… for dinner—small plates of abalone Rockefeller, and cold-smoked tomatoes flooded with ume ponzu. It’s as if Jason Peel, after decades of running restaurants for other chefs, couldn’t hold it all in anymore and just let loose in his first place of his own. Let’s say our excitement matches his.

Brunch is Nami Kaze at its best, more casual and drawing on some of the best breakfast traditions from across cultures, like the played-straight Japanese breakfast or labneh toast. But more often, cultures collide, as with the eggs Benedict, which swaps out listless English muffins for crisp Hong Kong-style shrimp toasts, cut into finger-sandwich lengths to be dipped into the poached eggs and hollandaise. And soon, you learn that Peel’s menu is not at all what you’d expect. The so-called omelets are silky-smooth chawanmushi topped with anything from mapo tofu to mentaiko cream, the latter’s richness offset with ikura. And then that honey walnut shrimp waffle: It’s the best thing to happen to waffles since fried chicken.

Though it seemed that Peel, born and bred on Kaua‘i, would have been content being the right-hand man to chefs for many more years, when the pandemic hit, it distilled his priorities. As Hawai‘i turned inward, Peel turned to Hawai‘i—to the chefs and cooks who worked for him, to the farmers he worked with—and wanted to build a home that didn’t yet exist. That meant creating a more nurturing environment than the work culture of many kitchens and focusing on seafood and vegetables.

The latter is more evident at dinner, where you’ll find wasabi okra and shishito peppers with preserved calamansi and black sesame. Corn beignets are puffs of air brought down to earth with a dredging of Japanese curry salt and Kewpie mayo. And there are two dishes of ‘ulu, one of which is ‘ulu tots (again, misdirection!) made with ‘ulu flour and fried, and though they’re paired with his grandfather’s recipe for barbecue sauce, the effect is surprisingly Italian, like fried polenta in tomato sauce. Like a lot of Peel’s food, it is our local culture returning to us by way of another.

While the vegetables are local, the seafood combines the local and imported. The local: Kona abalone dressed up oysters Rockefeller style, doused in butter and topped with garlicky kale and Sweet Land Farm’s goat cheese tomme. The imported: hamachi crudo with ají amarillo and fried ogo. Recently, Peel became one of the first chefs to buy fish from Paepae O He‘eia’s restored Hawaiian fishpond, which has yielded barracuda, toau (blacktail snapper) and Aussie mullet, which he has fried and served whole. Sometimes, though, like with pāpio, there isn’t enough for dinner service, so he fries it up for the cooks. But it’s all part of Nami Kaze as a teaching kitchen—Peel was a Kapi‘olani Community College culinary instructor for six years. And maybe one day, those fish will find a place in future omakase dinners alongside the à la carte menu. Because yes, there’s more to come. So much more. –MC

$$ for brunch, $$$ for dinner, 
1135 N. Nimitz Highway,
(808) 888-6264,
namikaze.com,
@namikaze.hi

… smash hit Tin Roof Maui, bringing touched-up plate lunches to a former okazuya space, or with his latest, Tiffany’s, taking over a Wailuku dive bar.

The building housing Tiffany’s has a deep history. In its most recent 20 years, it was one of Wailuku’s most beloved bars. From the 1950s to the ’70s, it was Wing Sing, a chop suey restaurant. And in years between, it was a hostess bar. Enter Simeon, with his own deep history, some of it overlapping with Tiffany’s. After finishing culinary school on Maui, he’d head there with friends, “trying to feel like an uncle, ordering too much food and watching uncles drinking Coors Light on ice,” he says. His order: “Steak bites, automatic. And crispy pork. It wasn’t good, but it’s something we always ordered. Just the Filipino in me, I guess. When I drink and eat, I gotta have fried pork belly.”

And so, when he took over the space in summer of 2022 and pared down the menu of more than 150 (yes, really) dishes, he kept the steak bites and the pork belly, improving the latter, of course, by letting more of the fat render and making it crispy. His Tiffany’s has a somewhat more manageable 50 dishes on the menu, and most are holdovers, just slightly tweaked. Like the salt and pepper shrimp, head-on, battered and fried and tossed with chile flakes and Thai basil. And the beef broccoli cake noodle, with copious oyster sauce gravy. My favorites, though, are his additions. He axed the surprisingly extensive sushi menu, but the hamachi sashimi, flooded with finadene, a Chamorro sauce that Simeon adapts with ponzu and plenty of onion and shiso, is all I need to be happy at Tiffany’s. The menu is still a work in progress as Simeon decides how much of the past to keep. But whether it’s a huge crispy pata that you need to pull apart with your hands or a simple clear saimin, Simeon continues to bring to the table the foods that locals like to eat.

–Martha Cheng

$, 1424 Lower Main St., Wailuku,
tiffanysmaui.com,
@tiffanysmaui   

… the minimalist Le’s Banh Mi, where Chi Lam bakes her own bread. Vietnamese baguettes are in their own wonderful category. Lam knows this. When she moved from Ho Chi Minh City to Honolulu six years ago, she tried a lot of baguette recipes, “but none of them taste exactly like the [ones] I used to eat in Vietnam, so I decided to learn how to bake,” she says. She now creates her own version every morning, and the results are airy and chubby loaves with delicate crackly crusts.   

And what she and her husband, Minh Tuan Le, do with them is just as lovely. The sandwiches are as restrained as the shop’s sleek white interior, which lets the details pop, like in the roast pork banh mi, with its delicate, soft center giving way to curly-cue green onions, seeded jalapeños, morsels of roast pork mixed with bits of fat and crackly skin. Even in the Saigon special, with all the fixings of cha lua steamed pork roll, ham, char siu, house-made pâté and mayo, cucumbers, jalapeño, pickles and cilantro, the bread still shines through. The vegetarian options include a lemongrass tofu as well as a mushroom banh mi. The entire menu consists of just four sandwiches and four drinks, including a coconut coffee—rich and strong, poured over a sweet and frothy coconut slush like a Vietnamese affogato. You won’t find plastic containers of spring rolls, rice cakes, buns and vermicelli. But with Lam and her husband’s attention to detail, you won’t miss what isn’t there.

–Martha Cheng/Thomas Obungen  

$, 808 Sheridan St., Suite 306B,
(808) 227-3066,
@les_banhmi