Matt VanderNoot came to cooking in a roundabout way.
But the New Hampshire native, who spent more than a decade in Japan, is bringing a wealth of experiences in kitchens and top businesses to Hawi with his new restaurant, Local Dish, which opened in the Kohala Trade Center building in August.
Pinning down the style of the restaurant, which is open from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Thursdays through Mondays, can be a bit tricky.
“It’s fairly eclectic,” VanderNoot said, adding that one of his inspirations is Blue Ribbon, a New York City restaurant where the chefs feature their favorite dishes from a variety of cooking styles and ingredients.
The regular menu includes a New York City style reuben, as well as a Hawaiian reuben with green papaya “kraut” and papaya seed dressing instead of coleslaw and Thousand Island, a chicken kabayaki, a jerk chicken and pulled pork. There’s a version of the infamous Elvis sandwich, this one featuring local honey, macadamia nuts, peanut butter, and local apple bananas on panini toasted bread, or a version from the 1970s that substitutes marshmallow fluff for the honey. Restaurant patrons can upgrade a grilled cheese with tomato, avocado, grilled onion, bacon or roasted Portabello mushrooms.
Specials include a housemade hummus sandwich with local vegetables, a house-smoked Italian sausage sandwich, a premium Italian hoagie, and turkey with guacamole. Desserts include cookies, cupcakes and other pastries.
While VanderNoot isn’t a fan of children’s menus, he does offer a few hot dog options, which might appeal to younger palates. He said he remembers disliking certain foods as a child, including cheddar cheese and the turnips in a soup his grandmother would make for him, that later he learned to enjoy.
Prices range from $4.75 for a red Hawaiian hot dog with kettle chips to $13.75 for a meaty banh mi with local herbs and house pickles.
VanderNoot moved to Hawaii in late 2012, but had visited annually for several years. While working in Japan as a freelancer for the country’s top business magazine, he picked up on some business practices he wanted to bring to the United States, including incentive trips for his employees at Sun Valley, Idaho, that he ran with his girlfriend. Those trips brought VanderNoot and his crew to a home in Kapoho, where they’d stay for two or three weeks.
“After several of these trips, we decided we really wanted to be here, primarily because of the aloha spirit,” he said, adding that he understands that might sound a little cheesy.
He was drawn to some of the more Japanese aspects of Hawaii’s culture, including respect for one’s neighbors, aunties and uncles.
There’s also “great food to play with,” he added, noting the abundance of fresh fish, local farms and the growing organic movement here.
Hawi offered its own advantages, he said, including the freedom to decide not to select a specific food theme for the restaurant, aside from as local and organic as possible.
“I can just do sort of a hodge podge, but everyone may like it,” he said.
VanderNoot gave himself about three times longer to open Local Dish than he would have for a restaurant on the mainland. It actually took a few months longer than even he expected, but the end result has had an unexpected twist. Usually, he said, when a restaurant first opens, the menu goes through some significant changes. He had so much time to work on the menu and see what sort of food would really work in Hawaii that his hasn’t changed at all.
“There’s a lot of opportunity to do inventive things that are really fun,” he said.