Waking Up in Eden (24 page)

Nowhere but in Hawaii did Pacific, Asian, and Western food traditions meet in such close proximity. Few other places can date so precisely the arrival of different cuisines. The Polynesians found the islands bereft of carbohydrates, so they packed their voyaging canoes with slips and roots of taro — a sustaining carbohydrate — and dozens of varieties of breadfruit, yams, coconut, and bananas. The first Hawaiian food was eaten raw, or cooked in
imus
— fires burned down to coals to heat rocks, then covered with fragrant leaves, similar to cooking methods found throughout the South Pacific. Chinese laborers started arriving in 1852, most from the culinary-supreme Kwangtung Province with its black bean and oyster sauces. Japanese workers landed in 1868 with soybean products of soy sauce, miso, and tofu, as well as dried seaweed and pickles. Portuguese, primarily
from the Madeira Islands and Azores, came in 1878, bringing spicy sausages. Koreans imported pungent pickled cabbage and marinated beef starting in 1903, followed by Filipinos in 1909, with their peas, beans, and adobe style of vinegar- and garlic-flavored dishes. The last great Asian cooking influence flooded Hawaii in the 1970s when Thai and Vietnamese immigrants opened dozens of restaurants.

Alan Wong was illustrative of yet another social upheaval in Hawaii — the emergence of a generation who came of age in the 1970s, determined to reject mainland influences as the only valid culture. They were intent on rediscovering and reviving what it meant to be Hawaiian. It was a trend evidenced in the new wave of Hawaiian music stars such as Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, in the revival of water sports, in a growing insistence on inserting diacritical marks into Hawaiian printed words, and on the menus of restaurants, from gourmet temples to the lowest vendor of plate lunches. Isabella Bird and Mark Twain had both reported on the local people of Hawaii, but, it must be said, were racist in describing the “natives” as curiosities prone to stupidity. Now Hawaiian residents frequently boast of bloodlines from all parts of the world, and their polyglot rules the islands.

O
NE NIGHT
A
LAN
let me watch him cook. As I arrived in the kitchen at 5 p.m., one food preparer held open a stiffly starched white double-breasted chef's jacket and eased it over my shoulders. Another tied an ankle-length apron around my waist. At that hour the restaurant held an expectant air of a stage before the curtain rises. Already in place at one of three cooking stations, Alan relaxed liked an athlete stretching before the race. The kitchen's 1,300 square feet is generous by some restaurant standards,
but each cook has only three feet of counter workspace, an amount that any amateur cook would deplore. Behind Alan a bank of blazing burners already shot up six- to eight-inch flames, and an aroma of garlic and ginger sizzled into the air.

In his forties, Alan conveyed the ease and confidence of a successful man, the self-awareness of a celebrated artist. His face has a smooth, creaseless blend of Hawaiian, Chinese, and Japanese features and a thick thatch of shiny blue-black hair. His low-riding girth under his white jacket gives him a wrestler's centered power. Alan's facial expressions are hard to read. But when he uses an unusual term, he scans your eyes, as if looking to see if the information arrived. It's a listener's trait, rare in successful men and indicative of a great teacher. When he reverts back to his local pidgin, you get a glimpse of the boy in him. But there is no question that he is the boss.

Alan squatted to open one of the refrigerated cases below the counter containing vats of organic greens and plates already made up with portions of lobster tails and shrimp, ready for searing. He pulled out a long
onaga
fish for his signature dish and started to fillet it with a razor-like blade. As he butchered fish with both hands, Alan signaled Wade, the starch preparer, to spoon mashed potatoes directly into his mouth, then silently circled a finger in the air, indicating a need for more butter.

Finished with filleting, Alan squeezed a teaspoon full of dark sauce from the first of a dozen plastic squeeze bottles aligned on his counter like surgeon's instruments. Methodically, he did the same with each bottle. Each evening, about two hundred different sauces and components make up the night's forty or so entrées and starters. He works on the theory that if the components are good, his staff can compose them, so he tastes the
sauces instead of the finished dishes. Wade returned with another spoonful of mashed potatoes. More salt, Alan mouthed. Wade returns four times before Alan is satisfied.

