Broke Da Mouth

This is not my first post about food on this blog, nor do I expect it will be my last. I absolutely love to eat and an integral part of any good trip for me either abroad or here at home features an enthusiastic investigation of local cuisine. Now admittedly, I typically do more exploring on this subject when I travel outside of the United States because food tends to be more different when I use my passport to travel. When I stay domestic, I usually find one or two local or regional dishes along with foods that I might eat every day or week while I'm at home. It seems like everywhere I go in the U.S. has a similar sort of baseline of American or adopted American fare.

Everywhere, that is, except for Hawaii.  Hawaiian food is really like nothing else in the United States. Like it's totally different. Compared to the rest of the country, it's complete chaos. And it's mostly related to who lives there now and how they got there. So to understand the food on Hawaii, you have to understand a little bit of the islands' history. Or more precisely, a little bit of their sugar plantation history. So here comes your history lesson for this post. 

Until the late 1700s, Hawaii was about as isolated from the rest of the world as it could have possibly been (mostly due to the fact that it's in the middle of the Pacific Ocean). As a result, the diet for the islands' inhabitants was fairly limited. Food choices for the locals at that time consisted of whatever the initial settlers brought with them when they sailed there from Polynesia added to whatever existed before they got there. Their grocery list back then included taro, bananas, sweet potatoes, fish, ferns (yes, ferns), coconuts and some other odds and ends.

Then in about the mid-1800s, some Americans, most of whose families had come to Hawaii as missionaries, decided they could make a whole lot of money growing sugar cane. It seemed to them that Hawaii's climate was ideal to facilitate large scale sugar production and they were right. The big problem? Running a sugar cane plantation requires a lot of manual labor and there just simply weren't enough people in the islands at that time to make such an operation work. So they started looking around for sources of labor. Around the globe, that is.

The Chinese were the first takers. They started arriving in 1850 to work the land. And that worked for a while until the plantation owners decided there might be a risk of labor unrest if there were too many people from a single national origin. In the 1860s, the plantations started bringing people from Japan to supplement their Chinese workforce. Then it was the Portuguese in the 1870s. This sort of stuff went on for the next 30 or more years. The Koreans were next. Then the Filipinos. And each time a new group of foreigners arrived on Hawaiian soil, they brought their own food traditions. And some of them stuck.

The result of all this? A unique menu which over time became sort of endemic: part Polynesian, part Chinese, part Japanese, part American, part whoever else happened to show up to the party. Nowhere else in the U.S. will you find such a mix of dishes as we found in Hawaii last month. Hawaiian pidgin for absolute deliciousness is "broke da mouth." Here are some things that broke our mouths in February on Oahu, The Big Island and Maui, along with some foods that decidedly did not.

Plate Lunch

Plate lunches are a Hawaiian staple. There's no other way to put it than that. Our first meal about two hours after we landed in Honolulu was our first plate lunch and it would not be the last. There would be four more to follow over the next nine days. Plate lunches are about the simplest kind of food you can find, which in a way presaged a lot of our experience with food on the islands. Take two scoops of rice, one scoop of macaroni salad, add a protein and maybe some sauce or gravy, and you have yourself a plate lunch. Need to eat a lot really cheap in Hawaii? Have at least one plate lunch per day.

Roast pork. Mahi mahi. Shoyu chicken. Beef curry. Chopped steak. Ham steak. Kalbi ribs. Eggs. Lau lau. Think of any kind of protein and you can likely either make a plate lunch out of it or find a restaurant somewhere on one of the islands that already has it on a menu. It's as versatile as it is simple. We ate plate lunches on picnic tables, in covered porches of restaurants and sitting on the grassed in curb area of a grocery store parking lot. And we never paid more than about $8 for any of these meals.

The invention of the plate lunch is a bit of a mystery. I'm not even going to try and track that down for this post. But I'm craving some mac salad with some sort of protein while I'm writing this. The mac salad, we found, was (with one exception) about the best part of these meals, especially if mixed with a little shoyu chicken sauce. Eat as much as or more than I did if you go. And plan on some exercise afterwards.

Malasadas

How a group of people from Portugal decided that the way to jumpstart their lives was to travel across the Atlantic Ocean, sail around South America's Cape Horn and land on some tiny islands in the middle of the biggest ocean on Earth to work on a sugar cane plantation is absolutely beyond me. But I'm glad they did. Because if they didn't, Hawaii wouldn't have malasadas.

Think donut here but not quite cooked all the way through and rolled in plenty of sugar. That's a malasada (which literally means under-cooked) in its truest form. Admittedly, some folks fill them with flavored cream these days but we opted for the original and stopped there. Malasadas in Portugal were traditionally a Mardi Gras food; in an effort to use up all their butter and sugar before the beginning of Lent, the Portuguese made malasadas in profusion. Can't say I blame them. These things are good. As a result, Fat Tuesday is actually known as Malasada Day in Hawaii.

