Tomorrow, April 7, the University of Hawaii School of Travel Industry Management will be celebrating the 20th annual “A Legacy in Tourism.” One of this year’s honorees is a great friend and fellow chef, Roy Yamaguchi. This is a wonderful tribute to Roy, a pioneer and leader, in more than one way. After garnering much success in Los Angeles and California, he came to Hawaii with a new cooking style of which most locals and chefs hadn’t seen a lot of yet. Opening his restaurant in Hawaii Kai in 1988, he was at the forefront of a big change in Hawaii’s culinary scene. Roy led the movement from the old way of cooking into a new way and changed forever how we eat in modern-day Hawaii.
For the longest time, we looked up to French and European cooking. Most hotels were serving continental cuisine, we had French and Italian restaurants; yes, we had the evolving luau buffets and we had ethnic restaurants. The most significant culinary change to happen in Hawaii in the ’80s was a break from the past. There was a new cuisine being born which saw a rise in utilizing all the ethnic influences and allowing them to shine in restaurant menus.
This shift meant that continental menus were about to slowly disappear, local ingredients like miso, seaweed, kimchi, sesame, opihi, taro and ulu, began to appear on restaurant menus. European chefs began to retire one at a time, and local chefs began to emerge and become in charge of kitchens and hotels. There was an emphasis on serving locally grown and raised food from Hawaii. It would not be until 1991 when Hawaii Regional Cuisine was born. All of these changes shaped the way Hawaii would eat forever.
When Roy came here from L.A., already successful and recognized with his refreshing, innovative cooking style, he inspired local chefs to think similarly that it’s OK to add Japanese/Asian ingredients and flavors to the French cooking technique. The local flavors and tastes usually served at homes and employee cafeterias slowly became mainstream restaurant and hotel fare.
I remember one day, the chef I was working for at that time went to dinner at Roy’s and came back saying to everyone, “There’s a new restaurant in Hawaii Kai called Roy’s; it’s different, it’s new, you all have to go out there and see what this chef is doing, it’s exciting.”
I remember Roy celebrating each restaurant’s anniversary with an event, inviting local and mainland chefs to cook together. In hindsight, what this started was a network of chef friends from all over the world together with local chefs. Some of us got invited and went overseas to cook, share the aloha spirit, and ambassador local ingredients and tastes.
One of the great common threads of hospitality, tourism, traveling and culture is food. What chef Roy has done for our industry here in Hawaii, nationally and globally, the footprints he has left through his work, his legacy left through his people, the farmers and food products we now have, I say a big mahalo! The state of Hawaii says mahalo to you! Thank you, bruddah! Well deserved, congratulations!
Chef and restaurateur Alan Wong has wowed diners around the world for decades, and is known as one of the founders of Hawaii Regional Cuisine. Find his column in Crave every first Wednesday. Currently, Wong is dba Alan Wong’s Consulting Co.
