Food Trucks

by Heather Shouse

  The attention that followed—and soon swelled, thanks to a cameo on the TV show Lost and a nod as Best Shrimp Truck from Honolulu magazine—translated to sales of roughly eighty to a hundred pounds of shrimp a day. Realizing that his wife’s cooked shrimp might just be his golden ticket, Ming-Cheng sold the farm in 2005, but those Pacific whites are still the only shrimp you’ll find on Macky’s truck.

  All five shrimp plates Macky’s serves come with the standard Hawaiian setup: two mounds of fluffy white rice, fresh pineapple, and a green salad drizzled with what’s generally referred to as “Oriental dressing,” a concoction of sesame oil, soy sauce, and ginger. Choices enter the equation only when it comes to how you like your shrimp. Macky says the diehards order theirs boiled and unseasoned (“Maybe they’re shrimp farmers testing us. Who knows?”), but he prefers his “spicy-hot,” sautéed in Hualien’s secret hot sauce, a distant cousin to Szechuan chile paste. Lemon-pepper remains something of the redheaded stepchild of the bunch, bringing up the rear as the flavorful-but-tame option for the AARP set. That battle champion coconut shrimp is the only fried option—the shrimp are soaked in coconut milk, dredged in a mix of flour and shaved coconut, then dropped in a roiling vat of vegetable oil—so that tends to be the choice for irie surfers. And finally there is the iconic garlic-butter shrimp, the variation found in every shrimp truck doing business in Hawaii, and which is most often linked to homesickness among expats and nostalgic rhapsodizing among tourists returning to the mainland. Any version you’ll come across has essentially the same ingredients: garlic, butter, and, of course, shrimp. But as Hualien Chen knows, it’s what you do with the shrimp that sets you apart.

  Macky’s Garlic-Butter Shrimp Plate

  Serves 4

  10 cloves garlic, minced

  1 tablespoon vegetable oil

  ¼ cup unsalted butter

  2 pounds Pacific white shrimp or other jumbo saltwater shrimp, deveined, with tail and shell on

  4 teaspoons garlic salt

  4 cups cooked white sushi rice

  1 small head romaine lettuce, chopped

  ½ small head red cabbage, chopped

  1 large carrot, shredded

  2 tablespoons prepared ginger-sesame salad dressing (any brand)

  4 fresh pineapple wedges

  Heat the garlic and vegetable oil in a sauté pan over low heat, stirring occasionally to make sure the garlic doesn’t burn, until a deep brown color, about 20 minutes.

  Melt half of the butter in a large sauté pan over medium heat. Add half of the shrimp and cook until bright red, about 3 minutes per side. Remove from the pan and set aside. Repeat with the remaining butter and shrimp. Sprinkle each of the two batches with 2 teaspoons of the garlic salt and toss to coat. Spoon the browned garlic into the pan with all the shrimp and toss to coat.

  Divide the shrimp among 4 plates. Add to each plate two ½-cup scoops of rice and a small pile of the romaine topped with an equal amount of cabbage. Sprinkle the shredded carrot on the cabbage and top the vegetables with the salad dressing. Garnish the plate with a pineapple wedge. E ‘ai ka-kou! (Bon appétit!)

  ( SIDE DISH )

  Not many people want to interrupt their Hawaiian vacation with a trip to a boring shopping mall (“you can buy shoes back home, dear”), but there is one reason to make a detour to the Waikele Shopping Center: a red- and white-striped trailer slapped with giant lettering that reads “HOT MALASADAS.” Malasadas are Portugal’s answer to the doughnut, holeless and amazing, yeasty and eggy like brioche inside but with an exterior that gives way with a crunch similar to that of a croissant. Leonard Rego’s grandparents came to Hawaii from Portugal in the late 1800s, and half a century later Leonard started his own bakery, selling these Portuguese sweets at his mother’s suggestion. His son, Leonard Jr., runs the business today, and it was his idea to roll out the Leonard’s Malasadamobiles, one of which roams (see www.leonardshawaii.com for locations) and the other of which is parked at the mall daily (94–894 Lumiaina St., Waipahu). The malasada fryer is constantly sizzling, turning the little puffs of dough golden brown before they’re scooped up by a wire basket and set aside for final flavoring. They can be injected with coconut, vanilla, or chocolate custard, but they’re better intact, tossed in plain sugar or given a dusting of cinnamon. I fell in love with the li hing mui variety, where the malasada is rolled in salty dried plum powder. It’s not for everyone, but mix-and-match boxes come by the half dozen, so you can afford to take a leap on one.