Already the heat at the chefs' stations grows intense, smoky with aromas of grilled meat and fish seared to a flaky crust. “Oh, it gets very hot,” says Lance, one of the entrée chefs. “But Alan likes it that way. Keeps him on edge.” Alan serves as expeditor, calling to the other chefs to hurry an order, or to a waiter to pick it up while it's hot. “This kitchen is a well-oiled machine,” he says with pride. “When it's performing well, it's humming. It's a piece of art. This place has
mana
.”

Alan grew up in Waipio, a small plantation town on Oahu's north shore, in the 1950s, when you could pick ripe pineapple out the back door. The food his mother served was simple but typically Hawaiian in its ethnic mixtures — rice on the table every day, as well as Portuguese, Filipino, and Korean dishes. After a year at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, the chronic lack of dorm space forced him to find an apartment. To pay the rent he went to work as a dishwasher at Don the Beachcomber Restaurant.

“You're talking about someone from the country. My pidgin English was atrocious,” he told me with a look of red embarrassment briefly flushing his features. Methodically, Alan studied each job, figuring out what would be required to progress from dishwasher to busboy, cashier, hotel front-desk clerk, and night manager. After the last promotion, he wondered, What next? and enrolled in food-service management at Kapiolani Community College. The classes dazzled him. “When I made my first loaf of French bread, I never realized I would get turned on,” he says.

Alan won a coveted apprenticeship at the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia. Then he secured a prized spot at the foodies' mecca, Lutèce in New York City, working three years for Chef André Soltner. When Alan wanted to go home, he landed a big job at the Mauna Lani Bay Hotel and Bungalows on the Big Island, often ranked by travel guides as the most luxurious hotel in all the islands.

With the same careful methodical research that marked his first restaurant jobs, Alan analyzed Hawaiian cuisine. He and other young Hawaiian chefs developed an haute cuisine of Asian Pacific fusion. Chef Roy Yamaguchi dared to open in Waikiki, the graveyard of restaurants, and was so successful he opened branches on outer islands. Sam Choy was equally prolific. On Kauai, Jean-Marie Josselin opened his Pacific Café with a French twist.

No one drew from the local style as much as Alan Wong. At the Mauna Lani, Alan set up the network of local agriculture producers that he still uses today. Much of the time he had to tell growers what to grow and how to grow it — the perfect vine-ripened tomato still eludes him, but he now features lettuce from a Hilo farmer, lamb from a Big Island ranch, farm-raised shrimp, and vintage estate-grown chocolate from the Kona Coast, the only chocolate grown in America.

He scrutinized the local dishes of his boyhood, taking each dish apart, analyzing each ingredient, then reassembling them in different combinations. One of this evening's special appetizers is “Laulau Lumpia” — kalua pig and salted butterfish on luau leaves with a
lumpia
wrapper (a wonton), fried crisp and drizzled with poi vinaigrette. On the side is a relish of
lomi-lomi
salmon. Voilà! The local plate lunch, dressed up.

When asked to participate in a “New Wave Luau Festival” a few years ago, Alan figured he needed to research the classic luau, not the tourist monstrosity that I had learned to avoid. How did it come about? He learned from a historian that
poke
originally meant
cubed.
In the old days, fishermen didn't go out in big boats, so the original
poke
was made from small reef fish. Hawaiians used very crude instruments made of shells to roughly cut the small fish, then sprinkled them with Hawaiian salt that had been evaporated in fields that imbued it with a red-dirt hue.

The happy result of Alan's research was presented to me tonight: a “
poke
-pine.” I bit tentatively into a crispy wonton ball to find cool, red, translucent flesh of sushi-quality yellowfin ahi, set off by a swish of wasabi, the nose-snorting Asian horseradish sauce.

Alan had hated poi when growing up. But after his scholarly study, he decided that the essential ingredient of taro was good but over the years had been transmuted into a lavender library-paste goo. Now his starch chef, Wade, boils taro cubes, puts them through a ricer, and produces a grainy, thick, raspberry-colored taffy, all within a couple of hours.

At 8:30 p.m. Alan looked out onto a sea of diners, tapping a Sabatier knife like a tuning fork on the marble cutting block. “Oh ho, see the storm brewing? All those people? When they all order it's going to be madness,” he said happily. Alan called to the chefs and nods in the direction of the crowd, “See you at the finish line, boys.”

By 10:15 p.m., the wave had crashed, spent. The bar was finally empty, and the remaining diners lingered over dessert and estate-grown Kona coffee.

