EAT ‘LOCALICIOUS’ FOR AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION
Beginning Sunday and all through the month of March, 229 restaurants statewide will offer special dishes sold to benefit agricultural education in the public schools.
Localicious Hawai‘i, an annual campaign of the Hawai‘i Agricultural Foundation, has raised over $300,000 since its launch in 2014.
Order a Localicious dish — all are made with locally sourced ingredients — and a portion of what you pay for your meal will go to programs that introduce students to ag-related careers.
Dishes cover a wide variety: At Hoku’s at the Kahala Hotel & Resort, find an elegant mixed plate of Mountain View pork and fish crusted with Kauai shrimp hash; at 7-Eleven Hawaii stores, take out a shrimp and vegetable sinigang soup. Interesting backstory: The soup was developed with culinary student Kainoa Reloza, who won a December competition at the Culinary Institute of the Pacific to develop a dish for 7-Eleven.
New this year is an Instagram competition with the grand prize of a two-night trip to the Big Island. To enter, post a photo with the hashtag #EATLocalicious2020, tag the restaurant, and “like” the @HiAgFdn and @LocaliciousHi accounts,
Find a participating restaurant and read up on all the Localicious dishes at LocaliciousHawaii.com. The website is also running a drawing for a $100 gift card to a Localicious restaurant. One will be awarded each week through the campaign.
YOUNG HAWAII CHEF SCORES COVETED APPRENTICESHIP
A line cook at Sushi ii has won an apprenticeship through a national program designed to provide up-and-coming chefs with hands-on study in the world’s top restaurants.
Reed Kikuta, 24, is among 24 young professionals awarded a Ment’or Grant, through a program founded in 2008 by chefs Daniel Boulud, Thomas Keller and Jerome Bocuse.
Kikuta is a graduate of the culinary program at Kapiolani Community College and earned an advanced professional certificate from the Culinary Institute of the Pacific in 2017.
The grants are available to cooks with three to six years of experience in a restaurant kitchen. Applicants are evaluated based on an essay and letters of recommendations. Each recipient receives a one- to two-month apprenticeship at a restaurant in the U.S. or abroad, covering housing, transportation, salary and other expenses.
Kikuta said he hopes to secure his apprenticeship at n/naka, the acclaimed kaiseki restaurant in Los Angeles. He said he has a deep personal interest in traditional Japanese cooking that would be expanded by the contemporary innovations practiced at n/naka.
