Where Plant-Based Goes Vogue  |  Where Vegetables Go Indulgent

—Ahu Hettema, chef and co-owner, Istanbul Hawai‘i

—Meiko Fuchie, co-owner, Alo Café

—Brandon Lam, co-founder, La Tour Café

SEE ALSO: Tails of the City: Goats, Chickens and a Beehive

Hale ‘Aina Award Winners | Best New Restaurant | Best New Restaurant (Editors’ Choice) | Most Innovative Farm-to-Counter

Chinatown’s transformation into one of Honolulu’s trendiest dining districts didn’t happen because of Lucky Belly. But it’s arguable how much of it would have, and how fast, without it. Away from Indigo, Brasserie du Vin and Soul de Cuba, the avant garde eateries then clustered around Hawai‘i Theatre, Dusty Grable and Jesse Cruz opened their nouveau ramen bar at the corner of Hotel and Smith streets in 2012. At the same intersection in the next four years, they opened modern-American Livestock Tavern and the rooftop Tchin Tchin Bar. The triple successes shifted the nexus, and by 2017, so many new eateries radiated up and down Hotel and Smith that Honolulu’s new Chinatown was being written up nationally.

Grable sold his shares to Cruz that year and left to raise a family and open restaurants for others. Now, he’s back in the fore—this time in upscale, unchanging Mānoa, a residential valley that’s as polar opposite as you can get from Chinatown’s edgy dynamism. At Mānoa Marketplace, Grable’s Lovers + Fighters restaurant group launched a new eatery and a gourmet and barware store last spring; a second restaurant was planned for late summer. Given his track record in Chinatown and beyond, with concepts as varied as French modern tasting menus in Waikīkī (La Vie) and a cocktail bar in a pool hall (Wild Orange), Mānoa will be worth watching. All this makes Grable our 2024 Hale ‘Aina Restaurateur of the Year.

“You don’t see many of them out there these days—people who dedicate their lives to hospitality, understand it as a craft. You just start realizing this is a very honorable, noble and fulfilling career that you can raise families on.”

Among independent restaurateurs, Grable stands out for what he isn’t: a chef who dreamed of owning his own restaurant. Instead, he calls himself a hospitalitarian. Asked when he realized this, he recalls telling his sister about his first 100% tip after a shift waiting tables at Indigo. “They said I was the best waiter they ever had,” he said. “She said what makes you different than any other waiter? I didn’t know. But now looking back, I’m pretty convinced that I genuinely cared. I wanted them to enjoy themselves and they knew it. Taking care of people well filled my own cup.”

At 23, Grable dropped his college art studies to learn to be a restaurateur. Working part-time at the Kāhala Mandarin Oriental (now The Kāhala Hotel & Resort) and Alan Wong’s, the hospitalitarian in him had identified Cheryle Gomez Furuya, then a server; wine director Mark Shishido; and master sommelier Patrick Okubo as pros whose face-to-face encounters could elevate a customer’s experience.

“I really got exposed to a caliber of service that was another level,” Grable says. “You don’t see many of them out there these days—people who dedicate their lives to hospitality, understand it as a craft. You just start realizing this is a very honorable, noble and fulfilling career that you can raise families on.”

He found a like mind in Cruz, the chef at Formaggio Grill in Kailua, where Grable was the manager. They began hashing out concepts for their own restaurants. Grable had moved to San Francisco to up his game, working at Gary Danko and rising to beverage director at Michelin-starred Ame at the St. Regis Hotel, when Cruz found the old Mini Garden space in Chinatown.

On Hotel Street ‘Ewa of Hawai‘i Theatre, Justin Park was mixing cocktails at The Manifest and Christian Self was upstairs at thirtyninehotel, but “that block was a no-man’s land for restaurants,” says Danny Ka‘aiali‘i, who later opened The Daley, Pizza Mamo and the former Encore Saloon on the far corner. Grable and Cruz “broke that barrier, and soon after, The Pig & The Lady popped up. Then Livestock and Tchin Tchin. All those concepts are fun and unique and just well done.”

Lucky Belly’s meat-laden Belly Bowls and Beast Bowls were inspired by New York City’s Momofuku Noodle Bar. Grable’s bar program, where Buffalo Trace was the well bourbon and bartenders served sake in Riedel glasses, got as much attention, as did service, which Grable saw not as transactions but as human interactions, no two of which would be alike.

