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.
