Hawaii Regional Cuisine

“Thirty years ago the joke was that the restaurant food was rea-son never to visit Hawaii. In this excellent study, Sam Yamashita brings an insider’s knowledge and a historian’s rigor to explaining how a dozen pioneering chefs re-versed this judgement. In doing so, they created a new genre of high cuisine, shattered the race, gender, and class barriers of the culinary industry in the Islands, and fostered fresh ways of fishing and farming. A telling tale of what a few deter-mined and intelligent people can accomplish.” – Rachel Laudan, author of The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage and Cuisine and Empire

Samuel Hideo Yamashita grew up in Kailua, a beach town in Hawaii, and studied history in college. A Woodrow Wilson Fellowship led to graduate work in history at the University of Michigan and a post-doctoral year at Harvard Univer-sity. He is currently the Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History at Pomona College.