If the Tomato Recipe Contest was Chapter 1 in our interesting times of this past week, here’s Chapter 2.

You already read about Chef Alan Wong judging at our Tomato Recipe Contest the other day. Now let me tell you about something else he just did in conjunction with the farm.

Chef Alan, who is based on O‘ahu, regularly buys produce for his restaurants from Hamakua Springs as well as a few other farms here on the Hamakua Coast. And every year he flies his staff here – chefs and other staff from his different restaurants – for a couple days.

The purpose of his annual visit? To visit the farms, and the farmers, who produce the fresh, delicious ingredients they work with every day. Chef Alan has a personal connection with the sources of his food, and he wants his chefs and other employees to know where the food comes from too, and who grows it, and how, so they can take that knowledge back with them. So they visit each farm, see how the food grows and get to know the farmers a little.

Then the culmination of their visit is that all his restaurant people and all the farmers gather at Hamakua Springs for an absolutely world-class Alan Wong cookout using ingredients from those local farms. It’s Chef Alan’s unbelievably gracious and generous (and delicious) thank you to the farmers.

This year for the first time there was also an imu. On Monday afternoon Kimo and his good friend Al Jardine prepared the imu, filling it with pig, turkey, beef, taro, sweet potato and more.

Chef Alan put some nontraditional ingredients in the imu, too. Lesley Hill and Michael Crowell, of nearby Wailea Ag Group,
brought big long “trunks” of heart of palm to put into the imu as an
experiment (they were delicious).

Here’s how it looked after they opened the imu the next day and were taking the meat and other foods out. That’s Mrs. Ha there, Richard’s mom. She’s great.

Here they are, chopping up the cooked meat. That’s Al in the blue shirt and Kimo in the red.

We all gathered at the farm’s recently reclaimed green shack. We’ll tell you more about that historical building on the edge of Hamakua Springs later – it has a story, too. For now we’ll just say that it was the HQ for food preparation. See all the beautiful old photos of former plantation days? They tell some of the story of what plantation life used to look like.

So everybody gathered the food from the imu and took it inside, where tables were set up and Chef Alan and staff cooked and set up the long serving table. There were some amazing dishes made with Hawai’i Island Goat Dairy goat cheese and local Hamakua Mushrooms, and Ka’u coffee and Big Island Candies and more.

It is absolutely amazing what Chef Alan can do on a portable gas burner.

This was a shrimp, olive and tomato concoction. Is your mouth watering?

The serving line. There was even more food around on the other side, too, that doesn’t show here.

Richard thanked everyone for being there and talked about why Alan had brought us together, and then Richard’s grandson Kapono said a blessing in Hawaiian and English. And then we ate. And ate.

There was also a PBS crew present, taping the whole thing. They were following Chef Alan around taping a Chefs Afield program, which will air next year. There was a lot going on.

It was really a terrific evening. From the reason we were all there – because Chef Alan has such respect for, and such connections with, his farmer friends, and thanks them with such an incredible feast – to the new connections as restaurant folk and farmers got to know and appreciate each other, talk story and eat and laugh together. It was a fun, delicious, boisterous event where everybody seemed to be enjoy the food, the setting outside under the big tent, talking, the company.

A huge mahalo to Chef Alan and all his employees, who prepared such a tremendous feast and also created such a wonderful, memorable gathering.