Wong could easily rest on his capacity to cook delicious food and manage a talented staff. What sets him apart from his peers is not his ability to cook, but rather his active intrusion into the way we eat and grow food on the islands, and by extension, order our culture. In consistently pursuing the local over the non-local, he is making a political statement about what it means to eat here, now.

Alan Wong knows his numbers and has been making a pitch for the “eat local” movement for years. “The Department of Agriculture says that if we increase local consumption by 10 percent, we make 300,000 jobs and increase our local tax base by $600 million.” He goes on: “So, it’s our company mission to help get towards 10 percent by shining a light on these local growers. We do that, in part, with the Farm Series Restaurant dinners.” Although a week of these dinners is the price of a slightly used sedan, at least the moral component is in place. Wong certainly understands what he is up against. “Things are disappearing all around us. Look at the bees. Without them, we have about seven years on planet earth. I’m doing this adopt-a-beehive program with UH Hilo to help local folks learn about beekeeping. This is just bees though. We used to make 70 percent of our own food, our own eggs and dairy.”

He explains what he’s up to. “I know this restaurant is doing our part to be more self-sufficient and sustainable. There’s a supply and demand thing going on with local production,” he says as he checks off a mental list of points for an interview. “I was just in a civil defense meeting. Who knows how I got invited, but there I was. Without shipping, we’ve got no more than three days of MREs before we starve. I’m trying to make this place more than a restaurant. People raise money with us all the time – really the entire chef population does it so it’s not just us. This is good karma.” More than good karma, this is actually the sort of sermon that makes it seem completely rational to drop half a paycheck on a dinner date.

Alan Wong’s flagship restaurant on King Street in Honolulu is easy to miss if you’re zooming past McCully Street and the more conspicuous chop suey spots. The place requires a slower pace to find. The day I took the elevator up to the third floor, the chef and his staff were reviewing menu items for a forthcoming restaurant to be located in the Grand Wailea resort on Maui, named Amasia.

Arranged on one of the tables were dishes in various forms of development. Simply grilled, large sardines were arranged on a silver platter; poha and caper berries glistened in spiced olive oil; a platter of fried lotus root with mustard powder looked like something I would stand in line for 30 minutes to attack at Costco. Fried ulu and sweet potato spiraled out of a metal container like an edible fire, and a pot of Japanese pork curry with whole peppercorns and macadamia nuts funked up the area, disrupting all capacity for rational thought. I tried not to drool all over a conspicuous notepad. In a vain attempt to maintain professionalism, I sat askew of the table and waited to dig in like a Pavlovian dog after the bell had rung. It was intensely difficult to pay attention to the serious discussion of dish preparation with the full spread awaiting plunder like that. A later review of my notes was a testament to the experience. For a full page all I could write was, “Effing ONO,” like Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining when he really lost his marbles.

When Wong reviews his menu, it is a serious affair. Gathered around the table, the young chefs resembled doctoral candidates during a status review of their respective work prior to submission, hanging on the words of their director. He uses silence as an instructional tool much like a stoic professor out of a Kurosawa film, with all moves and words intentional and instructive. In The Blue Tomato, Wong writes about the process of menu development: “Our staff’s reaction and interaction is more important than whether that dish ever makes it onto the menu. … This process also makes anyone offering a critique a better teacher. Criticizing a new dish in front of the staff can be intimidating, but our most successful cooks, who have gone on to become sous chefs of chefs, were the ones who embraced this and met the challenge.” Each staff member was being actively reviewed for talent, and the dishes met the challenge.

New restaurants are notoriously difficult business ventures, and even the best have failed to survive past the watershed two-year mark. No matter what happens with Amasia, the food will be amazing. The concept of the restaurant is the “gastro-pub,” a phenomenon that has been changing the way we eat out for the better. Wong later explained it as “izakaya-style, something that goes across cultures. We’re celebrating Asian street food. There will be traditional tables, and a robata station for certain orders.” In describing the necessary investment discussions, he explained, “I was in a meeting with haole guys from the mainland, and you could imagine how well ‘pupus’ goes over as a restaurant title with them.”