Our single malasada experience was at Champion Malasadas in Honolulu, about 12 hours after our first plate lunch (it was a healthy first 24 hours). We stopped there at the beginning of our first full day of sightseeing on our way out of town and grabbed ourselves a couple of 85 cent (yes, you read that right) fried puffs of goodness each. Our malasadas were handed to us in a wax paper bag inside a brown paper bag and we were cautioned to let them cool down a bit first. These things were so pillowy soft that they almost deflated on the first bite. A little more time got them to a perfectly delicious temperature and texture. I shoveled mine down in about five minutes. The picture above which seems to show me eating them as if they were in a feedbag is pretty much correct. Plan on more exercise.

Poke

If there's one food I crave more than any other from our Hawaii trip, it's poke (pronounced poh-kay). Poke (the name is from the Hawaiian word for "cut") is cubes of raw fish (traditionally tuna) or other sea creature (traditionally octopus and not raw) flavored with some sort of mixture of ingredients that might include oils, vegetables (predominantly some kind of onions) and spices. The dish was originally prepared from the spare cuttings of fish after they had been butchered. Today, of course, people use premium cuts of fish specifically to make poke. And why not, the stuff is generally just awesome.

The most popular base ingredient for poke that we encountered in Hawaii was ahi tuna, which was just fine by me because I love raw tuna. We ate poke from a sushi restaurant, a take out poke place (seriously) and a supermarket (not kidding). At each place we paid vastly different prices, from market price ($32 per pound as it turned out) at Da Poke Shack in Kailua-Kona to $14 for a small plate with macadamia nuts at Banzai Sushi Bar in Haleiwa to $14 per pound for California roll poke at Foodland in Kihei.

While prepping for this trip, we bought a Lonely Planet guide to Hawaii to get us ready to take maximum advantage of our time in the islands. One of the places or maybe THE place that guidebook pointed us for poke was to Foodland, claiming the supermarket chain offered some of the best in the state, complete with free tastings for the asking. Considering the source (I trust Lonely Planet a lot), we humored ourselves and put a stop at one of their stores on our agenda. I still didn't really believe their poke would be better than a place like Da Poke Shack, whose fish was ultra fresh.

It was a kind of an apples and oranges comparison. Foodland's California roll poke is flavored to taste like a (no surprise here) California roll whereas Da Poke Shack's flavors are designed to let the fish shine. Both were delicious but Foodland's arguably had more flavor. And considering the price point, I have to say if I lived in Hawaii, I'd be shopping at Foodland for poke a lot. This stuff was amazing. And all things considered, fairly darned cheap. For sure right now as I write this, it's Foodland's poke I'm craving.

Kalua Pig

Kalua pig or kalua pork is likely one of the biggest misnomers on most menus in the state of Hawaii. The word "kalua" literally means to cook in an underground oven, yet today most pork labeled as kalua pig is not, in fact, cooked underground at all. The process of slow cooking, braising or smoking is way more likely to be used to cook your pig in most Hawaiian restaurants today.

Kalua pig today is most likely found as the centerpiece of a luau meal. A typical imu (or underground oven) is a pit dug in the earth where wood is used to heat up lava rocks which will be used to cook the meat. Once the wood used to start the fire is burned up, the pit is lined with banana leaves and some of the hot rocks are removed from the pit and placed inside the pig. The meat is then seasoned with sea salt and wrapped in more banana and ti leaves and the pig placed in the pit and covered, first with a barrier to retain the moisture, like burlap, and then sand. The result is a super hot slow cooking oven. About 12 hours later, dinner is ready.

According to the menus I read, I allegedly ate kalua pig three times in a week in Hawaii: once on what was surely a frozen pizza; once as part of a plate lunch; and once out of a genuine imu. I'm not a big believer in pork as a tasty meat. Mostly I see it as a protein vehicle to carry other flavors and in the case of my pizza and plate lunch, that's exactly what it was. I got nothing out of those meals except sustenance.

But the kalua pig I had out of the imu was absolutely delicious and I was shocked it was so good. The meat was succulent and perfectly salted to bring out the flavor of the pork. I'm not sure I've had simply salted pork this good in my life. The Old Lahaina Luau deserves a lot of credit here. I'll remember that meat for a while.

Taro / Poi

How to begin with the story of taro? Well, I ate it in solid form twice when I was in Hawaii, once as an accompaniment to a dish of mahi mahi and once as a starch in a helping (or two) of taro leaf stew. Both times, I thought it was delicious. Taste-wise it's sort of like a nutty sweet potato flavor, although not quite as sweet. Texturally, I thought it was like an upgraded potato, not as starchy and stodgy as I find that vegetable to be sometimes. I had never before had taro in my life and I was really really pleasantly surprised. I'd eat this stuff all the time if I could get it locally and learned how to cook it properly (which can't be that difficult). All that is not why I'm writing about taro here in this post.

Taro is a starchy root vegetable with leaves that grows best in flooded conditions. It was imported to Hawaii when the first Polynesians set out to settle the island and it formed the core of the diet of those people both before and after they arrived in Hawaii. Both the root and the leaves are edible (as suggested in the previous paragraph). Roasting, boiling, baking and frying all work to get taro root from its raw form to the deliciousness I experienced while on vacation last month. But in Hawaii, taro is more famous in another form: poi!

