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Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:2 (2019-2020): 171-172 © American Folklore Society 2021	

Review of: 
 
Hawaiʻi Regional Cuisine: The Food Movement That Changed 
the Way Hawaiʻi Eats 
Samuel Hideo Yamashita. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2019. Pp. xii + 181, 
preface, maps, glossary, notes, selected bibliography, index. 
  
Review by: Katrina Wynn 
____________________________________________________________ 
 
In the book Hawaiʻi Regional Cuisine: The Food Movement That Changed the Way 
Hawaiʻi Eats, historian Samuel Hideo Yamashita offers a detailed account of the 
Hawaiʻi Regional Cuisine (HRC) movement of the 1990s and 2000s. A dozen chefs 
launched this movement in a deliberate attempt to overhaul the fine dining scene in 
Hawai’i by shifting the focus away from French cuisine, made with imported 
ingredients, to a locally-sourced hybrid cuisine based partially on French styles, but also 
adding Asian and American elements. The book’s five chapters trace the history, 
development, and impact of the HRC movement and the careers of its founding chefs. 

 
The book begins with “Origins,” which examines the impact of colonialism and 
Americanism on the Islands and the resulting fine dining culture. Yamashita lays out the 
foundation for Hawaiʻi Regional Cuisine, specifically one in which white male chefs 
cooking French food had come to dominate fine cuisine on the Islands. This chapter 
provides a very informative overview of the historical development of fine cuisine in 
Hawai’i. 
 
The achievements of the HRC chefs during the 1990s and 2000s, with a focus on their 
restaurants, awards, publicity, cookbooks, television appearances, and extensive 
networking with celebrity chefs, are detailed in the second chapter, “Development.” 
Yamashita goes into considerable detail about the chefs’ previous training and awards, 
likely in part to establish their culinary pedigrees. This encyclopedic information is 
perhaps most interesting to an audience of chefs, culinary historians, and enthusiasts. 
To folklorists and foodways scholars, it speaks to the importance of formal professional 
chef training, experience, mentorship, and robust apprenticeship traditions. I found 
maps of the locations of restaurants owned by HRC chefs a nice addition to the chapter. 
 
The next chapter, “Cuisine,” follows the same timeline as Chapter 2, but examines what 
and how the chefs cooked, based on their commitment to use local products and their 
general leaning toward Euro-Asian fusion cuisine. Digest readers may find the 
introduction of the “Dishes” section in Chapter 3 interesting, as it discusses influences 
on the chefs, especially their own personal foodways and the regional cooking of 
Hawaiʻi. The theory discussion, “Semiotics” in this chapter, may also appeal to 
folklorists as it is the only place in the book where Yamashita ventures an interpretive 
analysis of the HRC.  
 
The fourth chapter, “Successors,” focuses on the 2010s and the directions in which six 
young “post-HRC” chefs took fine dining in Hawaiʻi as they moved away from French 
cuisine and toward one based more on personal memories and local foodways—
something of special interest to Digest readers. 



172  Wynn, Review, Hawaiʻi Regional Cuisine, Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:2 (2019-2020	

 
The final chapter, “Legacies,” examines how HRC chefs have influenced the food scene 
in Hawaiʻi. In the section “Food Scene,” Yamashita explains how the impact ranges from 
helping them open the door to women and people of color to increasing the prestige of a 
culinary career. He also explains how the HRC has affected Hawaiʻian food production. 
Digest readers may also find this chapter interesting because of its discussion about 
sustainability and the results of the booming food business on farming and fisheries 
supply chains. 
 
Despite the detail, there is no discussion in the book about how most of the HRC chefs 
were not from Hawaiʻi yet came to define fine dining cuisine in Hawaiʻi. Yamashita also 
examines the twelve HRC chefs in a kind of isolation, without placing them in the 
context of other fine dining chefs in Hawaiʻi during the 1990s and 2000s nor 
establishing whether the HRC chefs had a horizontal impact as well as a vertical one. 
This narrow focus on the original HRC members undercuts Yamashita’s argument about 
the prominence of the HRC movement. 
 
Moreover, this book would have benefitted from significant editing to manage the level 
of detail more effectively. While the chapters are often dense with information, there is 
much repetition, not all supporting details seem relevant, and there are occasional 
abrupt one-line insertions of scholarly references from other fields that seem outside of 
the book’s scope. Finally, updated information could have been included for events 
occasionally alluded to in the future tense when they are now many years in the past. 
 
At its core, however, Hawaiʻi Regional Cuisine is an homage to the founding chefs of the 
Hawaiʻi Regional Cuisine movement and is worth skimming for the satisfying nuggets. 
Most Digest readers may prefer to focus on the first chapter with its interesting history 
of Hawaiʻian fine cuisine, and on each chapter’s clear and succinct conclusion. 


