Pier 38 on a normal day is a place of great fishiness—fish parts, fish insides, a wafting aroma of fish, with a view of Matson containers across the water. But the place sure cleans up nice.

Saturday was not a normal day. Pier 38, site of the Honolulu Fish Auction, was transformed into a site befitting a party priced at $10,000 per table. The event marked the exact day 20 years earlier that Hawaii chef Roy Yamaguchi opened his first restaurant, in Hawaii Kai.

It took an army to transform the site: tables for 280 people, draped in black and silver under a huge tent on the dock; the auction room itself, still looking quite industrial, but scrubbed clean for a champagne cocktail party.

On top of that, the fish auction has no kitchen. More on that later.

It does have freezers, though. That's where Francois Payard, one of the world's most respected pastry chefs, was scooping out ice cream late in the afternoon, a large, solidly frozen fish staring up at him from the floor.

The brown-butter ice cream had been made that morning, Payard said, to be garnished with “;pineapple chips”; that he'd made in New York and hand-carried on the plane. He was fascinated with the idea of serving pineapple at a function in Hawaii, he said, to the point where he and his assistant took a trip to the North Shore to bone up on pineapple lore.

“;We go to the Dole Plantation,”; he said. “;We even ride the train.”;

The eight other chefs were in need of cooking facilities. All the prep work was done in the kitchens at Kapiolani Community College, but the task of providing a kitchen at the pier—four portable ovens, 11 burners, several work tables and a refrigerated truck—was left to Jackie Lau, corporate chef for Roy's in Hawaii. Which seems only right, as she admits it was her thought that a party on the pier would certainly make an impact.

Later, as the night wound down, Yamaguchi would acknowledge the effort it took—not just the mechanics, but the meaning of it all. “;This is a million-dollar kitchen. This is real stuff. This is what my life is all about.”;

And not to get too gushy, but it was a mark of the specialness of the event that Yamaguchi himself spent half the night taking pictures. “;These chefs could be anywhere,”; he said, “;and they chose to be here.”;

Among them: Charlie Trotter, the acclaimed chef from Chicago, whose time in Hawaii would amount to barely 17 hours before he left to tend to his restaurant in Las Vegas: “;I got here at 2 this afternoon and I fly out at 7 tomorrow morning.”;

Trotter celebrated his own 20th last summer, inviting such chefs as Thomas Keller and Daniel Boulud to cook beside him. At $5,000 per person, the dinner for 80 raised $250,000 for Trotter's charitable foundation.

Trotter noted, though, that his restaurant ambition doesn't approach that of Yamaguchi, who has 37 restaurants in the U.S. and Japan.

“;Roy has certainly gone crazy,”; he said. “;I mean that in the best sense of the word.”;