Next Wednesday: Up close with chef Ming Tsai
By Betty Shimabukuro
Star-BulletinCUISINES of the Sun is the kind of event where, when you get home, you tell your friends, "I was there and YOU weren't." The kind of event where they give you a chocolate tart made by New York's Francois Payard, just about the best pastry chef in the country, thank you very much. It's perfectly bittersweet, oozing a warm, mellow filling, and on top of feeding it to you, Payard tells you how to make it.
Or they give you a piece of smoked lamb with an incredible fennel flan just invented by Todd English, who has two James Beard awards, which is like having two Oscars (think Jack Nicholson). It's paired with a sneak-preview wine that won't even be bottled until November, and even then won't be available outside the winery. Feeling pretty special?
OK, that was gushy. You get that way after you eat yourself into a stupor for the better part of a week and pour a crate of fine wine into yourself, too.This is how the other half eats, for four days and nights at the Mauna Lani Bay resort in Kona, at an annual food extravaganza they call Cuisines of the Sun. Price tag, with accommodations: $2,215.
I was there, and you weren't. Did I mention that?
Cuisines annually draws championship chefs from throughout the country (this includes a few local boys whose star power is nothing to sneeze at), and they in turn draw hundreds of well-heeled eaters to one of the sunniest corners of the world.
Here, through numbers and anecdotal evidence, is how some very lucky people were entertained from Saturday through yesterday and why they went home much rounder than when they arrived.
300 shumai
The star among stars at this year's event was Ming Tsai, the Food Network chef whose "East Meets West" cooking show has made him into a culinary Brad Pitt. He has the credentials to back it up, including a James Beard Award for his Wellesley, Mass., restaurant Blue Ginger, and more than one chef-of-the-year title.
For the opening-night buffet-style blowout he made 300 thin-skinned shumai stuffed with foie gras and shiitake mushrooms, as well as a sushi using soba instead of rice and an ahi "parfait" topped with caviar and cream.It's a cooking style that marries well with Cuisines, which encourages a merging of cultures and styles. It's also a culinary philosophy -- East blended with West -- "that is kind of the key going into the new millennium," Tsai said, between posing for photographs and shaking hands with star-struck fans.
As for that part of it, "there are worse places to be," he said. "It's a lot better than people yelling out, 'Hey Ming, you owe me money!' "
1,900 wine glasses
At most wine tastings, you get one glass, which you carry from station-to-station to fill up. At Cuisines, you get a new glass with every pour. Not a big deal, perhaps, to the nongeek, but in wineland, it is a mark of distinction.On the first night alone, nearly 2,000 wine and champagne glasses were prepared for 335 drinking eaters. Each one was hand-polished, a task that took 15 people several hours to complete, and not just anybody waving a cloth napkin, but 15 restaurant managers from Oahu and the Big Island.
After each event, the glasses were run through the dishwasher twice, then twice more with hot water only. Each day, the polishing began again.The glasses were treated with such care so that no distracting scents would interfere with the rareness of what went into them. For example, a 1990 Gunderloch Auslese "Three Star," of which only 50 cases were bottled, of which only eight were sent to the United States, of which four were served at Cuisines.
Winemaker Fritz Hasselbach of the German winery Weingut Gunderloch said his wife, Agnes, only opens a bottle of "Three Star" on very special occasions. "I am very pleased to taste it again. At home I wasn't allowed."
42-1/2 ounces of margarita
This is what you get in a Megarita from Cisco's Cantina in Kailua, which has nothing to do with Cuisines except that the owners, Martha Harding and Greg Blotsky, have faithfully attended the Mauna Lani event for several years."We're in the food and beverage business and we're very, very picky," Harding said; here they can find nothing to complain about.
Laurence and Kiyomi Lueck have been to nine of the 10 Cuisines events, as well as to similar affairs in Europe, Japan and Hong Kong. They find Cuisines to be beyond compare."They show you how wine goes with food and how to flavor food and all the things we care about," Kiyomi Lueck said.
