09/18/2026
In 1986, you could not find fresh basil in Hawaii. Not on any island. So a cook from Pittsburgh took out a classified ad in the local newspaper. Ten words: "If you grow it or catch it, I'll buy it."
That ad is the reason a menu in Hawaii can now name the farm the lettuce came from. The cook was Peter Merriman.
He had arrived on the Big Island in early 1983 with one suitcase and 75 dollars, by his own count, to work as a line cook at the Mauna Lani Bay Hotel. His mother, Woodene Merriman, was the restaurant critic at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. When he was 16 she got him an unpaid job scrubbing pots for a master chef at H.J. Heinz. He knew what a tomato was supposed to taste like.
Hawaii in 1983 did not. The resort dining rooms served Chateaubriand and Veal Cordon Bleu. Produce came in from California and, as fellow chef Jean-Marie Josselin put it, arrived "incredibly dead or half dead."
In 1985 the resort made him executive chef of its new Gallery Restaurant. At the interview he said he wanted to serve "regional cuisine" before checking whether any existed. Then he found out: almost nothing local was for sale to a restaurant.
So he drove. To the ranches above Waimea, to the docks, to a farm in Hōnaunau where Tane Datta had been scratching trees in North Kohala to smell for cinnamon. He told every one of them the same thing: "We're in this together." He offered to pay more than the mainland price for what they grew. "People thought I was crazy," he says.
In 1988 he left the resort job and opened a 104-seat restaurant in Waimea, a cattle town. He printed the farmers' NAMES on the menu. Alan Wong puts it plainly: "He was one of the first to use local produce and put the farmers' names on the menu."
In August 1991 Merriman got on the phone and invited eleven other chefs to a spare banquet room at the Maui Prince. "The only rules were no knives, no press." They named the movement Hawaii Regional Cuisine and made him its founding president. A month later, at the second meeting, he put the chefs on a bus and took them to the farms. Datta remembers what they found: "I wasn't even really a farmer in 1991. It was more like we had a big home garden."
That is the supply chain every farm-to-table menu in Hawaii runs on today. He built it by promising to buy before anyone had grown.
Then Lahaina burned.
August 8, 2023. Merriman's Kapalua, north of the fire on the same coast, was still standing. It had a kitchen full of food and no power. "You know that you got a restaurant full of food and no electricity, right so that food's not going to last," he said.
Most owners would have counted the loss for the insurance claim. "Our people just put a grill in a parking lot and started grilling off the food and handing it out to people." Nine hundred people came the first day. A thousand every day after that. At the peak the crew was pushing 2,000 plates a day off that grill, FREE. Eighty of the company's 300 employees had lost their own homes. They kept cooking. He called it a business owner's responsibility to the community. The word for it here is kuleana.
Eleven days after the fire, on August 19, his mother died at 97. The woman who got him the pot-scrubbing job. He had built her a cottage at his home on Maui, and she had spent her winters there.
The man who spent 35 years buying everything Hawaii could grow spent that month giving it away.
By the first week of October the count stood at 45,000 meals in seven weeks. The scholarship fund he started in 2000 to pay culinary-school tuition for Hawaii students was turned, for six months, into a fund for free meals for the survivors. His Kapalua manager Brendan O'Leary said it for the whole crew: "This is the most basic form of what we do: providing nourishment to people in need."
Merriman's Waimea is still open, 38 years on. Hirabara Farms, on less than two acres nearby, cuts 350 pounds of lettuce a day for restaurant kitchens. Tane Datta's company, Adaptations, now delivers produce from dozens of Kona farms to 65 restaurants.
Peter Merriman is not Hawaiian. He was born in a steel town outside Pittsburgh, and he tells his staff that anyone who calls him Uncle is fired. Ask the farmers instead. Gary Maunakea-Forth of MAʻO Organic Farms in Waiʻanae: "There are chefs who are good about it, but they're not as rabid as Peter." His own line: "My heroes have always been farmers." He ran an ad promising to buy whatever they grew. Thirty-eight years later, he still does.
