Full Belly Files | Eats and Angst on Our Hawaiian Adventure

This edition of Full Belly Files was originally emailed to subscribers on August 18, 2023. To receive Matt Kettmann’s food newsletter in your inbox each Friday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

Our Hawaiian family vacation that started high on kalbi ribs, fresh poke, and lava flows ended on a more melancholy note of all-too-familiar wildfire tragedy, as we ventured from the sunshine of Kauai to the mess of Maui over the past two weeks. Our four nights on the latter island at the tail end of our trip were spent far away from the disaster scenes of Lahaina, which is why we kept our plans intact. But there was plenty of angst in making that decision, even with all of our Maui contacts urging us to come.

Rather than dwell on the bad (more on that down the page), let’s hit the highlights first, as the state of Hawai‘i — and Maui specifically — is going to need all the continued tourism it can get to recover. Hopefully our happy times will encourage you to book a trip of your own in the near future.

For the sake of this newsletter, I’ll keep the highlights to the food and drink variety, though I could go on and on about the glories of super-challenging golf at Hōkūala, the bouncy riding of inner tubes down old irrigation ditches with Kauai Backcountry, or the waterfalls and cliff jumps on the Road to Hana.

Cajun-spiced ono at Paia Fish Market and chili pepper chicken at Wailua Drive-In | Credit: Matt Kettmann