  Soul Patrol

  KEEP UP WITH IT: twitter.com/pacificsoul

  If you were the executive chef of one of Hawaii’s most popular fine dining restaurants—a revolving restaurant on the twenty-first floor, no less, with 360-degree views of Waikiki Beach—and you were adored by the media, making a six-figure salary, putting your kid through private school, and flush with benefits, would you leave it all to start a food truck? Sean Priester would, and did. And he’s banking on the island’s best fried chicken to sail into success.

  “I started as the chef at Top of Waikiki five years ago, I proved myself, and there was a point last year that I realized I was done proving myself,” Sean says. “I’ve been cooking in Hawaii for the past twenty years, and in the last ten or so my voice began to develop. One of the things Charlie Trotter wrote in Lessons in Excellence was every chef needs to find his voice, and I just found mine.”

  He found it in Soul Patrol, the white box truck he stumbled onto in 2009. Sean’s friend Utu Langi has headed up an organization known as H5 (Hawaii Helping the Hungry Have Hope) since the mid-’90s. Utu and a few friends cruise areas thick with poverty in a fully stocked lunch wagon, delivering hot meals to the hungry. One day in early 2009 Sean went along for the ride and came back with a newfound reverence for Utu’s mission, but also bitten by the lunch truck bug. After joining Utu on a few more outings, Sean couldn’t stop talking about how cool it would be to do this for his full-time gig. “And then what happened was Utu bought another wagon, and he just said, ‘Here’s your lunch wagon.’ At the time I was fully employed as the head chef at Top of Wakiki, and I was totally uncomfortable and overwhelmed with leaving. I guess I asked for it, but I didn’t think I was actually gonna get it.”

  At first, Sean tried to figure out a way to do both his fine dining gig and his lunch truck at the same time, getting “creative” with scheduling and pushing his bosses at Top of Waikiki to the limits of their flexibility. After about three months of this, plus weekend mornings cooking at a farmers’ market stand under the name Pacific Soul, it was pretty clear that Sean’s days of serving his food on fancy china were over.

  “I’ve cooked everything, from Hawaiian regional cuisine to progressive American, you name it. But I only just realized that I’ve always had this essence of the South in there, making gnocchi out of sweet potatoes, throwing greens underneath fish. I’ve always wanted something more traditional and Southern,” Sean says. “I’m an Army brat, but my parents are from South Carolina, and while I didn’t know it was a part of me, I embrace that as you see it now.”

  “Embrace” is putting it mildly. Soul Patrol is 100 percent Southern staples: barbecue spareribs with a perfect pink smoke ring; po’ boys stuffed with crunchy battered shrimp; Carolina-style pulled pork with the same vinegar tang Hawaiians have come to know by way of Filipino adobo; chili made from black-eyed peas; moist cornbread slathered with honey butter; and, of course, the buttermilk fried chicken that’s won more local acclaim in the year since Soul Patrol launched than Sean has seen his entire career.

  There’s no question Sean is cooking the best soul food Hawaii has ever seen, but it’s figuring out the truck game after stepping down out of the ivory tower that’s taking some time. He still sticks to his mission to work with H5 providing meals to the hungry, but the bulk of his time is spent navigating the streets of Honolulu and hoping Hawaiians eventually embrace Twitter the way chowhounds on the mainland have. Slowly but surely, the word is spreading, and as Sean gets faster and mor
e consistent with his Tweets, he’s elated to pull into a spot and find a few people milling about, just salivating to get their hands on that fried chicken.

  “I spent a lot of my career just wanting to be a great chef. Not a great black, soul food, Southern chef, but just a great chef,” Sean says. “But it turns out when I talk about my cooking, I think of my grandfather’s pot of field peas and neck bones and rice. I remember going to his house and experiencing that food, and there was something very spiritual about it. I didn’t quite understand it at the time. I knew it was good, but now I know what it means.”

  Soul Patrol Buttermilk Fried Chicken

  Serves 8 to 10

  2 quarts buttermilk

  5 cups water

  1 cup kosher salt

  ⅔ cup sugar

  ¼ cup lemon pepper

  3 tablespoons minced fresh rosemary, plus more for sprinkling

  1½ teaspoons minced fresh sage

  5 pounds chicken legs and thighs

  Lard or canola oil, for frying

  3 cups flour, seasoned with salt and pepper

  Sea salt, for sprinkling (optional)

  Combine the buttermilk, water, salt, sugar, lemon pepper, rosemary, and sage in a large nonreactive bowl or container with a lid. Add the chicken to the brine, cover, and refrigerate for at least 24 hours, and preferably for 48.

