I love food tours where you get to sample a variety of things from different places for a reasonable price. Every big city seems to have them now. Even in Sacramento we now have Grubcrawl, Dishcrawl, and Local Roots.

In Honolulu there are a couple of food tours as well. I chose to go on the Taste of Chinatown tour with Walter Rhee. Walter grew up a Korean diplomat's son and so he was exposed to a lot of Asian travel, cultures, and food. As an adult he got a degree in marine biology but soon found that his interest in eating his studies was greater. He then got a Master's in food science and has taught it at the University of Illinois and the University of Hawaii. Currently he's been teaching cooking classes, writing a cookbook, and taking people around Chinatown to taste the treasures found there. Due to his food science and cultural background, his tours are full of all sorts of interesting food facts.

The (semi)-traditional career path in the culinary world is: culinary school, food prep, line chef, sous chef, leading to eventually head chef for a big restaurant or owning one's own restaurant. This path doesn't always work for people, either by choice or by economic conditions.

On my visit to Oahu last month I was introduced to two local chefs that are making their own way in the Honolulu area food scene. Andrew Le and Mark Noguchi have both worked as chefs at Mavro and Mark at Town as well before leaving to pursue divergent paths. Andrew has been doing a pop-up restaurant called The Pig & The Lady while Mark went to the windward side of the island to take over a small 'deli' and general store on He'eia Pier.

 

(What is a pop-up restaurant? It is another food trend happening mostly in cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. That doesn't mean we haven't had them here too. Basically it is a temporary restaurant. Pop-ups happen when a chef is without a restaurant and wants to put together a special menu featured at a temporary location for a few nights. Locally we've had an example with Pajo Bruich when he had been serving out of a commercial kitchen every so often before he moved to Lounge on 20.)

Puffettes, chimney cakes, and wonton poppers were some of the new street food I got to try at Eat the Street last week in Honolulu. As expected, I found a lot of new items that I had not seen at any of the mainland street vendors I've visited over the last couple of years. And just like Off the Grid and SactoMoFo, people came out in droves to experience a great variety of food in this temporary mobile food pod/event.


Put on by Poni Askew of Streetgrindz, Eat the Street (ETS) happens on the last Friday of the month. It includes the participation of food trucks as well as other street food vendors and has everything from shaved ice to herb encrusted lamb lollipops. With over 30 vendors, there was plenty to choose from.


There were a lot of great things about this event. It was held on a parking lot about the size of a city block, so there was plenty of room for all of the people and for the lines. There was also a lot of tables, both with seating and some standup.

What was your go-to flavor of snow cone as a child? Mine was rainbow. I liked the beautiful array of colors and the thought that I could get more than one flavor. Of course those flavors all melded into one fruit-punchy flavor in reality. Those snow cones were coarse and crude compared to shaved ice.

Most of us grew up with snow cones, not shaved ice. Not so the Hawaiians where shaved ice is another cultural part of their heritage. 

Unlike snow cones which are made with crushed ice, shaved ice is just that - ice shaved from an ice block using a fine edged blade. This means that the flavorings are absorbed into the ice crystals instead of just soaking around the crushed ice like in snow cones. Snow cones have that pool of syrup at the bottom of the cup, shaved ice doesn't.

Ask any two lunch wagons on Oahu what the truck ordinances are and you get different answers.

As I discussed in my last post on Hawaiian Lunch Wagons, the food truck culture has grown up over decades from a way to get meals to fields and construction sites to a modern mixture of old style lunch wagons and new style gourmet trucks. Along with this sense of tradition is the "hang loose" mentality of Hawaiians. This has created an "anything goes" approach to the truck scene which has both good and bad points to it.

What you don't really see in Hawaii are trucks roaming the streets. Almost every truck I saw was parked on private property. In this regard, Oahu is more like Portland than Sacramento or San Francisco. In some cases you will even see them set up with awnings, tables, and chairs for patrons to eat their meals at. So far this is by choice of the trucks themselves versus a perk thrown in by the property owners like is often seen in Portland.

Did you know that pineapples are not native to Hawaii? It turns out they are from South America and came over on trading ships back in the early 1800s.


This was one of the interesting facts I learned when I stopped at the Dole Pineapple Plantation on my way to North Shore on Oahu. The plantation sits almost in the center of the island at an elevation of xx above sea level. This elevation provides the perfect growing conditions in that there is plenty of Hawaiian sun but the temperatures are a bit cooler than down by the coast. Another element that makes Hawaii perfect for pineapples is the high iron content in the volcanic soil.

 

"I get confused when you say food truck because here we call them lunch wagons." This was from my tablemate at dinner the other night (sorry, forgot your name, my bad). This woman grew up here in Honolulu and gave me some interesting perspective on the food truck history here. I had already arrived at the conclusion that it's a cultural thing, she just reinforced it.

Lunch wagons have been around on the islands for decades. My tablemate explained to me that when she was growing up, there were still many trucks used as mobile stores. There were few stores on the island and so trucks would come to your neighborhood with anything from produce to fabric to household items. Vending trucks were a familiar sight and as they came down the street, some would generate the same kind of excitement that we associate with ice cream trucks attracting kids today.

Do you know where your sushi fish came from? There's a good chance that it came from the Hawaii fish auction.

Started in 1952, the Honolulu Fish Auction is the only live tuna auction in the U.S. The auction is a way for fisherman to get the best, fairest price for their fish by competitive bidding from wholesalers, retailers, and restaurants. The bidding process also prices according to market conditions of supply and demand as well as availability of the daily catch.

To be quite honest, there is so much to say about the Hawaiian food truck scene that I'm having a hard time figuring out how I want to put it into an article. In the meantime, here are a couple of collages of the Honolulu trucks I've encountered so far, and these are just the ones I took time to snap pics of. 

The first collage is of the two trucks at the University of Hawaii. The second are trucks found on lots throughout downtown.  I'm heading off to Aloha Stadium to see some more tomorrow and then, of course, is Eat the Street on Friday, Hawaii's equivalent of Off the Grid with about 30 trucks in one spot.

I'm also still trying to hook up with local truck advocates so that I can learn more about the ordinances and what does and doesn't work here. Suffice it to say, each truck I talk to seems to have a different understanding of the rules. I guess it's that laid back Hawaiian culture where no one seems to really care all that much about the rules. 

A couple of things to note from the pictures - first is that they convert whatever they can get their hands on, be it a bus, a delivery van, or a limo bus. Second is that most of these vehicles are not the spiffy, sharp looking trucks like our Drewski's or Wicked 'Wich.

Plenty more to come, including the famous Giovanni's shrimp truck I ate at today on the north shore. Stay tuned.

No, you can't just hike up the side of Diamond Head. I mistakenly thought you could.

My hotel is at the end of Waikiki, almost across the street from the Honolulu Zoo. The zoo sits in a park at the base of Diamond Head and I had thought I could just walk out of my hotel, across the park, and start climbing up the face of Diamond Head. Not so.

Diamond Head (DH) is a volcanic crater that was formed 300,000 years ago. When it erupted it created a huge cone of ash and pulverized magma that settled and hardened into tuff. It has never erupted again at this point.