Wynn Magazine - Las Vegas
Issue link: http://digital.greengale.com/i/660157
42 below: Fresh ahi poke is garnished with ogo seaweed, sesame seeds, and spring onions and served from a coconut. right: Greggie Lind serves daughter Kai Kai a plate at the party, while Wai'oli awaits his turn from a tree. opposite: Grilled ahi loin anchors a guest's plate. hat afternoon, it's Walzog's turn to go to work, and he takes his cues for the evening menu from the mountain of local ingredients sitting in the tiny kitchen of the house our crew is renting in Maka'alae. A 40-pound tuna is cubed for ahi poke, and tuna loins are seasoned and tossed on a grill in the back- yard. Little Lind children scatter to find ti and banana leaves to hold the food; the lemongrass they've picked is stuffed inside whole snap- pers, with fat ginger slices in slits in their flesh. The shredded pork from the imu is seasoned and warmed; native fiddlehead fern shoots, pohole, become a salad spiked with sweet Maui onions; and the island's famous tomatoes are simply dressed and tossed with basil and spring onions and studded with goat cheese from Surfing Goat Dairy in Kula, in Maui's upcountry. In Las Vegas, Walzog serves dishes he has refined for a fine-dining audience, but the idea remains the same: Coax the flavor from the fish with the simplest ingredients possible. (His favorite at Lakeside: the onaga, or long-tail red snapper, whose slight sweetness he offsets with an Asian set of pickled Japanese vegetables and ponzu broth.) The beers come out and trucks show up, bringing friends from all over Hana. All this food is a good excuse for a party, which becomes almost too perfectly photogenic when Gina's father, Hank Eharis, Jr., appears with his ukulele. To say that fishing is in the Linds' DNA is something of an understatement: Both Greggie and Gina have fishing roots that go deeper than recorded his- tory. On our final morning, we drive to the coastal area of Kanewai in Mu'olea, the family's ancestral land, where Ekolu sometimes goes fishing at dawn, gath- ering up his net and tossing it in one smooth motion from the jagged black volcanic rocks into the sea. There is a distinctly sacred feeling to this area, which was owned by 13 families, seized as "crown lands" during the Great Mahele—the Hawaiian land redistribution carried out in the mid-19th century by King Kamehameha III—and temporarily used as a royal summer palace by King David Kalakaua. The matriarch of the House of Kalakaua, Analea Keohokalole, returned it to the families, from which both Gina and Greggie are descended, in the late 1800s. "But people needed money in the mid-1900s," Gina explains, "and the only thing they had of value was their land, so they traded it." After the land was nearly developed, the county and private donors interceded to make the area a kapu, or preservation district. We walk down toward the water, through tangles of yellow liliko'i (passion fruit) vines, mango trees, and coconut palms, and past a horse that ambles through a grassy clearing. The place, announces a sign, is an opihi resting area, referring to the small cone-shaped mollusk that the nonprofit group Na Mamo o Mu'olea, which oversees the district, is trying to protect from pro- fessional opihi pickers (consuming a few on-site is allowed). Greggie cooks two over the fire; they're rubbery and salty and bathed in their own liquid. He splits open purple ha'uke'uke, the helmet urchins that cling to the rocks, so we can taste the buttery yellow roe. Gina's father, who heads Na Mamo o Mu'olea, considers it a sacred duty to preserve the lands all the way up Haleakala and down to the sea: Every change in the landscape has a cascading impact, even- tually affecting the waters that hold the key not only to their livelihood, but also to their culture and their history. "We were married down here, and our families have had their ashes spread here," Gina says. "It is a 'piko place' [liter- ally a 'navel cord'] for us, lineal descendants who have a close spiritual tie to Kanewai. It is as much a part of us as fishing is." Greggie and Walzog watch the kids scramble over rocks and through dense trees as the men talk a little shop, discuss Greggie's next visit to Las Vegas, and, most important, plan what they'll make for lunch (as it turns out, the world's most precious tuna sandwiches, from yesterday's ahi). It is through this friendship, and this family of stewards of the land and sea, that David Walzog has found a story to tell every night in his kitchen. T