Online food nexus and network Eater.com has some good travel-to-eat guides—Paris and Lisbon for example. For the first time it highlights a U.S. state, and it happens to be Hawai‘i. Particularly good is Lavonne Leongʻs meditation on Zippyʻs. She encapsulates what makes Zippyʻs Zippyʻs in one sentence: “Locals, especially ex-pats, walk into a Zippy’s and exhale, because they’re finally in a place where Hawai‘i isn’t … Continue reading Eater does Hawai‘i
In the wayback machine, I was an editor for the World Wildlife Fund’s International Secretariat in Gland, Switzerland. I wrote about many conservation topics, and one of the most urgent at the time (well, weren’t they all) was the looming fisheries crisis. My cover story for the Spring 1995 issue of WWF News was Fishing for Disaster: “Overfishing affects the whole world: an estimated 20 million people who fish for a living, national economies (since 1983, the Canadian government has spent US$1 billion on fishermen’s welfare), anyone who eats seafood, not to mention the fish.” It was hard to get international press to cover the marine debacle. But 15 years later, it is headline news. (See, it pays to contribute to conservation organizations—they persevere.) Continue reading “Kahala: The new bluefin?”
I was born in Honolulu the year JFK visited—and one year after Tamashiro Market opened. My life parallels the development of poke from rustic garage snack to high-end restaurant culinary hat trick. When I was a kid, my ojichan mainlined dried shrimp marinated in shoyu as he watched football and slurped his Oly. By the time he died in 2005, poke was the couch snack of choice. How did this traditional Hawaiian dish become the number-one easiest thing to bring to a family pot luck? To find out, I first went to fresh-fish mecca Tamashiro Market. Continue reading “Poke evolution”
Eatizen Jane 