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Pidgin for a mouth-watering dish is brok'd'moutt (it breaks the mouth). While Hawaiian cuisine may never break Michelin's mouth, Maui offers some distinctive delicacies: ophis (yellow limpets) eaten raw, chicken stewed in coconut milk, kuolo (coconut and sweet-potato pudding) and macadamia-nut pie, aloha cousin to Southern pecan pie; also, almost all the island's fish, notably mahimahi (dolphin), ahi (tuna), ono (wahoo), opakapaka (pink snapper), akule (mackerel) and aquaculturally raised catfish, all of which are often served in a papillote of ti leaves; and all the tropical fruits like papaya, persimmon, pineapple, lilikoi (passion fruit), guava and dozens of wild berries. Between meals, there are Dewey Kobayashi's famed Kitch'n Cook'd potato chips, which are unobtainable on the mainland at any price. Whether for malihin is or for themselves, Mauians, like all Hawaiians, dish up gargantuan meals, fit for a 300-lb. Queen Namahana. "Mo is bettah!" they say.
Restaurants have bloomed like mamane flowers;, there are some 160, most of them so-so or ho-ho. Among the best: Inter-Continental's La Perouse (where the resident harp player is truly named Holly Angel), Wailea Beach's Raffles, Robaire's, Kimo's and Chez Paul, a French bistro in a beat-up storefront near Lahaina that is owned by a Boston Irishman named Paul Kirk (fortunately, his French wife Fernanda presides over the stove).
The better places do not curdle the diner's juices with Tin Pan Aloha plunk-plunk music. Some of the most memorable songs are English or American ballads rendered in Hawaiian to a Hawaiian beat; The Battle Hymn of the Republic sounds terrific that way. Many other chants have their island-English versions, to wit: The Twelve Days of Christmas, in which "my tutu [grannie] give to me one mynah bird in one papaya tree, two coconut, three dried squid, four flower lei, five fat pig, six hula lesson, seven shrimp as wimming, eight ukulele, nine pound of poi, ten can of beer, eleven missionary and twelve television."
A more magnanimous tutu would surely have thrown in one $500,000 condo and two grilled mahimahi filets. Mo is bettah! Brok'd'moutt! Thank you, Sun! —Michael Demarest
*To this day. the state flag incorporates the Union Jack.