- [Francesca] Today we're on the island of Maui.
I'm here to learn about how Filipino food
has evolved in Hawai'i.
We're gonna meet up with Chef Sheldon Simeon,
whose grandparents immigrated to Hawai'i in the early 1900s.
He's gonna show me how to harvest sugar cane,
farm Filipino ingredients,
and, of course, cook three of his favorite
Filipino-Hawaiian dishes.
I mean, that's why you're here, right?
(upbeat music)
In the early 1900s, the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association
heavily recruited Ilocanos from the Philippines
to work on Hawaii's plantations.
Ilocanos come from the Ilocos Region
of Luzon in northwestern Philippines.
Sheldon, where are we?
- We are standing at the foot of a sugar mill
here in Pu'unene in the center of Maui.
- [Francesca] It's abandoned, right?
- [Sheldon] It's abandoned.
It closed just two years ago.
It was the last sugar mill in Hawai'i that was operating.
But can you imagine at its peak,
it was the livelihood of the island, of the state, in fact.
- [Francesca] Sheldon opened his second restaurant, Lineage,
to celebrate the recipes of his Ilocano roots
in the Hawaiian islands.
- [Sheldon] Ilocano food, it's all about the vegetables,
in my opinion, vegetables and pork.
Guisantes on the menu, it's Pork n Peas,
the one dish that is always the most requested.
Soy sauce.
- [Francesca] What kind of soy sauce?
- Aloha Shoyu, sugar cane or apple cider vinegar,
mix that around. - Vinegar.
- Bay leaves. - Yay.
- [Sheldon] All that same flavors of adobo, right.
So we've added a little bit of that love cream in there.
(laughing)
- [Francesca] All my aunties that are watching like--
- "What is that?"
- "Anak, what's that love cream that he was talking about?"
- [Sheldon] Just a little bit of toe paste to it,
some tomato paste.
Though we kind of plate it up a little bit differently
for the restaurant.
Pea shoots, cinnamon.
- [Francesca] Wowee.
- [Sheldon] That's over the top of everything.
Pork n Peas.
- What was life like, especially for your grandparents?
- [Sheldon] They were Sakadas, the first wave of Filipinos.
They were given opportunities either to work at the mill,
or take care of a parcel of land.
They got paid very, very little of the amount of money
that they were being reciprocated.
It's bittersweet, the whole idea of it.
If it wasn't for the plantation,
my grandparents wouldn't be here.
But taking over the lands
and taking it from the native Hawaiians.
Hawaii has this crazy history trying to be navigated.
Who owns what, who has the rights to what?
- [Francesca] Oko'a Farms began here in 2007.
Sugar cane was one of the first crops planted.
- We use Ryan's sugar cane juice.
He presses it here,
and we're making vinegar out of it for Lineage.
- Yeah, and different flavors.
The red sugar cane versus the gold sugar cane
versus the rainbow sugar cane,
all the flavors come out different.
It's just like wine.
- Yeah. - Wow.
- So you're gonna have the different flavors.
There's a lot of different diversity.
- [Sheldon] We're gonna get to harvest some today?
- Yeah, we're going to harvest some cane,
make some juice.
- Yes! - Get your shoulders ready.
- [Ryan] Yep, superpowers.
- [Sheldon] You carry one of these.
(canes rustling)
- And now that's ready to go back and get juiced.
- Let's juice! - Yeah.
- I think I got the biggest one out of everyone.
(loud chopping)
- [Sheldon] When's the last time you chewed
on fresh sugar cane cut from the field?
Right? - I think never. (laughs)
- [Sheldon] The first nibs.
- [Francesca] Oh yeah, it's so clean.
- That's how sugar's supposed to taste.
(machine whirring)
That's what your teeth was doing.
- [Ryan] We'll run some ginger, mint,
squeeze in a little bit of lemon juice.
- [Sheldon] Look at the color of that.
- [All] Yes!
- [Sheldon] Pretty much perfection right there.
- [Ryan] Yeah, it's got some heat.
- I'm just over here chugging it. (laughs)
- [Sheldon] Mahalos, Ryan.
Thank you buddy.
- [Francesca] Thank you so much.
- When the Filipinos brought these seeds with them,
when they put it in the ground, everything grew.
