Yesterday I rode my bike from Mōʻiliʻili to Seaside and Kuhio in Waikīkī, as I did every day for over two years working at natuRe Waikīkī, a French inspired farm-to-table restaurant. I trudged up the back steps, growing sentimental as I walked through the side door. Screams and hugs ensued. Within two minutes, one of the line cooks invited me to stay for makanai. Of course! Her cooking was exceptional. Sometimes sheʻd make Indian curry, other times Jewish fry bread with hummus and three kinds of Middle Eastern sauces… She loved spices and knew what to do with them.
I cannot overstate the importance of family meal. Family meal, also called “staff meal” or makanai as we call it at natuRe (our chef is Japanese), is a free meal a restaurant provides for its employees, either before or after their shift. The tradition is as old as time, and it can make or break morale. I remember working in kitchens dreading making family meal because we never had anything appetizing to work with. A shelf of leftover random mise en place does not a family meal make. I remember a cook frying chicken wings and tossing them in ketchup one night. Another night, a cook dumped all those deli containers of leftover mise into a hotel pan, covered it with puff pastry and called it pot pie. At natuRe it’s different. The cooks think about what they want to make and order the necessary ingredients. At times it felt like a competition, each meal was better than the last. I still do marketing for natuRe (I used to also be a server), for a while I was posting these family meals in our Instagram Stories. This is the best! No, this one! Finally, I just stamped every post with the same hashtag: #bestmakanai
I sat in the bar listening to the managers go over reservations with the servers that evening, devouring a bowl of warm, cilantro-specked rice, sweet corn salsa, fresh guacamole and heavily spiced grilled chicken sliced into two-inch strips, and instantly felt back home. Back with my family.
Recently published work:
Where to Buy Local Farm-Fresh Eggs on Oʻahu | Frolic Hawaiʻi