If there's one food I knew I had to try but I was definitely not looking forward to eating in Hawaii, it was poi, a purple barely runny liquid made by adding water to cooked taro that is continually mashed until it achieves a paste-like consistency. Sounds yummy, right? How people get food to this point is beyond me. Did someone one day just decide to pound on a cooked taro root to see what would happen and then taste when it turned purple?

Taro isn't eaten in poi form any other place than Hawaii and after eating it, I can understand why. It's totally tasteless, feels like cold-ish rubbery raw egg whites in your mouth and is quite likely the least satisfying food I have ever eaten in my life. I imagine it tastes like the amino acid goop that Neo and Morpheus' crew ate on their ship in The Matrix, although that might actually taste better. I managed to swallow a half a small paper cup (and I mean like one of those small paper ketchup cups they make you use at Wendy's) of this stuff and that was enough. Forever. I have no use for this "food" ever again.

Hilo Farmers Market

No, Hilo Farmers Market is not a food but we did have some of the tastiest morsels all trip there and we could have eaten a lot more. For those reasons, I thought spending a few paragraphs on this place was worth it. Here's my tip about this place: GO! Especially on a Wednesday or Saturday (we went on Wednesday) when the place expands into a super duper food and crafts market.

I love the idea of markets and food markets and try to hit them when I travel if I can. I always have this idea of these wonderful places where cheery vendors sell fresh fruits and vegetables with other stalls hawking artisanal foods that smell and look wonderful and that have samples that make you want to buy, buy, buy. I've visited markets or farmers markets in Italy, Germany and England in the past few years and have been mostly disappointed, sometimes coming away with a bite or two or maybe a full-ish meal that sort of satisfies.

If I imagined the perfect farmers market in the world, one that satisfied everything I've dreamed of in one of these, the Hilo Farmers Market is it. Maybe it's the exotic and tropical foods for sale. Maybe it's the fact that there are folks selling fruits and vegetables alongside stalls with homemade macadamia nut butter, local goat cheese and jams like habanero pineapple. Maybe it's the amazing craft stalls with soaps and pearls for sale. Maybe it's all of it. We parked in a two hour parking spot and, honestly, we needed all that time and could have stayed longer. We almost used all the float in our schedule for one day in this spot.

We planned to hit the Hilo Farmers Market just before lunch. We hoped we'd be able to find something tasty for lunch to keep us going for the entire afternoon (quick drive north to 'Akaka Falls) and maybe into the night (the most amazing stargazing EVER near the peak of Mauna Kea). We found what we were looking for in a small outdoor food court with picnic tables across the street from the main food stalls. Just like plate lunches, once again our meal proved to be extremely affordable; unlike some of our plate lunches, the food here was amazing.

I ended up mixing and matching food vendors for my meal, opting for a $6 green papaya salad paired with a $3.50 pork skewer. The pork was brushed with some sweet glaze and sliced thin so it cooked quickly which rendered off some, but not all, of the fat; what remained were crusty and tender inside pieces of meat with a little moist fat around the edges. I thought this paired well with my papaya salad which had about two whole papayas and some chiles to make it "hot" on the spiciness scale. I chickened out on the highest spice level ("Thai hot") which was smart. I don't often back down to heat but my instincts proved correct here. I ate slowly, letting the heat from each lime-y spicy bite cool down before proceeding.

Our trip to this farmers market was one of the pleasant surprises of this trip. It far exceeded our expectations. There may be some ordering from some vendors later on this year.

Shave Ice

For most readers of this blog ("most" here being about four people), the picture above appears to show me eating a snow cone. Say that to someone in Hawaii and there are likely to be some tense words exchanged. There's a big difference between a snow cone, which is made with crushed ice drizzled with sweetened syrup, and shave ice, which as the name suggests is made from shaved ice and then drenched (meaning a lot more) in the same sort of sweetened syrup used in a snow cone. The result of shaving ice (which starts as a big block of ice dropped into a shaving machine) is a snow like consistency which holds the syrup better than does crushed ice. It's different for sure.

There are a number of stories about the origins of shave ice, but the one that makes the most sense to me is that it was invented in Japan and brought to Hawaii starting with the Japanese immigration to work the sugar plantations in the 1860s and transformed from there. Told you it was all about the sugar plantations. The tradition of shaving ice, rather than crushing, is the Japanese influence. The flavoring syrups (and let's face it the flavored sugary liquid is why we're eating these things) make shave ice uniquely Hawaiian.

Shave ice comes in various sizes, sometimes has ice cream or azuki bean paste somewhere in the assemblage and can be saturated with one or more mind blowing flavors in various wild colors. I opted for a plain shave ice in coconut, pickled mango and tiger's blood (a cherry / coconut mixture) flavors. I've never been much of a snow cone guy, mostly because I don't like eating ice and the syrup never seems to last. Shave ice was a definite improvement and it's not even close. But I'm not dying for another one of these. Give me some ice cream anyday.