Eating flowers,
making a whole salad out of a Katuday flower,
we knew that would be something
that we could make delicious?
- [Francesca] Yeah.
- Ilocanos did.
(upbeat music)
You kind of just break it off there.
Put it in, you're going to press it down into the water.
- [Francesca] Okay.
- [Sheldon] Give that a little bit of flippy-floppies.
Get it all out of the water.
Go, go, go, go.
Go, go, go.
There you go.
Get it out here to give it a small little squeeze.
At this point, it's already one of my favorite things to--
- Really?
- Sweet and then, boom!
In your face with that bitterness.
- [Francesca] It's very similar to bittermelon.
- Or like winged beans, have that same bitterness to it.
So this is some Opelu.
Mackerel scad, very common fish caught outside here.
We simply just butterflied them from the bottom,
took the center bone out,
and then, that's just going to go underneath the broiler.
Add some shaved onions.
Toss that all together.
- [Francesca] It's pretty simple.
- [Sheldon] Very simple.
This is vinegar that we made with the sugar cane juice,
and then we added garlic and Hawaiian chile peppers.
There you go, Katuday.
- [Francesca] Man, that's beautiful.
The third dish Sheldon wants to make
is an Ilocano recipe known as dinengdeng.
It's a soup-based dish
with a ton of fermented fish,
commonly called bagoong in the Philippines.
- We're gonna get some utong or sitaw, right.
We're gonna hopefully get some okra,
and some other things.
So this was once sugar cane. - Yeah.
So we're repurposing it.
Being diverse, other than this monocrop.
Any of your workers from the plantation?
- [Robert] Yeah.
- [Sheldon] So a lot of them went
when the plantation closed.
- Closed, they came here. - They continued on.
It's pretty cool that they're farming their heritage.
- Yeah.
- [Sheldon] We're in the field of okra.
- [Francesca] This is cool.
I love when it curls up.
I didn't know it does that.
Here.
- [Robert] Yes.
Yes!
- First okra!
- [Francesca] Pretty good, huh?
First time.
- [Sheldon] Tomatoes.
We'll flavor the whole water with bagoong.
Like the base of it all has so much umami.
This bagoong is special. - Woo!
- This comes from one of our cooks,
Jazzy's family bagoong. - Thanks Jazzy.
- [Sheldon] Now we're starting our own
using some Hawaiian fish.
Kind of just try to figure out.
Add the rest of the vegetables and your okra.
- Get it.
Ooh, perfection.
(soft uplifting music)
- [Sheldon] That lemon olive oil that's been
studded with patis.
Dinengdeng with all the different vegetables
that we gathered.
Everyone touts me as the Filipino chef, right?
- Yeah, yeah. - They see me on Top Chef,
but my lens is very small.
So I think of Hawai'i as a province.
The more I travel
and the more Filipino food is being spoken about,
I see how specific and how unique
Filipino cuisine of Hawai'i is.
We did a lot of rustic dishes.
This is like a hearty stew.
- That's so good.
- [Sheldon] All the ingredients in this,
you can pretty much get anywhere across America.
- And yet, I don't think it's a very talked-about dish.
- Yeah.
- But, here, this is what you grew up eating.
- I think even more than adobo in Hawai'i.
- The heartiness, you really taste it here.
- [Sheldon] Like that.
- Woo!
I don't wanna say that I would
just drink this straight up,
but that's good.
- Salty fish.
It's fresh.
(bouncy music)
- [Francesca] I learned so much about Filipinos in Hawai'i
and kuleana, which is the Hawaiian term for responsibility.
Definitely come to Hawai'i for this,
but also come for the people
and learn more about the history,
and support the businesses that are really trying
to maintain and continue this legacy.
- Yeah, maybe my grandparents went through this hardship
where a lot of things, where things was promised,
where it doesn't happen.
- You're here now.
- [Sheldon] I'm here now.
And when we see our families and get to eat together,
get to enjoy the sun and the sea,
things can be put on pause for a second,
and just enjoy that.
(laughs)
- If you want to see more Halo Halo, you can--
- [All] Click here!
- Right there. - Right there.
- Right there.
- Over here, over here.
(laughing)
- [Sheldon] That's so Filipino.