  When ready to cook the chicken, pull the pieces, one at a time, from the brine and slide your thumb between the meat and the bone, gently separating the flesh a bit from the bone where you can. This ensures the chicken will cook through to the bone. Return the chicken to the brine until the lard is ready.

  Heat the lard in a deep fryer to 350°F.

  Spread the seasoned flour in a shallow dish. Pull the chicken from the brine, one piece at a time, coat with the seasoned flour, and carefully drop into the oil. Fry for 12 minutes, remove with a slotted spoon, and transfer to a paper towel–lined plate to drain. Taste, and if more seasoning is desired, combine equal amounts of the rosemary and salt and sprinkle on the chicken.

  ( SIDE DISH )

  When locals get tired of the standard plate lunch fare synonymous with wagons, they seek out one of the three Simply ‘Ono (www.simplyono.com) trucks. These clunky warhorse trucks are nothing fancy to look at, but it’s what’s inside that keeps diners on their toes: prime rib with jus and horseradish sauce, cool crab club sandwiches, lamb French dip, and international comfort food from corned beef and cabbage to cheesy lasagna. The rotation of daily specials comes from the years Harris Sukita and Cora Stevens spent cooking at the Kahala Hilton, formerly one of the island’s premier hotels. When the hotel closed in 1995, Harris talked Cora into going into the lunch wagon biz. It’s been fifteen years of success since Simply ‘Ono launched, and along the way Harris and Cora became a couple (regardless of Cora’s insistence that she thought Harris was a “male chauvinist” back in the hotel kitchen), and they’ve also become surrogate parents to hordes of college kids who flock to the truck in search of comforting home-style eats. The day’s menu always balances something slightly fancy with good old down-home cooking, and Fridays feature Hawaiian classics like kalua pig, shoyu chicken, and chicken long rice—a compromise the couple made to not stray too far from their roots.

  Ray’s Kiawe Broiled Chicken

  FIND IT: Saturday and Sunday mornings at Haleiwa Super Market

  (66–197 Kamehameha Hwy., Haleiwa, Hawaii)

  KEEP UP WITH IT: rayskiawechicken@hawaii.rr.com

  On the mainland, kids sell chocolate bars to raise money for football uniforms or sleepaway camp. In Hawaii, they sell huli huli chicken, rotisserie-cooked chicken named for the motion huli huli, or “turn turn.” Ray Tantog has always been one to support a cute kid who has come knocking on the door, but after buying a poor excuse for a proper huli huli chicken, he marched over to the school’s football coach to announce that he could do better. A man of his word, he did, and he became the school’s chicken supplier for its fund-raiser by the following week.

  Ray has always been an all-around handy guy, mechanically inclined, tinkering with projects that would impress even skilled tradesmen. At the time of the infamously inferior football team chicken of the 1980s, Ray was working in refrigeration. In his spare time he made huli huli chicken for family and friends, cooking the birds on a little rotisserie on wheels he built himself. It was quite a leap forward from the huli huli method he learned as a teen when his family arrived in Hawaii from the Philippines. “Way back in 1949, we used to put the chicken on a stick and roll it by hand over a fire we dug in the ground in the backyard,” says Ray. “We started using the rotisserie around 1955, ’57, with the long metal skewer on the ground over the fire and the end in a bicycle sprocket, with one person on the side cranking it.”

  By the time Ray took that fund-raising gig, his homemade rotisserie was a four by four-foot self-contained smoker of sorts, with three metal skewers that could hold a dozen fryer chickens, fueled by kiawe charcoal, a hardwood mesquite relative native to Hawaii that burns hotter and longer than typical charcoal briquettes, with no chemical additives. After word spread that Ray’s Kiawe Broiled Chicken was putting out the juiciest birds in town, he and his rig were in high demand, so he put his six kids to work helping. It was clear that his small grill on wheels wasn’t going to cut it keeping up with school fund-raisers, backyard luaus, and church celebrations, so Ray crafted an ingenious rotisserie out of a sixteen-foot flatbed trailer, fabricating massive metal skewers equal to its width and fitting their end grooves with a chain powered by a reduction gear motor. The kiawe lump charcoal burns in the base of the flatbed as the chickens slowly travel from one end of the trailer to the other, the coals carefully tended by Ray so that the highest heat is near the front, crisping the skin and sealing in the juices, and a slightly lower heat throughout helps ensure a fully cooked bird. Ray figured out the sprocket and the timing of his contraption so that it takes twenty-five minutes for each rod of chicken to reach the end of the line, the exact amount of cooking time it needs to reach perfection.