“It attracted the cool kids who weren’t afraid of a seedy neighborhood,” is how Andrew Le of The Pig & The Lady puts it. “Once Dusty and his team tested the waters, everyone found that the rising tide lifted all boats.”

Twelve years later, now 41, Grable sits in a booth at Little Plum, the modern-local restaurant Lovers + Fighters opened in June. Directly in front, framed by floor-to-ceiling windows, is Mānoa Marketplace’s new jungle gym and playground.

Grable’s path after he split from Cruz saw him opening or working leading roles at Merriman’s Honolulu, Stage, La Vie, Quiora and 53 By the Sea. Two things happened during this time: He started Lovers + Fighters (which opened Wild Orange inside Hawaiian Brian’s), and marketplace owner Alexander & Baldwin reached out.

“I’m older now, and I wanted a neighborhood restaurant, which is the opposite of what I wanted at the beginning of my career,” Grable says. “Chinatown had enough urban freedom for us to do what we do and have people come and like it, or not, versus a neighborhood that gets to say you’re in our neighborhood, and we get to say what you do. I think we’re going to encounter that in Mānoa.”

To Ka‘aiali‘i, who’s known Grable more than 15 years and was one of Little Plum’s first customers, the most striking thing isn’t that Grable is in Mānoa, or even that he’s opening three concepts in five months. It’s that people he hired in Chinatown are the backbone of Lovers + Fighters.

“That’s impressive, especially now, to have that loyalty. I have multiple concepts, and the biggest challenge if you speak to anybody in the industry is staffing,” Ka‘aiali‘i says. “And it’s not just staffing—he has some of the best people in the industry in Hawai‘i. I don’t know what the secret is, but he’s created something that people want to be a part of.”

Grable cites the size of Lovers + Fighters as a reason he needed to open Uncle Paul’s Corner Store, Little Plum and Mediterranean-inspired Lady Elaine in quick succession. Its key players include beverage director Michael Nishikawa, who worked with Grable at Alan Wong’s; guest relations director Allie Haines, who helped open Lucky Belly as a server and bartender; and Ku‘ulei Akuna, director of bar operations, who was a regular at Lucky Belly before becoming a waitress at Livestock. She’s been with Grable at every restaurant since then.

Tiffany Ibale, another former Lucky Belly server, is a Lovers + Fighters partner who works for Google in California; operations director Wesley Inoshita was a server at Livestock and, like Akuna and Ibale, became a manager at the Chinatown restaurants. Former Lucky Belly and Livestock server Lindsey Miyasato is a full-time pharmacist; her administrative director role at Lovers + Fighters is a side job. And wine director Hayden Butler met Grable while busing tables at Stage. He followed him to Merriman’s and then La Vie and Quiora, where he became wine director. Casey Kusaka, the chef, has worked with Grable since the Ritz-Carlton Waikīkī and before that, cooked at Momofuku Noodle Bar and was general manager at two-Michelin-star Californios.

In Mānoa, Grable says, the group’s focus will be pan-generational. He wants his mother-in-law, who’s from the valley, to feel as at home in the restaurants as his daughters, who go to Noelani Elementary School.

“This community asked us to join them. We’re doing that very cautiously and humbly. Our concepts are very much designed with this in mind,” he says. “One of the things I’m hoping for is to inspire others. I think that’s what happened in Chinatown, to show other people it can be done.”

Hale ‘Aina Award Winners | Best New Restaurant | Restaurateur of the Year | Most Innovative Farm-to-Counter

El Cielo’s menu mirrors the life of its chef—not unusual among chef-driven restaurants in this city, until you look at the life of Masa Arnaldo Gushiken. The menu is his story—growing up in Argentina, years spent in Italian and French kitchens in Tokyo, then a life-changing connection with the food of Spain, whose language and simpler preparations took him back to the world of his youth. At its heart, El Cielo is Spain through Gushiken’s lens, with classics like paella and croquetas de jamon as well as the more niche (at least in Hawai‘i) callos tripe stew and pintxos with whole anchovies. Tucked in between are nods to Argentina, contemporary Japan and France.

