Mike Leslie could well be the poster boy for the Eating House, Roy Yamaguchi’s reflection on Hawaii’s plantation days.
Leslie, executive chef of the new venue, lists his ancestry as Hawaiian, Japanese, Scottish and German — “that’s pretty much just the main ones.”
It’s a mashup of ethnicities, just as Eating House is a mashup of the ethnic foods of the plantation. “I grew up eating all the food that we’re serving,” Leslie said.
The concept: Yamaguchi describes Eating House as a way of connecting with his grandfather, who owned a tavern on Maui in the 1940s.
The “1849” in the name comes from the year that the first “eating house” opened in Honolulu, according to the Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink, published in 1983.
Eating House reflects Hawaii’s mixed plantation heritage — Portuguese, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, Korean — with, as Yamaguchi says, “a Roy’s oomph to it.”
In other words, rustic, but not rough.
The Waikiki location will be the second Eating House; the first opened last year on Kauai.
The chef: Leslie grew up in Hawaii Kai, one of seven children. He graduated from Kaiser High School in 1993 and started working for Yamaguchi in 1999. He left in 2008 for a series of projects, dabbling, among other things, in bar food and food trucks, and rejoined the Roy’s operation a year ago. “I just wanted to come back to where I began, where I started.”
When the Eating House Waikiki idea was presented to him, “I thought it was perfect,” he said. “It’s really my style.”
Sample dishes: “I’m a big one-pot cookery guy,” Leslie said, and key dishes planned for the new menu reflect the ideal of hearty, slow-cooked, single-pot comfort foods.
>> Short-ribs luau-stew style, a variation on chicken or squid luau.
>> Chicken hekka, a dish Leslie says his mother made “all the time.” In his take the chicken will be sous vide with “hekka-style” vegetables.
>> Vinha d’alhos, the vinegary Portuguese pot roast, in this case cooked sous vide, but based on the recipe of Leslie’s “100 percent Portuguese” brother-in-law.
>> Spicy ramen, a carryover from the Kauai restaurant and Yamaguchi’s personal project, with roast pork and shrimp dumplings.