  Over the years Ray added a thirty-foot trailer to the fleet, which he uses for events calling for around 1,500 chickens (Japanese churches are his best customers for the big rig). The original trailer he started with is still in rotation, used primarily for regular Saturday and Sunday gigs at a grocery store parking lot in Haleiwa, where the sweet smoke of kiawe wafts through the sleepy town before its surfers even crawl out of bed. And for events where fewer than five hundred chickens are on order, Ray wheels out his custom-built wagon, a crafty setup with a sneaky hidden burner that rolls out from behind a gate, cooks up the chicken, then rolls back into its storage spot as smoothly as a drawer on casters. He’s mastered each of these machines, but as he gets older, his children’s role in the family business has increased. Still, he’s quick to point out that only his sons Dino and Jesse can be trusted to man the flames.

  Ask Ray about any of his inventions and he’s happy to talk for days. Ask him about his chicken, though, and he clams up tighter than a witness pleading the fifth. “I just use my own spice, salt, paprika, just rub it on with no liquid, just season it, you know? But I’ve used the same chicken since I started, fryer chickens, three or four months old. Older chickens are tough,” Ray explains.

  He’s reluctant to go on, mainly because he doesn’t think the secret lies in the chicken. For a man who’s been building his own mobile cooking devices for fifty years, it’s the method that makes the difference. “People have taken my spice and done it themselves and they say it’s not the same. I know that. I’m waiting for a franchise. Not KFC, RKC. I want to put it in a brick building like Taco Bell and have my big rotisserie in the center. As soon as people walk in the door, that’s the first thing they see.”

  ( SIDE DISH )

  Want to stand out in a sea of North Shore shrimp trucks? Cook Thai food. Sounds simple, but that decision has brought success for Opal Sirichandhra since he opened Opal Thai (66–460 Kamehameha Hwy.) in
Haleiwa in 2006. The Bangkok native had more than a decade of cooking experience in the Bay Area before taking a vacation to Hawaii, falling in love with its similarities to Thailand, and relocating to the island. There he met his wife Aoy, also Thai but from Chiang Mai, and the couple started cooking a small lineup of Thai noodle and rice dishes in a propane-fueled tabletop wok set up under a ten-by-ten-foot tent along the side of the road at Sunset Beach. Their street food gig lasted about a year, until they left for the mainland, where Aoy gave birth to their son, Lio. They returned four years later with a California taco truck in tow and secured a spot in a shaded lot in Haleiwa, where three other trucks, including one of the famous Giovanni’s shrimp trucks, compete for customers. As the only Thai truck on the island, Opal has become a destination, earning legions of loyalists with bright green papaya salad and a delicious pad Thai, seasoned with a touch of the smoky roasted Thai chiles that Aoy’s mother sends her from Chiang Mai. Mom also sends packages of a homemade curry blend from a family friend, and Opal swears it’s a key to his truck’s success, pointing out that even if Hawaiians don’t know the difference, he does.

  Haili’s

  FIND IT: Auahi St. between Ward Ave. and Kamakee St., Honolulu, Hawaii

  There was a time when the waterfront at the southern tip of Honolulu was packed stern to stern with fishing boats, docked to unload their haul just after sunrise, then heading back out to sea by sunset. Their customers were wholesalers, restaurateurs, and families with many mouths to feed, and among those lined up to negotiate prices on skipjack tuna and squid was Peter Haili. In the late 1940s he got to the docks before the sun did, loading the day’s buy onto a rickety cart and wheeling it a few hundred feet to his modest fish store, one of a handful of businesses there in the Kaka’ako area. Peter sold the fish whole and filleted, diced up tuna for poke, and turned the scraps—the head, bellies, and innards—into palu, which sport fishermen used as bait. Gradually Peter’s wife, Rachel Ching Haili, set out nibbles of her home-style cooking for customers. There were maroon-colored strips of jerkylike aku, salted and air-dried tuna. Neat little bundles of pork shoulder and butterfish were wrapped in taro tops and ti leaves, steamed to perfection, and called laulau. Ground taro root was cooked down into poi, a purplish-gray pudding eaten alongside meals throughout the island for centuries. And like many Hawaiians with Asian roots, Rachel channeled her Chinese ancestry to make the mother of all Asiawaiian comfort foods: chicken long rice, a tangle of clear noodles and gingery chicken tossed in the bird’s rich cooking broth. That little counter was soon overflowing, and somewhere along the way Peter’s fish shop became Haili’s Hawaiian Foods.