Pupus would have been a great name, but not with the tourists. While the traditional American sit-down offers very few surprises, the pupu platter concept is nothing but hits. What Wong and other restaurateurs have picked up on is the way we eat when we aren’t stuck in our chairs. With smaller plates and more options, sharing becomes a necessity. Eating can be fun again. The chefs that Alan Wong has hired will not disappoint. This is local food unburdened by provincialism. These are local ingredients set free to inspire.

When I asked him what the secret is to cooking for local folks, he spun the question back at me, “How do you tell if say, a Chinese restaurant is good?” To which I reply, “If there’s a table of old Chinese dudes grinding at the corner table at 3 p.m.”

“You got it,” he replied, “Another good sign is if kids like your food. You can’t fake it to them.” Like an ancient sage, the Chef answered my question with an observation. The reason that local folks love his food so much is that it is a reflection of themselves. The food at his restaurant is an artistic, gorgeous interpretation of what we eat at home. These meals are worth every penny.

My contact into the glamorous world of fighting chickens was Benson*, an unpretentious, stocky fellow who despite cultural shifts toward altered racial nomenclature, is still quite comfortable self-defining as “Oriental.” Fight scheduling can be a sporadic endeavor as attendees and organizers have very real concerns about avoiding detection and prosecution. For Benson and I, our first trip to an event was a three-hour mission from town to the back roads of Wai‘anae Valley, near to where “that Samoan pig farmer got convicted of slavery,” a friend later pointed out. Although unsuccessful and dispersed due to fears of a police raid, Benson delivered a three hour master’s course in fighting chickens, from the two year preparation (every day) and the cost of feed (it can add up), to the careful, almost loving attention placed on a dying bird by a trained handler during a fight. It was then that I learned the local nuances of a practice as old as chicken-and-rice-for-dinner. We rescheduled for the next weekend.

Six days later, there was little chance of catching any sleep as I was up free-associating and googling the various ways people are injured or killed in gambling here on the islands: One guy burned in his car for deserting a debt; one guy shot on the side of the road after a big win; an old man whose calf was “butterflied open” by a wayward fighting chicken with a customized razor affixed to its leg. The threat of being maimed or killed took all the joy out of participant observation methodology. I attempted some self-motivation by remembering one of life’s inconvenient truths: that if you follow all the rules, you probably won’t have any fun. ** Summer heat rose up from the road as we took off for the fight. Honolulu’s fringes progressively crumbled in the rear-view mirror, from high rises to mid-century suburbs to sodden fields of dense vegetation. These in turn gave way to a flanking of undeveloped private property and the onshore sea. The land became spare enough to where one could actually imagine a dark, mysterious spot on the satellite map, some far away place on this densely populated island where our phones’ service indicators would be out of bars. Then the windmills began to rhythmically slash at the horizon – New Age shining Pololu protecting the northernmost point of the island – and we took a hard turn down a dirt road.

Even after the previous trip and all I had read, I still had in mind that a cockfight would be an after-dark, furtive affair: squatting men betting and drinking and sweating out the brutal suspense under the cover of night. Benson cut the wheel sharply, taking us off the road and down a dirt one-lane in the broad daylight, navigating by an instinct that removed us from the state highway. “I bet it’s there,” I said like an idiot as we passed a thicket and a herd of pickup trucks parked at odd angles came into view, like nervous horses ready to bolt.

Once one knows what to look for, a derby fight in the country is one of the worst kept secrets on the rock. We walked with half a dozen other local guys through the property, passing poi dogs loosely leashed to hand-built sheds and feral cocks who kicked up the alkali dust in their wake. Dozens of triangle-shaped pens were in neat rows, with chickens leashed by the leg to their bases, just long enough so they could jump to the top and crow their gizzards’ content. Men in surf trunks and work boots carried coop boxes holding three chickens each, the size of a disco-era subwoofer. There were several tailgates open for party mode in the field, and the unmistakable tang of pork adobo lingered in the air. Seemingly innocuous as a country picnic.

Beneath the surface of the country gathering, I sensed a deep well of transgressive danger. Maybe it was the ruddy local boys exiting a lifted truck that looked like something driven by a Libyan rebel? The flash of 3-inch blades being attached to strutting chickens? The row of men resembling an outdoor police booking station waiting for action? In retrospect, the veil of lawful safety was lifted when I caught sight of a thin, elderly Asian woman who sat in a plastic chair in the center of the ring, lazily smoking a Marlboro and eyeing the entrants as the sun slanted over the pit. I avoided eye contact with her as I did most everyone else, half expecting her to point a long bony forefinger in my direction like something out of a Stephen King novel, outing me as a writer and causing my fact to melt.