Maui Brewing Company

A few months ago, I stopped by my local beer store to stock up on beers for the Christmas holidays and to see if there was anything else interesting until we got to December 25. Among my haul that day was a six pack each of Coconut Porter and Kihei Kolsch from Maui Brewing Company. I knew I was headed to Hawaii in a couple of months and thought why not get a head start on both drinking local beers and the holidays, I guess.

To that point in life, my Hawaiian beer experience was limited to Kona Brewing Company's various offerings, in which I had been historically disappointed. Maui Brewing Company changed my opinion of Hawaii beers as soon as I took a single sip of Coconut Porter. From that moment on, stopping by Maui Brewing Company was on my itinerary for last month's vacation to paradise.

Maui Brewing Company's brewery and beer patio is located in an industrial park on the east side of Piilani Highway in Kihei. Their tap list is huge and it features both the brews that I can get in cans at my local beer store here in northern Virginia (Norm's Beer and Wine, if you must know) and all the other beers they make in keg form only. And by all the other beers, I mean like 12 or 15 types I had never even heard of. I feel like I struck gold.

One of the things I love about Maui Brewing Company is how their beers really really specifically and obviously reference their point of origin. Mana Wheat Beer is sweetened with pineapple juice (it works!) and the Coconut Porter is finished with toasted coconut, which gives the beer a nice tasty finish to follow the rich, exactly-what-a-porter-should-be flavor. Their on-tap offerings continue this theme and in some cases, ramp it up a bit.

Because we had limited time (it's a crime, I know...), I opted for a sampler tray (shown above) and then a full glass of whatever won the sample test accompanied by a couple of Maui Cookie Lady cookies (total surprise but the Grown Up Samoa...OMG! good). Clockwise from the upper left in my sampler: Hot Blonde (MBC's Bikini Blond brewed with comapeno peppers); Haleakala Sunryes Rye IPA; Barefoot Brew (amber with local honey); 'Uala Pale Ale (made with Maui grown sweet potatoes); Ka'anapali Coffee Porter; and Imperial Coconut Porter (made with MORE coconut than the standard Coconut Porter).

I expected the Imperial Coconut Porter would win the sampling because (a) I love porter and (b) I love imperial stout. I expected this beer would be the best of both varieties with the same sort of delicious finish as MBC's standard Coconut Porter. But the extra sweetness for me made the beer too sweet and heavy for a porter (porter is my favorite beer variety, hands down). I'll stick with the standard non-imperial variety of this one.

The actual winner turned out to be the 'Uala Pale Ale which is brewed with sweet potatoes (also known as 'uala). Surprised this could be really good? So was I. The 'uala imparted a gentle sweetness to the beer and Maui Brewing Company laid off on the hops enough to create a beer that strikes a great balance between flavor and hoppiness. It's still clearly a pale ale, but it's like none that I've ever had. Pale ale purists probably wouldn't approve. I went home happy. Now I just need to get back over to Norm's sometime soon so I can keep drinking Maui's beer.

Loco Moco

So I realize some of you reading this post may be getting ready to call me out at this point. Let me save you the trouble. Yes, I realize loco moco, a dish featuring hamburger patties, rice, macaroni salad, gravy and fried eggs (yikes!) is technically a plate lunch. But I'm giving it some special attention here for two reasons: (1) it's an absolutely over the top cholesterol bomb that you just can't eat too many of without really getting yourself into a significant health crisis and (2) it wasn't always so plate lunch-like.

According to Hawaiian legend (it seems like all origin stories in Hawaii have become legends), the dish might have been created in 1949 as a hamburger, rice and gravy concoction at the suggestion of some kids looking for a cheap meal from the now out of business Lincoln Grill. The name loco moco was allegedly applied because the owner of the Grill, Richard Inouye, told his wife that the kids were crazy or loco. The egg, apparently, came later. Somehow, somewhere along the way, some mac salad was thrown in there, making it part of the plate lunch family.

So what's it like eating all this fat and carbs? Well, for us it depended on how the hamburgers were treated. Get a little crust on those things like we had at Aloha Mixed Plate in Lahaina and it's a pretty tasty dish. I'm not sure how I feel about the gravy on rice; that's not quite a combination I was really ready for. There's also no doubt I felt a little sluggish after downing a loco moco. There are some foods in Hawaii I'd jump at having again. Not sure I feel that way about this one.

My plate of loco moco was the last true Hawaiian food I ate in state. It capped a full week plus of pigging out on the unique fare you can find in the islands. Having said that, we barely scratched the surface. We didn't even touch other signature dishes like Spam musabi, saimin, lomi salmon or chicken longrice and there must be a dozen or more signature plate lunches that we didn't get to.

There's a lot of writing in this post and I didn't cover everything we ate. Having said that there isn't a lot that's fancy on this list. That's deliberate. I wanted my eating in Hawaii to explore the variety of everyday dishes that are local to Hawaii and very few other places. The unique mini-melting pot that is our 50th state has taken its input from every food culture that has touched it throughout its history and has spit out something very different than you can find anywhere else.

