Hawaii's Share Your Table

And as the plump chef in Pixar's movie Ratatouille tells us, “anyone can cook!” Indeed, everyone can be taught to cook, but the truth is, not everyone can cook for a living. With the long hours, hard labor and low pay, anybody who’s considering being a professional cook needs a dose of restaurant reality as an antidote to the Food Network mania. And that’s exactly what George Mavrothalassitis, chef/owner of Chef Mavro restaurant, and the Hale ‘Aina ‘Ohana (HAO) aim to do with their newest program, Restaurant Reality.

A few weeks ago, Braden Hiraoka and Charles Devaney from the Kauai Community College culinary program were invited to follow Chef Mavro in a two-day program divided into four parts: “The Kitchen,” “Sourcing,” “Service,” and “The Guest Experience.” Mavro is a member of the Board of Directors of HAO which covered the students' air and hotel for the program. The first day was spent mostly in Chef Mavro’s kitchen, on the first day of the new Spring Menu, rotating between stations and learning the details of the kitchen, from prep to service. “Inviting students into our kitchen is natural,” says Mavro. “We have a culinary laboratory going on in our kitchen every day anyways as we’re always working on new techniques and flavor combinations.”

The second day began with the “Sourcing” segment, starting with a 5am fish auction tour. Hiraoka and Devaney were then whisked around the island to Sumida Watercress Farm, Jeanne Vana’s North Shore Farms and Dr. Wenhao Sun’s Kahuku sea asparagus farm. In this segment, the students learned how important ingredients are to cooking and how a chef’s dishes depend as much on the passion and skill of the farmer as it does of the chef.



Devaney comes away from the farm tours with a sense of urgency to preserve and grow the local farm industry. “The most important thing is to achieve sustainability,” he says. “The watercress farm, it’s a beautiful farm, but then you see all this civilization around it, encroaching upon it. I’m sure there’s somebody that would just love to plant a shopping mall right there. So how do you protect that? How do you protect all these things?”

The last two segments, “Service” and “The Guest Experience” bridge the gap between the operations of the front of house waitstaff and back of the house cooks, showing that both sides working together smoothly is essential to the entire restaurant experience.

Hiraoka and Devaney still have some ways to go before running their own place. Hiraoka wants to open a saimin stand and Devaney hopes to run a high-end catering service. Though Hiraoka’s saimin stand is on the opposite spectrum of Chef Mavro restaurant, Hiraoka says the Restaurant Reality experience has given him a foundation to apply to whatever he does in the future. For even the humble bowl of saimin can be elevated to the sublime when prepared with good technique and ingredients. And especially here in Hawaii, our saimin stands are no less revered than our nationally-recognized restaurants.




Though HAO's advisory board includes such elite chefs as Alan Wong and Roy Yamaguchi and past programs include visting chefs such as Jonathan Benno of acclaimed Per Se, the goal of Hale ‘Aina ‘Ohana programs is not to push students into one cooking style or field. Rather, it's to “expose students to a wide variety of experiences,” says Hayley Matson-Mathes, Hale ‘Aina ‘Ohana Culinary Coordinator. "[It's] for them to appreciate passion, hard work, fresh and quality ingredients, a relationship with the farmer and to learn new ideas that they might not be exposed to at school.”

And in the end, it's all about the pleasures and inspiration of food. For while Mavro will talk to students about the rigors of the kitchen and the hard work, he also describes the transformative experience of something as simple as mashed potatoes and the sensuality of asparagus soup. Ultimately, Restaurant Reality is meant to inspire, not deter culinary students from his profession. The program hopes to strengthen students’ drive by exposing them to the focus of Mavro’s young chef de cuisine, Kevin Chong, to Jeanne Vana’s pursuit of perfection in her tomato fields to manager and sommelier Todd Ashline’s attention to detail. For the restaurant reality is that restaurants are tough places to work, but with determination and passion, the personal rewards and satisfaction are great.