The totality, in an elegantly renovated ​midcentury​ walk​-​up in Waikīkī, makes El Cielo the HONOLULU editors’ pick as the Hale ‘Aina Awards’ Best New Restaurant (our readers named it ​​the finalist).

Gushiken’s food story begins at a turning point. Born in Buenos Aires to parents whose own parents emigrated from Okinawa, he might have continued to adulthood as a Spanish-speaking nisei, except his family moved to Japan when he was 12. It wasn’t smooth. Cut off from his Latin world—“my heart,” he calls it—and unable to express himself, he struggled to learn Japanese and ended up quitting high school. A fear of losing his birth language drew him to Los Angeles, where he washed dishes among other Spanish speakers. When he had worked his way up to chef de cuisine at a casual Japanese eatery, he had enough skills to return to Tokyo. Higher-end training followed, in French and Italian kitchens under Michelin-starred chef Hide Yamamoto. Eventually, Gushiken wound up on the opening team of a Spanish restaurant in Shibuya.

“They sent me to Spain, and it changed everything,” he says. “Everything was good and simple. I went to ​Barcelona and​ Galicia and San Sebastian, and I was like, ​I gotta​ do this.”

Immersed in a proud Latin food culture, learning from culinary equals in the fluency of his native tongue, everything clicked. Gushiken’s most vivid memory from this time? “The octopus in Galicia,” he says at once. “It’s super simple. You know how ​octopus is​ so soft? A lady taught me to cook it. She taught me to put in one wine cork, boil it, turn off the heat, put the lid on, ​two​ hours, that’s it. I had ​tried in Japan​—I put octopus in Coca-Cola, I boiled ​it a long​ time, but I never got it as soft as Galicia style.”

Twelve years later, when Gushiken opened El Cielo on Lewers Street in the summer of 2023, octopus a la Gallega was on the menu. The years in between had brought him to Honolulu, where he became corporate chef for Diamond Dining and its then-trio of Shokudo, Bread + Butter and Búho Cocina y Cantina. By the time he found an investor and a space—a former boutique with 18-foot ceilings and a Spanish-tile fountain in the courtyard—for his first restaurant, he was 46. He’d had plenty of time to plan a menu.

Which dishes, we asked, would he serve to chef friends? His answers:

1. Croquetas de jamon, $8—“I use jamon de bellota, a more high-end ham” made from free-range pigs that ate acorns, and cured for longer than jamon ​Iberico​. “It’s more rich, with a lot of flavor.”

2. Seafood paella with Kaua‘i shrimp, $38—“I use the shrimp heads to make the broth.”

3. Octopus a la Gallega, $22—“Sometimes in Spain, it’s chilled. Grilling adds flavor (after boiling), and I mix sweet and smoked paprika together​”​ to sprinkle on top.

4. Empanada, $7—“It’s my mom’s recipe. ​Always when​ I eat empanadas, I think of my mom.”

5. Shrimp ​ajillo​, $21—“A lot of places, ​ajillo​ is just garlic and oil. I use the same Kaua‘i shrimp head sauce as for the seafood paella.”

6. Iberico pork shoulder, $48—“Everybody’s scared to eat pork medium-rare, but it’s the best. In some places in Spain, they cook it almost ​rare​. There’s a technique: After searing, keep it warm, sear again and keep it warm. It’s low-temperature cooking.”

7. House-made baguette—“This one, every day I make”—to go with the chicken liver pâté and shrimp ​ajillo​.

Not mentioned but notable are Gushiken’s mother’s chimichurri, which nestles in the curve of the tender, smoky octopus tentacle. The same chimichurri accompanies the gentle beef empanada with paprika and raisins, and his washugyu steak, a nod to Argentinian kitchen workers he met at steakhouses in Galicia. Uni pasta, a staple of every Japanese-owned Italian restaurant, is on the menu because Gushiken’s wife, who’s from Japan, insisted (it’s a top seller). Marinated mushrooms, chilled with a vinegar tang, is a recipe he created at a French restaurant years ago.

Our favorite at El Cielo is the pork shoulder, which wraps porky grill flavor around a juicy, yielding core. And not on any chef’s list but a favorite nonetheless: fries with Serrano ham shavings and a fried egg. You break the yolk and let everything go. Which is a good way to start.