In that vein, we tried to stick to places that served food in as traditional a way as we could find. But we did seek out a couple of spots that seemed to be taking a new spin on Hawaii's food history. Of these places, I thought the best meal we had all week was at Town Restaurant in Honolulu. They source all their ingredients locally and historically, referencing Hawaiian food while updating it into something more modern. If you are on Oahu, I'd highly recommend stopping by. I'd go back for dinner if I ever had the chance. Probably after some takeout poke from Foodland. And a couple of malasadas for breakfast. Now about that exercise...

Umm...yeah, we definitely like poke!

The Aloha Shirt

Yes, I know the photograph above screams middle aged haole. I think it's something about the combination of light and shadow and the light in my eyes causing me to smile awkwardly and create an extra chin. Please read anyway...

A really long time ago, at the beginning of my senior year of high school, our school for some reason decided to have a theme week to promote school pride. I'm guessing that's what it was for anyway. Each day of the designated week had a specific activity which allowed us students to cut loose and be individuals or something like that. Clearly from that enthusiastic and articulate introduction, I didn't quite get the point of it all. Still don't probably. Anyway, for whatever reason, one of the days was "Hawaiian Shirt Day."

Now we've already established elsewhere in this blog that I wasn't the coolest kid in school so of course I didn't own a Hawaiian shirt. I mean, what the heck do I want with a Hawaiian shirt as a 17 year old kid in Connecticut? Well apparently, a lot of other kids in my school (all cooler than me of course) did own such a garment of clothing. And as it turned out, so did my younger sister. So in a rare instance of me caving to peer pressure or whatever, I went to school as a senior for one day stuffed into my little sister's blue and flowered shirt and wore plastic leis that I probably purchased for a quarter or something like that from someone on the student council. I felt like an idiot. Never again, I vowed.

It's now 30 years later (wow, really?) and times sure have changed a lot. So have I, as it turns out. And honestly there's no way I was going to Hawaii and not coming back with at least one Hawaiian shirt, which as it turns out are really called aloha shirts. So in between surfing and hiking and eating and snorkeling and doing whatever else there is to do in Hawaii, I went clothes shopping. A couple of times.

Aloha shirts for sale in one of the many ABC Stores in Honolulu.

There is a lot about the history of Hawaii which is not really recorded fact but has slipped into either folklore or legend, and the creation of the aloha shirt is no exception. The origin of a lot of what goes into an aloha shirt was borrowed from the immigrant Asian workers who arrived in Hawaii in the mid 19th century. That part doesn't seem up for debate. It seems pretty clear that both the patterning and the cloth of these shirts was inspired by traditional Japanese kimonos and the untucked style of wearing the shirts can be traced to Filipino barong tagalog shirts.

Who came up with idea that launched the modern aloha shirt, though, is less clear, although there seems to be little debate that the shirt in its current form was "invented" sometime in the 1920s or 1930s. The original idea may have been conceived of by Gordon Young, a student at the University of Hawaii who started making and selling brightly colored geometrically patterned shirts made of a Japanese yakuza cloth, which was traditionally used to make robes in Japan. The commercialization of the shirt is typically traced to Ellery Chun, a Yale degreed Chinese-Hawaiian businessman working in his father's Honolulu dry goods store.

Chun's idea was to make the shirts into a local style of clothing different from anywhere else in the world. He was the first one to stock this type of shirt in a store and also the first one to advertise the garments as "aloha shirts." Clearly, if only evidenced by that September day of my senior year of high school, the idea worked. These things are serious business in Hawaii. I expected there would be a tourist only trade in the shirts but walking through downtown Honolulu proved me wrong: aloha shirts are business wear in Hawaii without a doubt. It's definitely an idea which changed the world, or at least a little part of it.

So what makes up an aloha shirt? Well, there are a couple of musts and maybe one or two options. First, the shirts are patterned, often quite brightly, with natural or floral motifs, although modern designs may feature tropical drinks, cars or even sports team logos. The shirts feature buttons down their entire front or just halfway (pullover) and traditionally have a pocket on the left breast. The patterning of the shirt should be continuous over the entire garment, including where the shirt buttons and across the pocket. Buttons are sometimes, although rarely these days, made out of coconut shells and in its most traditional form, the pattern is printed on the interior of the shirt, resulting in a somewhat muted look to the shirt.

My Reyn Spooner year of the monkey shirt is (correctly) reverse printed.

If and when you decide an aloha shirt is for you, there are certainly no shortages of options in the islands. The easiest and cheapest place to pick one up is probably at one of the 85 million ABC Stores that can be found in any reasonably populated area of Hawaii (there are actually allegedly only 56 of these stores in the state). The shirts in these stores are appropriately cartoonishly garish and inexpensive. You can probably pick one up for less than $20 if you shop just a little bit.

The majority of the shirts available in tourist souvenir outlets are not likely traditionally Hawaiian. While I didn't check exhaustively, most seemed to be made in China for businesses that were decidedly not local. I decided if I was buying one or two of these, that I should make sure that I bought from a locally based manufacturer with some history in the islands and I'd try to get a variety in the designs that represented different influences in both the appearance and manufacture of the shirts. I ended up finding what I wanted from Reyn Spooner and Tori Richard.