At the weighing tables, I caught sight of the fighters. These “chickens” are not the banal type embroidered on aprons or playfully painted on a pack of thighs at Sac-N-Save. More than anything they are war birds, bred with decades-old stud books for strength and streamlined for combat. To the uninitiated, the cocks all look the same until they start dying differently. But to the handlers there were differentiations in breed, height, weight and ability that determined the matches for the day, thousands of dollars riding on each bird.

As things got going, there was a definite code of accepted conduct to the rowdiness, and one would have to be diagnosed with something out of the DSM-IV-TR (ie: crazy) to pick a fight. Though loud, the betting was far from crazy. It seemed that everyone there was picking up on the nuances of chicken, handler and referee that intuited how to direct funds, not unlike a low-end stock exchange. The yells of “jes! jes!” interlaced with harsh Ilocano accents raised the level of claustrophobia significantly.

More than racial signifiers, there was a certain hardness to the crowd: working class, middle-aged local men, with the occasional facially tattooed drug dealer mixed in for third world effect. After feigning an interest in sharing a smoke with someone a few chairs down, Benson later told me that the fellow I was chatting with was the owner, and that “he knows your face now, so you’re good to sit there.” Oh great. Off to the left, an excited better told me, “My P.O. told me this is healthier than drugs. I didn’t go to a fight for three years and I didn’t know what to do with myself. Brah, stay so excited!” As he spoke, I could not help but notice that he was thumbing more hundred-dollar bills in his hand than he had teeth in his mouth. 

For those of us with a modern life unaccustomed to the casual nearness of death and violence, the pit appears to be a brutal environment. For some handlers though, working chicken looked as easy as operating a remote control. An elegant, white-haired Filipino man in black wranglers, a spotless sweater, and blood-spattered tan cowboy boots looked like everything a chicken cutman would be. As he entered the pit with the underdog cock, he looked much more composed than the young braddah in slippers nervously cradling his big red. As the elegant man’s fighter began spitting up blood, he held it upside down just long enough to suck blood out of its beak and encourage it to bite its opponent. He spat the purple clot onto the dirt, searing an image onto my mental retina that I’m sure to recall anytime I fear dinner is not cooked through enough. Although doomed, his cock won the fight with his veteran skills.

After a few quick rounds, the elegant Filipino man re-entered the pit, and I almost got into the spirit of losing money. That was until Benson informed me of the quick hand signaling required to enter the fray. He explained: “A finger up means ‘jes,’ which today is $100. A finger down means $1,000. Two fingers down: $2,000 … so umm, maybe best if you just don’t use your fingers.” With that in mind, I kept my digits neatly folded on my lap while the dust flew and the toothless ex-con to the left of me made it rain Benjamins after winning an upset against a 300-pound heavy across the pit. “We all going eat good tonight!” he exclaimed, with me nodding in silent approval, careful not to give a thumbs up for fear of owing someone the rent under enforcement of the syndicate.

By the fourth fight, I had grown tired of the bloodshed. So too had the blonde cock being handled to attack his already critically wounded opponent. Despite some clever flicks to attempt a reaction, he stopped biting back and began to peck the ground, looking like he wanted nothing more than to go back to being a humble, big-boned chicken from Waimānalo. The Waimānalo blonde, like all the other chickens, had no idea this was a fight to the death. Although cocks have a natural bony spur at the back of their feet, there is no Darwinian advantage in killing an opponent of the same species in a matter of minutes. Chickens are existential creatures, somehow forgetting an experience right after it happened. Although they fight, cocks without knives attached to their legs quickly determine a pecking order and continue on their dumb way, forgetting the whole affair and going back to scratching for scraps.

There are such things as stupid questions, and the stupidest one a cockfighter hears usually has to do with what happens to dead birds. Benson told me on the way home, “Everything that goes down in human fights goes down in chicken fights. So you’ve got some guys who try to cheat, there could be poison on the blade or in the bird – definitely something you don’t wanna eat.” As we parted ways, Benson mentioned another fight next weekend and asked if I wanted to go. “No thanks,” I replied, digging my fingers into my pockets to signify no bet.