In Detroit, Brigitte and Chuck Bingham -- "food and wine junkies," is how they describe themselves -- schedule their vacation each summer so they can fly to Kona for this event. It is an extravagance, they admit, "but most of the people who come to something like this, a couple hundred dollars one way or the other is nothing," Chuck Bingham said.
70 volunteers in the kitchen
The superstar chefs arrive with very few of their own people -- their kitchen crews are made up of people recruited from throughout the country who take time off from work to fly themselves to Kona and do prep work at the Mauna Lani for free."You've got to be invited to pay your way and then you have to smile about it," said Phil Sassaman, who as executive chef at the Mauna Lani is host chef for the event.
The volunteers do it to be near the best chefs in the country, to network, to gain experience.
William Queja, assistant chef at Hoku's in the Kahala Mandarin Oriental, was thrilled to find himself working for Ming Tsai in his third year of volunteering. The annual experience polishes his technique and teamwork skills , Queja said, and has allowed him to rub shoulders with chefs like Emeril Lagasse in 1997. "That was great. It was like a big Mardi Gras."
60 pounds of tomatoes
Hawaii chef Alan Wong is the favorite son at this event. He's participated in every one since the beginning in 1989, when he was running the Mauna Lani's CanoeHouse restaurant.Now, of course, he has his own restaurant and his very own James Beard "Oscar."
Yet Cuisines remains "my one event for the year that I continually think about," Wong said. Part of it is a lingering connection with the Mauna Lani. "I love it here. I really had a good life here."
And part of it is that event organizer Janice Wald Henderson assigns him a new challenge every year. Like the time she gave him an event called "New Wave Luau," a concept that became the focus of his new cookbook.
This time, he took on a workshop on making fresh-squeezed juices bolstered by neutraceuticals. Wald Henderson thought it would be a good fit because Wong has recently taken charge of his health, dropping 35 pounds and controlling his lifestyle so well that two months ago he was able to go off his blood-pressure medication.He presented his audience with pages of research on the benefits of various herbal additives and explained how to hide good-for-you concoctions like -- yuck -- celery juice behind the sweetness of tomato or apple.
He served up three juices -- one of which required his kitchen crew to cut up six boxes of Big Island Sunrise tomatoes -- then coached individual tables on creating their own blends.
You have to wonder if they all got the point, though. At the last table, celery, parsley, tomato, pineapple, apple and beet juices went into the blender -- then someone poured in a tiny bottle of rum. It was quite good, even Wong said so.
11 hours in the kitchen
Todd English, executive chef at the acclaimed Olives in Boston, said he looks for a background in athletics when he hires his kitchen staff. Preparing great food is a lot more about hard work than it is about glamour, he said."People who play team sports have stamina. They need hand-eye coordination because you're really juggling a lot of things."
He was assigned to create four dishes to pair with four very rare wines Monday night. Each dish was meticulously crafted on an assembly line, with English receiving each one at the end. (Imagine Bacon-Wrapped Quail Chop with Umbrian Truffles, Israeli Porcini Couscous and Compote of Roasted Shallot and Sangiovese Macerated Cherries. Imagine how long it takes to wrap 150 tiny quail chops, not to mention macerate all those cherries.)The prep work took all day. English and his crew worked at a constant pace from 7:30 a.m. until the event closed at 6:30 p.m. "You need to be in a certain physical condition to handle it," he said.
In the end, when English walked into the dining room, people actually stood and cheered.
Two guys, from East and West
It is mid-morning on the last day and the two guys on stage are Ming Tsai, from the East Coast, and Roy Yamaguchi, from beyond the West Coast.Yamaguchi cooked last night, along with Alan Wong. Each prepared a dozen entrees, a cocktail and several desserts, filling six tents with frantic, steaming, grilling activity.
But morning has arrived and Yamaguchi is cooking again and trading chef jokes with Tsai.
He holds up Tsai's specially made knife. "Ming told me after the show I could have this knife."
"That's good," Tsai says, "because Roy told me I could have two of his restaurants."
Oh, almost forgot the food: Miso-Marinated Salmon from Tsai and Vietnamese-Style Grilled Ahi with Mango Salad from Yamaguchi, served at 10 a.m. with two incredible wines.
Ah yes.
I was there and you weren't. Did I mention that?
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