Reyn Spooner was founded in 1962 by Reyn McCullough, an expatriate Californian who relocated to Hawaii in 1959, and Ruth Spooner, a Hawaiian seamstress whose Spooner's of Waikiki store specializing in swimwear opened in 1956. Over the last 50 plus years, the hallmark of Reyn Spooner's aloha shirts has been their more muted, less overly floral reverse printed fabrics which were perfect for someone like me who prefers less loud shirt wear.

The pattern I fell in love with at Reyn Spooner was their limited edition 2016-only year of the monkey design. It's for sure a busy pattern but reminiscent of a traditional paisley design, which connects more to a European / Persian heritage in addition to being uniquely Hawaiian. I love the shirt's design because it appears to be non-repeating (it does repeat, but it's not obvious) and features a variety of different monkeys hidden within the branches and flowers of the tree or plant which forms the body of the shirt. The design is obviously inspired by the Chinese zodiac, which includes a 12 year rotating cycle of different animals associated with each year. The year of the monkey is incredibly personal to me: it's the year (this year) that I first visited Hawaii but it's also the year of my birth (1968). I love it when things work on many levels.

My Tori Richard shirt showing the continuous patterning across the pocket and seams.

So considering my first aloha shirt was in many ways decidedly non-Hawaiian in it's paisley-esque appearance, I was determined to make the second more island-based. I thought it would be ideal if I could find a shirt that was more flowered. I also thought I would love a shirt not made of a polyester blend like the Spooner shirt, since I often find polyester blends soak up the heat from the sun. 

Enter Tori Richard, founded in 1956 by Chicago businessman Mort Feldman (not very Hawaiian I realize) who retired to Hawaii but found retirement didn't suit him. To this day, Tori Richard is a Honolulu based business and that connection to the local economy was important to me. They manufacture clothing for both men and women and their men's line features shirts made from a cotton and silk blend so the shirt I bought from them is incredibly comfortable and light which I like a lot. It's going to be perfect summer wear, when summer gets here in northern Virginia.

I deliberately went floral at Tori Richard, choosing a design with blue and white flowers which to me look like plumeria flowers, a tropical plant that seems to be everywhere in Hawaii and Hawaiian souvenir stores. I love this shirt because it is so Hawaiian to me and is also different in a number of ways from my Spooner shirt. It works for me less on an intellectual level but more on an emotional and reminiscing level. Imagine that...I'm getting all sappy here.

I think if I had a time machine and I'd done everything else I'd wanted to do going forwards and backwards in time, I might drop in on my 17 year old self in Glastonbury, Connecticut and deliver one of these things so I wouldn't have to wear my sister's too-small shirt to school on that one day. I'd also probably want to have a long discussion about self confidence and mellowing out. A lot. But those are discussions probably for another sort of forum, which I will not invite the whole world to witness. For now, I can't wait for things to heat up here in summer so I can remember Hawaii every time I put them on.

Nothing better than some loco moco when you are wearing your brand new aloha shirt.

Shaka

As recently as a month ago, pretty much everything I knew about surfing was based on movies and music. And by that I mean Kate Bosworth's Blue Crush, Fast Times At Ridgemont High and various songs by The Beach Boys were my bibles on the subject. As much as I'm inclined to believe everything Jeff Spicoli ever uttered (aren't we all? I mean "Surfing's not a sport, it's a way of life!" seems right to me) and as crazy as I am about "Good Vibrations" and "Surfin' U.S.A." in no way did I consider myself even remotely knowledgeable about this sport that might just be (as Spicoli argued) a way of life for most who get out there each morning and ride waves until it's time to go to work. Or just all day and not go to work at all even.

So when I started scheduling activities for my trip to Hawaii, I knew I had to move the needle on my surfing knowledge, even if it was just a little. After all, it was Hawaiians who first invented surfing. Until Captain James Cook's crew brought back accounts of the ancient Hawaiians hanging ten around the islands on oval pieces of wood, nobody else on Earth could conceive of standing on a wooden board on a wave. From the beginning of recorded history to the late 1700s, the ocean was a violent destructive force that was only entered for some useful purpose like gathering food or exploring. And here were the Hawaiians getting into the sea for fun! How strange.

Our Hawaii trip earlier this month started on Oahu, which gave us the perfect opportunity to see surfing on some of the sport's signature beaches. Not wanting to waste any time getting to it, on our first full day of vacation we packed up our rental Toyota Corolla (very cool, I know) and headed north out of Honolulu for the island's North Shore. A 45 minute or so drive through the valley between the two mountain ranges that make up the island and a quick right at the town of Haleiwa had us on our way to surfing Mecca: Waimea Bay Beach, Banzai Pipeline and Sunset Beach.

Driving north on H2 towards the North Shore. Angry surf in the distance.