Open daily 5 to 11 p.m., 346 Lewers St., elcielo-hawaii.com, @elcielo_hawaii

Hale ‘Aina Award Winners | Best New Restaurant | Restaurateur of the Year | Best New Restaurant (Editors’ Choice)

After a decade of feeding the Kalihi community, ​​Roots Café + Food Hub has taken its farm-to-counter concept to the streets. Its Rolling Roots truck—a mobile produce market that brings fresh produce to kūpuna and other underserved communities in Kalihi Valley—rolled out this past spring.

Supplying the valley with farm-fresh food is the guiding principle of the Roots program, part of the nonprofit Kōkua Kalihi Valley. At Roots Café, chefs and volunteer cooks make healthy plate lunches that highlight Pacific Island starches like kalo, ‘​uala​, ‘ulu and cassava, as well as local produce and proteins from Island ranches. The café and attached food hub—a small farmstand that showcases the season’s offerings—are weekly constants open for a few hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but they require people to go to them.

As part of a federally qualified community health center, Roots organizers ​​asked themselves what else they could do to achieve their goal. Their answer was a mobile food market. With a truck, they could take their farm hauls to the tables of the most vulnerable.

The program has been hosting pop-up produce markets with the truck at ​KKV’s​ Gulick Elder Care Center since May. A sort of community block party, the pop-ups have become so popular that Roots director Jesse Lipman says he is collaborating with Kalihi schools and community organizations to make Rolling Roots markets a more regular part of Kalihi life. Reaching and engaging the community is crucial, Lipman says, and the produce truck lets his team reach people where they are.

“We knew that getting out into Kalihi was essential,” he says. “This truck functions as both a storage unit and a distribution facility, while becoming the face of our work. It is wrapped in images of favorite Pacific Island foods designed by Kalihi artist Cor​​y Taum. When we roll up, open the awning and break out the produce, it becomes an event. It’s like we’d already planned the party, but now the DJ is showing up.”

Open Tuesday and Thursday, 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., 2229 North School St., rootskalihi.com, @rootskalihi

At Farm Link Hawai‘i’s warehouse on Waiakamilo Road, workers pack Hawai‘i Island lychee, Maui strawberries, poi harvested and milled in He‘eia, and red Cuban bananas from Hale‘iwa. Shelves are stocked with Maui-grown agave spirit and lip balm made in Mānoa with Kaua‘i beeswax and O‘ahu vanilla beans. It used to be if you wanted this kind of selection, you’d have to scour farmers markets, Chinatown, Foodland and Whole Foods. And you’d be lucky to find it all. Now, through Farm Link, a local online grocer, you can get it delivered to your door.

“The goal is having as complete a shop as possible, so that we can make it convenient for you, and that we’re supporting a whole food system, all the way from the raw ingredients to the manufacturers,” Farm Link CEO Claire Sullivan says. In a perfect world, everything sold on Farm Link would be grown in Hawai‘i or made with locally grown ingredients—but it’s going to take some time to get there.

The business’s 30-year mission—what it calls its “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” or “BHAG”—is taped to its warehouse’s cinderblock wall, detailing a utopia through Farm Link’s lens. There are 11 bullet points describing “what it will look like when we achieve our BHAG,” including: “Working agricultural fields, sheds, tractors, animals, and farmers are prominent across the Hawai‘i landscape and regenerative practices abound.”

It can feel incongruous imagining this agrarian ideal, when Farm Link’s current operations involve customers clicking through a website and finding produce in a cardboard box at their door the next day. But good luck finding anywhere else with as large a selection of local products. Maybe this is what utopia looks like when trying to improve what Farm Link founder Rob Barreca calls “one of the most complex systems that we interact with every day: the local food system.”

When Barreca left his job as a web designer in 2013 “to broadly do something in food and find some meaning in my life,” he says, he enrolled in the University of Hawai‘i’s GoFarm beginning farmer training course in Waimānalo. He sold what he grew, and when delivering produce to restaurants, he ran into classmates doing the same thing. “We all just drove half an hour, all did the back and forth with the chefs, and all had to deal with invoicing—it was so inefficient,” he recalls.

In 2015, he built what would become Farm Link, reaching out to growers who didn’t want to market, sell, deliver and invoice themselves. And he found buyers for their goods. In the beginning, that included Foodland and Peter Merriman’s restaurants.