Two of the entrée chefs brought me a final appetizer: a liquor glass of roasted tomato pesto soup. Layered like a parfait, pale green, orange, and yellow translucent liquids each contained the essence of ripened tomato, warm as if from sun. A miniature grilled sandwich of foie gras, Kalua pig, and Monterey Jack cheese accompanied the soup. I ate slowly, to savor each bite.

I
SOMETIMES LEFT
Kauai to go farther than Honolulu on fund-raising missions. For months I had been working on campaign preparations. I wrote a case statement, the official plan that laid out a ten-million-dollar goal with descriptions of proposed building projects, architectural renderings, cost estimates, and lists of donor prospects. Still, the campaign lacked a centerpiece, a spark. Unexpectedly, the sugar company Alexander & Baldwin announced the sale of all its holdings on Kauai, including an old plantation camp of worker houses. We found an abandoned little plantation cottage that still had enough salvageable features that we could fairly easily move and renovate it into a full-fledged visitor center for Allerton Garden. The plan provided the romance we needed to reel in big bucks.

Now we were ready for The Ask. If our target was a big gun on Wall Street, the trick was to find another big gun to bring with us. Better yet if they belonged to the same club or went to the same school or served on the same opera board. I went along to provide details, figures, the timing of the gift, the follow-up, the closing. Doug Kinney, the Garden chairman of the board of trustees, appointed himself as campaign chairman. He warmed to the asking but preferred to make his own deals without consulting anyone. Disastrous. Once he sold board members on a student internship program that wasn't part of the campaign
because it was loathed by Bill and the rest of the staff. Fire, load, aim, Bill Klein complained, was Doug's style.

I flew to California to meet up with Doug for our first fundraising trip together. As I drove a rental car down Interstate 280 south of San Francisco on the way to Portola Valley, Doug barked orders to some poor subordinate in the family business on the other end of his cell phone, his silvered Leonine head cocked to one side. A frown lined his long face. His kids nicknamed him “Growlie,” and I could see why. He rarely seemed pleased. Doug ordered people around like a nineteenth-century British Army officer. Including me. “Make my plane reservations!” he'd command before hanging up. For a while, I asked my secretary to handle his travel arrangements. Then one day Doug and I were in Honolulu for meetings when he turned to me and said, “What time is my flight tomorrow?” What flight? I answered. Oops. After that, he conscripted Dr. Klein's secretary for such personal services. As a journalist, I'd know exactly how to deal with a Doug, telling him to stuff it. But here I trod on foreign ground, trying to understand the delicacies and quicksands of courting board members and donors. And Doug was both.

Many nonprofit organizations lack a real board leader willing to expend effort and shoe leather to make the necessary personal calls to donors. Doug relentlessly pursued prospects and goals, showing a fierce love for the Garden. Part of his attraction to the institution lay in a powerful connection of family history: He introduced himself as Douglas
McBryde
Kinney in Hawaii, emphasizing his tie to the McBryde sugar family. Doug's great uncle, Alexander McBryde, long ago owned Lawai-Kai before the Allertons bought the property. Another of Doug's great uncles,
Judge Advocate W. A. Kinney, presided over the kangaroo court that prosecuted Queen Liliuokalani for treason after the United States annexed the Hawaiian Islands in 1899 and pushed aside the last of the Hawaiian monarchy. Aside from a family dynasty, I suspected that an even more profound motive drew Doug to the Garden: the possibility of redemption.

Doug had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, an heir to an electronics company. In his youth, he briefly worked as a bond salesman in New York but after that never found anything to particularly distinguish himself. Now in his mid-sixties, he devoted himself to golf at the exclusive Onwentsia Club in Lake Forest, Illinois, from Easter to Thanksgiving; the Seminole Golf Club in North Palm Beach, Florida, through the winter; and a jaunt to St. Andrews in Scotland every August. He played three hundred rounds of golf a year. “That's my job,” he frequently said, and sounded only a little defensive.

When Hurricane Iniki flattened the island, Doug immediately flew to Honolulu and pulled strings to get on the first flight to Kauai. He seized total control. The Garden not only lay damaged but also rudderless, as the previous director had suffered a paralyzing stroke. Performing triage, Doug closed down public operations, laid off most employees, then flew back to his Lake Forest house and ran the skeleton operation by phone. Few ever opposed him or his sometimes wrong-headed ideas. “It takes a lot of energy to fight Doug,” one trustee confided to me. “A lot of energy.”