Now in our first half day or so in state, we'd seen surfing on Waikiki Beach in Honolulu on the island's leeward side where the waves are pretty tame by Hawaiian standards. But the North Shore is the place to be to surf and to watch surfing. These are the same beaches that host the most famous surfing competitions like the Quicksilver Big Wave and the Duke Kahanamoku Invitationals and that boast 30 to 40 foot high waves in the wintertime, which is exactly the time of year we were in Oahu. If you can't really conceive of a 30 to 40 high wave and what kind of power that might contain, think of a wall of water the height of a three or four story building crashing over you and imagine what that might feel like. And remember Mother Nature often takes no prisoners.

Driving out of Honolulu, the ride to the North Shore takes you down the two-lane Interstate H2 road. Yep you read that right, two-lane interstate on an island that is part of only one state. H2 runs right between the mountains to the east and west and as soon as we cleared the top of the saddle between the ranges we saw something we hadn't seen at Waikiki: angry white foam, which to us meant bigger waves than the puny swells we'd seen the day before. It looked like our dreams of surfing nirvana were going to come true.

First stop: Waimea Bay Beach Park, a sheltered inlet on the North Shore about five miles outside Haleiwa, a beach with historically hellacious waves that nobody would even lifeguard at until legendary surfer Eddie Aikau (inspiration for the Quicksilver Invitational) dared to volunteer for in the late 1960s. The tiny bay is nothing more than a notch in the North Shore's rocky coast, a sandy beach with significant rocks above and below the ocean on either side, leaving precious room for error for any surfer tempted to leave the smallish beach area.

Waimea Bay Beach and the painted ocean.

The scene at Waimea Bay is gorgeous. It's a perfect picturesque sandy beach with surf breaking from the deep blue and pale green ocean. The sky was powder blue and dotted with clouds the day we were there and in the waves about 30 yards off shore were 15 or so surfers bobbing in the ocean on their boards hoping to catch a big one. It was a picture out of a movie or a postcard. The only problem for us was the waves were not the size of three or four story buildings like we'd hoped. They topped out at maybe six or eight feet maximum and only a few featured the kind of tunnels of water you see surfers riding in movies and GoPro promotional videos.

Having said that and despite what we saw as relatively small waves, the folks out there in the ocean trying to catch them certainly didn't make this surfing thing look easy. There were far more wipeouts than successful runs and plenty of the dudes out there seemed to chicken out when what to us looked like a moderately big wave came along. Maybe the scene from the shore was deceiving and this was really a vicious ocean like the breaking surf seemed to suggest on the drive to the beach.

We lingered at Waimea Bay for about 30 minutes or so and despite the picture book setting, we had to move on. I mean if we're not going to see killer waves at Waimea, might as well try the Pipeline or Sunset Beach. After all, those two spots are facing the Pacific Ocean directly with no shelter. Surely there had to be something better there. 

Relatively speaking, there was. The biggest waves we saw on Oahu were found at Banzai, where far fewer surfers were daring to be dangerous in the water. By the time we got to Sunset Beach, there was nobody left, just the ocean lapping the steep sloping beach and washing away the footprints of hopeful travelers like us. No 40 foot waves. Not even any ten footers. Nothing. The danger of pinning all your hopes for an experience like this on one day is that you might come home disappointed with it all. We certainly did that first day.

On the second day, it was our turn in the water.

I'm 47 years old, and before about six months ago, I had never contemplated getting on a surfboard in my life. But travel is supposed to broaden horizons, at least that's the way I see it, and the past few years I've tried not to back away from any reasonable challenge. So setting foot in Hawaii and not trying to stand up on a wave was just quite simply not an option.

Before arriving in Hawaii, we had every intention of taking a surfing lesson at Waikiki Beach in the morning one day. We figured a little sleep in at our hotel, maybe a malasada or two for breakfast and then a lazy walk down to the ocean for a couple of hours lesson. But somehow in selecting a place to introduce us to the sport, we managed to pick a place in Waianae, which is about an hour up the west coast of the island. By the time we realized our mistake, we already had our hearts set on West Oahu SUP and rather than changing our minds, we decided to get up a little earlier, fight some potential rush hour traffic and go with our first choice.

Good instinct. The beach at Waianae was quiet and deserted but just as spectacular as Waikiki. There were maybe ten or so surfers in the water and nobody (and I really mean nobody) on the beach at all. Perfect conditions to ride a board for the first time. All the other surfers were further out than we would go so there was nobody to interfere with us (or more accurately we wouldn't interfere with them I guess). 

Our instructor for our morning lesson was Alika, a native Hawaiian and descendant of King Kamehameha III who had been surfing since he was three years old. His dad taught him, which I think is awesome, even pulling him out of school as a kid on days when conditions were too perfect to pass up, which I'm sure the Hawaiian public school system didn't think was so awesome. We had Alika to ourselves for two hours (we booked a semi-private lesson to ensure we got some personal attention) and his mission in those couple of hours was to turn us from landlubbing haoles into people who could credibly stand up on what seemed the most enormous surfboard in the world.

Alika taking us out to catch some waves.

