Honolulu

History, culture, and diversity converge on the table of Honolulu, the main city on Oahu, a 597-square-mile island where almost a million people reside with no ethnic majority. It is a city that hosts more than 4 million visitors a year who seek expansive beaches and sunshine; it is a city where Diamond Head, Waikiki Beach, pineapple, and mai tais are symbolic.

The story of food in Honolulu begins with early Polynesian explorers who carried a dozen significant foods in their canoes across thousands of miles of ocean to Hawai’i. Among those foods were taro, sweet potato, breadfruit, banana, coconut, sugar cane, mountain apple, pig, dog, and chicken. Fish and seaweed from the surrounding Pacific waters added to the diet of early Hawai’ians as they cultivated their food crops in one of earth’s most remote geographic locations.