeon’s “Cook Real Hawaiʻi” (Clarkson Potter, $35) made me hungry to return, this time with a better appreciation of how these tastes fit into the Hawaiʻi story.
Simeon is the chef-owner of Tin Roof, a nationally recognized restaurant specializing in authentic Hawaiʻi cuisine in Maui. His versions of sinigang soup and pork belly adobo made him a finalist on “Top Chef,” and stoked his desire to teach mainlanders “the deeper nuances that make our culture different from any other place on earth.”
A third-generation Filipino, Simeon grew up in the sleepy town of Hilo on the Big Island’s rocky eastern coast, where his grandpa came to work on sugar plantations in the 1930s. His dad, a sugar mill worker for many years, roasted whole pigs and goats for community cookouts; his mom made miki noodles (a hearty chicken noodle soup) and other comforts for family meals.
Alongside these Filipino favorites were often dishes reflecting other contributors to Hawaiian culture: Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Koreans, Haoles (Westerners). Their influences on Simeon’s cooking is revealed in recipes such as Hawaiian-Style Ahi Poke, Kim Chee Dip, Filipino Okra Salad, Portuguese Bean Soup, and Sweetened Condensed Milk Cheesecake with Ovaltine Crust. You won’t find a mai tai recipe here, but there is one for Li Hing Mui Palomas — a grapefruit and tequila cocktail with a surprise element of salted sour plums.
“From afar, this multicultural combination seems to have no rhyme or reason,” he writes. “But to us it just feels natural — the most organic form of fusion cuisine.”
Susan Puckett is a cookbook author and former food editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Follow her at susanpuckett.com.
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