Chef Hui 2021 Quarter 3 Report
Quarter Three in Review
Aloha kākou,
On a mountainside in Waianu Valley, just past Waiāhole Poi Factory, rests a thriving homestead with running streams, bountiful loʻi, plenty of ʻulu trees and sprawling vanilla vines. One afternoon in August, in lieu of tapping on laptops and strategizing over Zoom, we spent the day on this property up to our knees in muddy water pulling kalo from the ground for paʻiʻai. We were at Reppun Farm to work, but also to cook a meal with friends and share our story with the world. The camera crew was from our ʻohana, but the producer was sent by The James Beard Foundation. Their goal was to capture our organizationʻs work and mission, so that they could honor us along with a handful of other non-profits in the country doing similar work to keep communities fed and restaurants sustained over the past year and a half.
The rollercoaster of the pandemic continues to keep us on our toes. The return of Summer tourism was still raging in July, but by September COVID numbers spiked, tourism dropped and strict mandates were reinstated, once again leaving restaurateurs shaking their heads in frustration. Unemployment has run out and so have loans for restaurants, leaving 82% of restaurants in America betting they wonʻt make it past 2021.
This quarter was business as “pandemic usual” at Chef Hui. We continue our work feeding houseless youth in partnership with Early Childhood Action Strategy and chefs that have been with us since the beginning of COVID. We completed our Full Calabash Fund grant with two Mahiʻai Meal distributions featuring entrepreneurs Jessica Rohr – a purveyor of local meats – and Casey Burns – founder of HI Pie and Bodega Hawaiʻi. Chef Gooch taught the team of Blue Planet how to make pizza via Zoom creating an opportunity to share pizza meal kits with recipients of Child & Family Service. Laulima Food Patch and The Food Basket on Hawaiʻi Island wrapped their second 5-week Mahiʻai Meal Kit program. We served breakfast to kūpuna for eight weeks with Key Project. In July we partnered with Civil Beat to host a virtual recipe contest encouraging contestants to decolonize their palates by finding more ways to cook with indigenous crops and less with rice and wheat. And in August we grabbed our restaurant buddies for another afternoon caring for the ʻāina at Kōkua Learning Farm. Here is the impact those events had on our community.
Closing Thoughts
Che Hui continues to look for ways to show up for Hawaiʻi. Whether it is searching for the next grant, planning the next distribution or looking for new ways to connect communities to the culinary world to strengthen food security, we want to be here. Not just with food, but with joy. Because if we lose joy we lose everything.
Hawaiʻi is too special of a place to live with the feeling of loneliness or despair. There is always someone there. We simply need to turn to our neighbor and ask. Our promise is to be that neighbor again and again, for as long as it takes.
At 2:00 p.m. on September 27th, Chef Hui was spotlighted in a live Twitter event hosted by the James Beard Foundation called “Stories of Resilience and Leadership. We watched with pride as Chef Hui partner Chef Paul Matsumoto shared our story with over 500,000 people.
“When the pandemic hit the doors got shut on a lot of restaurants,” he said. “They had pallets of food. We had to figure out how we could distribute it and get it out to people that could use it.”
Partnerships like the one we have with Chef Paul, and the organizations listed above, are 100 percent why we are able to be that neighbor.