Mural outside of Nextdoor in Chinatown, Honolulu by artist Vince Ricafort

In order to simplify the following blog for Twitter users, here it is in less than 144 characters:

HNL C&C selling us out. APEC not for us. If u free markets, pls. free people- economic conversation not in vacuum. #YOURSHIRTISSTUPID

In November, Honolulu will host the 22nd annual Asian Pacific Economic Conference (APEC). Over the years, the member economies have sought three goals: trade and investment liberalization, business facilitation, and economic and technical cooperation. Recently, though, critics of the conference have come from all sides, arguing that the proliferation of bilateral trade agreements between impatient member countries makes the whole thing irrelevant, that maybe freeing markets before you free people is jumping the gun (ahem China), and the obvious one: Trade liberalization tends to lead to gross economic inequality. Adding to the irrelevance argument is that India, after not being let in on APEC talks after years of being held at the door,  joined the East Asia Summit, on its sixth year this October in Bali.

APEC goes down in a different city every year, and not all cities are cool with paying for a party they aren’t invited to. The 1997 meeting was held in Vancouver, Canada, and got controversial when mounted police tagged the crowd with pepper spray. The 2007 conference in Sydney, Australia included a $150 million investment and a “great wall of Sydney” that was crashed by a local prank TV show with a rented limousine and a cast member dressed as recently deceased Osama Bin Laden. American media covered last year’s event in Yokohama, Japan with about as much enthusiasm as they covered the Commonwealth Games.

Organizers have a tradition of dressing the leaders in local garb, leading to what is now over 20 years of goofy photos of middle-aged men in indigenous outfits draped over pricy suits, creating an awkward slideshow that precedes any TV coverage. For Honolulu’s event, a call went out several months ago to local designers, so we can expect some more begrudging awkwardness. Personally, I’m looking forward to a photo of Hu Jintao dressed like a Mililani uncle on his way to tee time.

This year’s APEC has a specific back story for local artists and critics of power. On April 3, internationally famous artist and critic of the Chinese government Ai Wei Wei was detained in a Hong Kong airport for undisclosed reasons. Ai has been doing this for years. Instead of hiding from China’s version of COINTELPRO, he simply put all of his daily activities and views on his blog. After initially designing the “bird’s nest” for Beijing’s Olympic hosting, he abandoned the project, saying to other artists, “It’s disgusting. I don’t like anyone who shamelessly abuses their profession, who makes no moral judgment.” Ai Wei Wei’s profile in the international arts scene couldn’t be any bigger, as he was arrested on the heels of his acclaimed Sunflower Seeds exhibit at the Tate Modern in London, with current exhibition Zodiac Heads going up in New York’s Central Park.

An international groundswell of artists has sprung up in Ai’s defense. His stenciled image has appeared on the sides of Chinese governmental buildings in Hong Kong and mainland China. In April, over 2,000 people marched in Hong Kong; by May, numerous arts communities around the world had signed up and sent letters. Here in Honolulu, Vince Ricafort’s addition to the chorus of discontent went up on Hotel Street. For Vince’s piece, he altered an image of the artist from 1995, when Ai dropped a 2,000-year-old Han Dynasty urn, in part to discuss the Chinese government’s destruction of its people’s history. For the mural, the urn was turned into a Coca Cola bottle, adding a little globalized economic analysis on top of the original piece.

APEC continues to attempt conversations about open markets in a vacuum, disregarding discussions of human rights and its own growing irrelevance. This time, Honolulu will pay for the party.

For more reading on APEC:

Does APEC Matter? eastasiaforum.org

About John Hook
The great thing about John, other than the fact that he enjoys funny hats, fake mustaches and animals in human clothing, is that he’s brilliantly quick and creative behind the camera. We have had the privilege of working with John here at FLUX for the past two issues, and his consistency and skill have quickly made him our go-to photo guy. In only a short time, John has compiled a beautiful collection of work for us. Below are some of our favorite shots from John.

Jewelry designer Noelani Love and her son Aukai.



Goldsmith and jewelry maker Jason Dow



William S. Richardson School of Law professor Mari Matsuda and her family.



Book artist Jacqueline Rush Lee.



Four-time ASP world champion Stephanie Gilmore at the Surfer Poll Awards at Turtle Bay Resort.



Clones of the Queen singer and FLUX creative director Ara Laylo.