Barreca remembers times when Farm Link had inventory that needed to move, and they’d call chef Jose Gonzalez-Maya at Merriman’s Monkeypod Kitchen in Ko Olina. “Ninety-nine percent of the time he would say, ‘Yeah, I’ll take it, name the price.’ I swear, I almost cried a few times—I was just so stressed.”

That sense of relief is what Barreca wants Farm Link to provide its producers. “We want to evoke those same feelings, like, ‘Oh my god, I don’t have to worry so much about how to be able to sell this thing and make a viable business.’ We just want to say, ‘We want to take that off your shoulders, and we’re going to figure it out.’”

BHAG bullet point: “Producers say that FLH is their preferred buyer because we pay the best, we’re the easiest to deal with, we connect them with other resources, we help them plan and grow, and we honor our commitments.”

Barreca was just starting to explore direct-to-door delivery for households with funding from Elemental Excelerator when pandemic shelter-in-place orders descended in 2020. Sign-ups for Farm Link exploded, and operations expanded from a 40-foot refrigerated container in a dirt parking lot in Hale‘iwa to a 5,000-square-foot warehouse in Kalihi. Annual sales of around $400,000 before the pandemic grew to $2.8 million in 2023, with more customers, producers, plus an in-house butchery program, a liquor license, and daily delivery service across O‘ahu.

Still, Sullivan estimates that only 0.3% of O‘ahu’s $3.3 billion total grocery sales are made through Farm Link. And supply on Farm Link can be inconsistent. Some staples like bananas and tomatoes are not always available, a reflection of the tenuousness of Hawai‘i’s food system, while other foods are nonexistent on the platform, including milk and chicken. A more robust supply requires more farms, but based on the 2022 Dept. of Agriculture Census Report, Hawai‘i agriculture is on the decline, having lost 82,000 acres of farmland between 2017 and 2022.

Hawai‘i has been trying to grow local agriculture for decades. Foreseeing a shift away from a plantation-dominated economy, the state’s Constitution was amended in 1978, requiring the state to designate and conserve ag lands and increase agricultural self-sufficiency. In the more than four decades since, various organizations and initiatives have formed to stop the hemorrhaging of farms and farmlands, with Barecca a beneficiary of many of these efforts.

Along with Farm Link, Barreca started his own farm, Counter Culture in Hale‘iwa, after Kamehameha Schools’ Mahi‘ai Matchup agriculture business plan competition awarded him $20,000 and a five-year rent-free lease in 2015. And since Farm Link’s inception, it has received investments and grants from Hawai‘i Investment Ready, an accelerator for businesses striving to improve the environment and society; Kamehameha Schools’ Food Systems Fund; and the USDA Local Food Promotion Program. In 2021, it joined the Da Bux program—which doubles SNAP benefits, making locally grown produce and poi half-off for beneficiaries—an initiative that addresses food insecurity while also investing in local agriculture.

BHAG bullet point: “Community advocates credit FLH with contributing to the demise of food deserts on O‘ahu and making good food available to everyone.”

To witness the growth of Farm Link is to see how many hands are involved in trying to strengthen local ag. And now, it is also part of the network.

Ironically, to build an online grocer like Farm Link—where consumers buy food without interacting with a single person—requires in-person community building. Sullivan, who joined the company in 2021, has literally chased down Breadshop’s owner on the streets of Chinatown to get him to sell more bread on Farm Link and has met with cattle ranchers and chicken farmers to talk about plans for a mobile slaughterhouse.

For decades, demand for local products has outstripped supply and “if we wanted to achieve our vision, we realized we couldn’t just sit on our hands and wait for all of this amazing organic produce and locally manufactured goods to happen on its own,” Barreca says. “We had to try to build a supply chain … to connect folks to great product that doesn’t exist yet.”

Recently, Farm Link brokered an arrangement involving Kamehameha Schools prepurchasing “a significant volume of bananas,” Sullivan says, to be delivered within the next five years, enabling Farm Link to give Hawai‘i Banana Source “the capital upfront to make the investments they need in the plantings so that they can scale up over time.”

BHAG bullet point: “Food system organizations, local government, and peers point to FLH as a role model and primary driver of the increase of local food production.”