The primary reason we chose West Oahu SUP as our surf shop of choice was that they seemed to emphasize time in the water over lengthy safety instructions and simulations on land. And we really just wanted to get in the water as quickly as possible. For some, I suppose, the safety briefing may have been too brief. But since we are here in one piece after going through our time in the ocean, it was clearly effective. We received instructions on how to stand up (seemed super easy on land); how to fall (as flat as possible because of the rocks! wait, rocks??); how to get the board in the water; and where to avoid surfing. After that, we were being dragged out on our boards by Alika to a good spot to catch some tasty waves.

Surfing is both easier and harder than it looks and some of the parts that look difficult are actually pretty simple and vice versa. If you get it right the first time that is. One of the more straightforward maneuvers is actually standing up on the board, although getting your feet in the right spot is kind of tricky and certainly way more difficult than it was in the safety orientation session. The beginner boards we used are absolutely immense and they float and keep their balance pretty well. Not saying it's a piece of cake or anything, but it's easier than I imagined.

The more difficult part of the whole experience was fighting the sea and the extra large boards didn't help this at all. Pushing a 15 foot long by 4 foot wide piece of floating stuff into the tide is not easy, especially when it's strapped to your ankle with a surf leash. As soon as it enters the water, the board acts like a sail and catches every wave pretty easily. It's a struggle to get it to the point where you can flip it onto the sea and start paddling out. 

And here it doesn't get any easier. Paddling into position looks deceptively leisurely. It ain't. I like to think I'm a pretty strong guy sometimes but I clearly don't use the muscles that enable me to paddle a surfboard into position to start surfing. Not at all. I thought two hours of surfing would go by pretty quickly. But about at minute 90 or so, I was ready for someone to tug me into place to start my runs rather than paddle myself out.

The after photo: me and Alika giving the shaka sign for a successful run.

So after all that "it's not so hard" talk, I know you are expecting some tales of what an expert surfer I am now. Well, get ready for some disappointment. If I have a strength in my surfing game, it's riding the board on my knees or feet and knees without falling off. Like, I'm really good at that. But standing? Not so much. The footwork that seemed so easy on the beach is difficult on the water. Despite the fact that I knew I kept placing my feet too close together when getting up on the board, I couldn't correct it more than once. Blame it on the rocks about 18 inches below the surface of the water if you must. And if you do, you'd be pretty accurate.

But once was enough for me. Despite being too cautious most of the time and getting propelled off the front of my board by one all too strong wave, I actually surfed, meaning I stood up on a board in some super cool surfing pose, and rode a wave. The experience was so incredibly fantastic. It was without a doubt the best thing we did in Hawaii and we did some pretty amazing things on the days we weren't surfing. I surfed! Are you kidding me? 

I will say that the actual experience of riding a wave requires so much concentration that it's very difficult to enjoy it in the moment. But when you are done with your run or get back out to catch the next wave, the sense of accomplishment is tremendous. I know I'll never be a good surfer or even a novice surfer but dammit, I surfed. Nobody can take that away from me. Even if it was on two to three foot high waves. It's absolutely one of the best things I've done in my life.

I also have to say that surfing hurts. I imagine if I did this regularly that I would be in some kind of amazing shape. But for the first time, it really hurts. I felt it for sure in my seldom used paddling muscles, but I also managed a scraped right knee and elbow (despite wearing a long sleeved shirt) and the bottom of my ribcage was sore for days. Call me a whiner if you must but lying on a surfboard with the waves pushing up into your chest isn't similar to anything else I encounter in my regular everyday existence. The ribs part hurt the most.

The statue of Duke Kahanamoku on Waikiki Beach. Perhaps the most famous Hawaiian surfer ever.

After spending two hours in Waianae, I am fairly sure we could have rented a couple of boards on Waikiki Beach and faked our way through things with maybe a little help from a book or a passing surfer enough to do some of what we did in the sea with Alika. But the experience of getting taught how to surf with a native Hawaiian who lives this stuff was so much richer than just learning how to stand on a surfboard. So I wouldn't have done my first surfing experience any other way.

Admittedly, the best part of our lesson was standing on a surfboard and riding a wave to shore, but the knowledge of Hawaii and being Hawaiian that we got from spending a couple of hours with Alika was invaluable, and I'm not just talking about the plate lunch recommendation we got for our trip back to Honolulu. There's something about being Hawaiian that is different from the rest of the United States. That may seem like an obvious statement given the eight plus hour flight we took from Dallas to get there. But we got being Hawaiian out of talking to Alika while waiting to make our next run. And that was almost as good as standing up and riding a board to shore. And we wouldn't have got that from renting boards in Waikiki.

There's one other thing we wouldn't have got from renting boards on our own: the shaka sign. I may be presumptuous here but I feel I can credibly use the shaka sign, a hand gesture where the middle three fingers are folded to the palm leaving just the thumb and pinkie displayed, after my surfing experience. You might notice I'm using it in both pictures of me on this post. The sign is also known as "hang loose" but in Hawaii it's used to convey the aloha spirit. I feel we got that from our two hours with Alika, who also explained the origin and meaning of the sign to us and made us feel a little less like the haoles we surely are. 

Best thing we did in Hawaii, without a doubt. So glad we did this.