The Best Places to Eat in Oahu, According to ‘The Sioux Chef’ Sean Sherman

Megan Spurrell
·6 min read

Collage by Andrea Edelman Kay

Welcome to Where Chefs Eat on Vacation, a column in which chefs tell us what they ate on a recent trip.

If you keep up with Sean Sherman (Oglala Lakota), known to much of the internet as “The Sioux Chef,” it's little surprise that the Minneapolis-based food activist and award-winning cookbook author was excited to eat his way through Hawaii. His first trip to Oahu in 2022 was a visit to explore the island's food and agricultural landscape through an Indigenous lens, with Native Hawaiian chef Kealoha Domingo—but the annual Hawaii Food & Wine festival, which he participated in last year (and a friendship with Domingo), has brought him back since.

“There's a lot of parallel with Indigenous peoples all over the world, and the story is similar in Hawaii,” says Sherman. “These amazing Indigenous cultures had all of their own food systems and governance and culture and language, and colonization disrupted all of that. So it's a story of trying to understand people who are working on Indigenous pieces [of culture] today, compared to the tourism industry that was just culturally appropriating a lot of [Indigenous Hawaiian culture for so long].”

Together, Domingo, Sherman, and Sherman's partner Mecca Bos, a founder of the BIPOC Foodways Alliance, drove around Oahu to meet farmers sustaining native taro crops, try dishes from Pacific Rim cultures, and consume a whole lot of fresh fish. Bedding down at the iconic Ossipoff Cabin, by legendary architect Vladimir Ossipoff, was also a highlight—but ultimately, it's that poke-to-go he's still thinking about.

Ahead of the next installment of the Hawaii Food & Wine festival, taking place this October and November across three islands—and which will host local chefs like Domingo and Sheldon Simeon, alongside visiting talent like Crystal Wahpepah and Reem Assil—we asked Sherman about his favorite bites on Oahu, including which he would consider flying back for. With a cookbook coming out next year, and the expansion of his buzzy Owamni restaurant into Bozeman and Anchorage, Sherman's next trip to Hawaii isn't on the books just yet. But you can do yourself a favor and follow in his footsteps.

Did you have a go-to breakfast order throughout the trip?

I basically just do espresso, and then my partner doesn't really eat ‘til lunch. But one morning I got up pretty early, so I grabbed Spam musubi because I wanted to try it. Even though I grew up with Spam, it's not my favorite. It's funny, because, like, we live in Minnesota, where Spam is from, and there’s a Spam museum here. But obviously it has such a deep connection to Hawaii.

A standout lunch?

We were driving around—we were kind of all over the island a little bit—and across the hills from Honolulu there's a town that a lot of locals live in called Kaneohe. In this strip mall space there was a poke shop called K. Bay Bros. It was so good, I’ve been there three times now, and I've never found anything like that. There’s always a line of locals, and you just grab it to go and have a picnic. There are a bunch of different kinds of poke, a bunch of ahi, some crab poke, salmon poke, even poke with limpets, these little sand dollar things. That was just the taste of the culture—that stuff was so tasty.

What other local flavors were you excited to try?

There's a lot of Southeast Asian, Japanese, Chinese influences all over the place in Hawaii. Zigu is a Japanese place in Waikiki we found, the first night we arrived. It's not too far off the beach, and it’s small but it seems to be pretty well known. We were sitting at the bar so we got to talk to the bartenders and get a feel for things. We ended up there not once but twice because the sushi was so good. It was so clean. They were using really fresh fish from the islands, and I remember some of the appetizers like the mochiko chicken. It's their version of fried chicken, like a karaage. We got a bunch of rolls and sashimi and nigiri, as you do at sushi restaurants, because it was just so good. And they had a local sake too, brewed on one of the islands.

We found that spot by wandering around, but Kealoha brought us to a spot called The Pig and the Lady. It was in Chinatown, and it was just good. Kind of modern Vietnamese. We just ordered the menu because Kealoha knew the chef, who was really cool, and it was just a flood of food. There was this Burmese salad, we had some noodle sides, some fish.

Then there was one place called Nami Kaze, which was another sushi spot. And again, like, you're just on an island, so it made sense to eat a lot of fresh fish constantly, you know?

The most exciting restaurant on the island right now?

Kealoha is trying to do an Indigenous Hawaiian eatery at the Capitol Modern museum called Nui Kealoha pū paʻakai kākou [known as Nui Kealoha]. I looked it up, so I can tell you exactly what that full name means: great love in a place bound by salt. Because kealoha means “big love, great love, or much love.” And then the rest of it means “a place bounded by salt, meaning waters and the sands.” I think it's very poetic in Hawaiian lore.

Sometimes tourism is so exploitative—in Hawaii, most of the food comes from off the island and most of the money goes off island too. So I think it's really important to support people like Kealoha, who's going to be opening up this native Hawaiian [project], because he's purchasing products from a lot of the native growers. [Editor's note: The Capitol Modern location of Nui Kealoha had yet to open when Sherman visited, but is now open to the public.]

Any food item you stuffed in your suitcase to bring home?

We couldn’t bring taro back, but there’s this drink, kava, it's kind of like a stimulant. If you drink too much it makes you almost drunk. They drink it in little, tiny coconut cups and use it at every local celebration. It's kind of a weird thing, but it'll slow down your body movements if you drink too much. I feel like they're trying to make some businesses out of it, but some locals kind of frown on that—it's ceremonial for a lot of them. It has an almost medicinal taste, but it grows on you once you know what you're drinking.

Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler

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