I've seen restaurants claiming to offer "Hawaiian cuisine" but to me it all just looks like Chinese food with some pinapples thrown in. What are the features of real Hawaiian cuisine?

-- Caren Feldman (cfeld@ibm.net), January 10, 1999

Answers

This is kind of a tough one to answer. With over 50 ethnicities represented in Hawaii, you could have a typical "local" lunch being part Chinese, part Japanese, and part Hawaiian then dinner could be a mixture of Filipino, Korean, and Samoan dishes.

Some of the typical foods locals call Hawaiian include kalua pig (pig cooked in an imu or underground oven), lau lau (fish, chicken, sweeet potatoes, breadfruit in a leaf wrap), lomi salmon (salmon with onioins, tomatoes, and green onions), poi, and poki (raw fish with sea weed). These are just a few of the dishes.

-- Roy Inouye (roy@bothi.com), January 10, 1999.