“It’s a really exciting example of supply building, ensuring that there’s more of this thing a year from now than there was today and not being passive and just saying to the producer, ‘We need more of it,’ ignoring the fact that they have the thinnest margins and the highest risk of anybody on the value chain,” Sullivan says. “And we’re assuming that they’re the ones who are going to take that risk? It’s not how farming works anywhere else.”

Hawai‘i has some of the highest land costs in the country, and for 100 years, our island community was so focused on sugar and pineapple that we now lack the infrastructure to support diversified producers, Sullivan adds. “Yet we think that [farmers] should be able to solve it on their own.”

Sullivan has spent her entire 20-year career focused on the local food system, first at Maui Land & Pineapple Co., followed by a decade at Whole Foods building its local purchasing program, and then at MA‘O Organic Farms as the director of development and impact. She’s been around long enough to watch O‘ahu’s last dairy close; to witness Whole Foods scale back its local purchasing; to see the food supply problems laid bare during the pandemic and the sense of urgency and opportunity to fix them fade away.

Yet she’s hopeful. “Progress feels like fits and starts,” she says. “Sometimes, there’s real setbacks when we lose a producer, or when there are changes even in just ownership structure around key infrastructure pieces that feel disruptive—like slaughterhouses. (In 2019, Idaho billionaire Frank Vandersloot took control of Hawai‘i’s two largest slaughterhouses.)

“It all feels so precarious. But that said, it’s also feeling cumulative, like our collective capacity is getting so much stronger. And that capacity is not resting on singular producers, which is how it used to feel, like a one-off success story. Now, it feels more like those success stories are embedded in a more collective fabric. I wouldn’t say that it’s easy still. But there is a fabric.”

Sullivan points to changes in the local agricultural ecosystem over the past five to 10 years. She calls financial backers like Feed the Hunger Fund and Hawai‘i Investment Ready the “interstitial tissue,” and cites the Hawai‘i Food Hub, a network of 14 food hubs, with members that call each other to share insights.

“I’m hopeful [because] of the collective,” she says. “It’s recognizing this isn’t an environment where a singular effort could ever succeed—it will succeed by virtue of the collective success or fail by virtue of the collective failure.”

But there’s no getting around it: buying local is expensive. Local produce such as carrots and mushrooms can be twice the price, or more, of their imported counterparts. It’s the number one complaint of local consumers, according to a survey Farm Link sent out. In the same survey, 62% of customers say they also shop at Costco.

Sullivan says it’s reflective of Hawai‘i’s high cost of living—the highest in the country. People may want to buy local, but not everyone can afford to. But if consumers don’t buy from small-scale producers, which most farms in Hawai‘i are—and those producers are subject to the same high cost of living as everyone else—farmers won’t be able to invest in ways to scale up and bring costs down.

Those carrots? Google videos for “carrot harvester” and you’ll see why imported carrots are so much cheaper than in Hawai‘i, where each carrot is still pulled by hand.

“This is our biggest challenge,” Sullivan says. “And it is where very clear active intervention is required to break the impasse. A lot of the additional interventions will need to be made at the governmental level, capital providers, technical assistance suppliers, the university.”

She says people always ask, what’s the one thing that would make local agriculture viable? “There is no singular thing. That is erroneous; it is an ecosystem and that is the whole point. It is systemic. And solutions have to be as complex and systemic and intertwined as the problem is to have any chance of success.”

“It’s like asking a fish, ‘does the water really matter?’” Sullivan says when asked why the local food system is so important, especially when judging by the state’s list of priorities—agriculture makes up less than 1% of the state’s budget. “The reason I started working in food 20 years ago is because it was the space where all important things come to meet—our economic health and vitality, our ecological well-being, our cultural source of joy and history and opportunities to perpetuate that, our personal physical health, and our familial well-being. All of those things are impacted by food and how we interact with the production and the consumption of food. So the local food system matters because it’s touching all of those things.”

What keeps her going, what keeps her working in food is that its “shadow side is joy,” she says. “Like the overwhelm is so real and like yes, on the one side it is [about addressing] climate change and pollution and runoff into the ocean and into our streams. And on the other side, it’s delicious and fun and we get to cook it together. So how incredibly awesome that this momentous, hugely consequential space is also joyful and delicious.”

farmlinkhawaii.com, @farmlinkhawaii

BHAG bullet point: “Hawai‘i residents have the culinary knowledge to prepare and enjoy locally sourced meals at home.”