Hawai'i's home away from home in Las Vegas

By Wade Shirkey
Advertiser Staff Writer

The Market Street Cafe at the California Hotel brings a taste of Hawai'i to Las Vegas visitors. Boyd Gaming Corp. photos

Main Street Station's Garden Court buffet features popular Island-style dishes for its Hawai'i visitors.

"Saimin and hot dogs," she said.

The oxtail soup, too, is popular on a cold day in Las Vegas. "You can always tell it's on the menu," said California Hotel waitress Elizabeth Blose: "Customers line up an hour before we open," with 90 percent of Hawai'i tourists ordering the hotel speciality.

And it better not happen that Tomita, executive chef of the Fremont Hotel & Casino, forgets to put corned-beef hash on the menu for the Hawai'i folks who seem to come to the California, Fremont, Stardust and Main Street hotels as much for the food as the gambling. "I'd be in deep kim chee!" she said.

Tomita remembered the years on the job as she has watched the hotels get ever more "local" — for Hawai'i visitors.

Tomita, 48, at first wasn't accustomed to Mainland ways as she rose up the ranks to head chef at the hotels. When the Leilehua High grad arrived at the hotel in 1982, her Island-style honi/"kiss-kiss" greeting of a fellow restaurant employee almost got her hauled in on sexual impropriety charges, she said.

She can chuckle about it now, but at the time, she had a harsh realization: "This was a 'white man's world,' " she said, emphasis on both the words "white," and "man." She was neither.

"Bosses expected a really aggressive" attitude, she recalled. "People from Hawai'i had a hard time in the restaurant environment," with their humble ways and reliance on nonverbal cues.

Coming from "small-town Hawai'i," culture shock was inevitable: "At home, you go restaurant, you know there'll be shoyu on the table — and rice. And then you come here and end up at a Cracker Barrel ..." she said, picking an example of a Mainland cookie-cutter restaurant chain.

Now Tomita turns the tables, so to speak: "I tell our people (employees), 'When guests enter any (of our) restaurants, they are entering our home.' "

And when they're Hawai'i guests, she said, they're treated as they would be back home.

"That's how I was raised. I'm second-generation (Japanese-American), and even into third generations, Hawai'i people are very traditional" in many ways. "Dad always told the story: Plantation workers worked for their $1 a day in the field. Then they'd fish at night and grow vegetables. Dad would say the poor man had to have his sashimi, namasu and rice to eat! That's the 'local feeling' we try to cultivate."

For many years, hotel chain founder Sam Boyd lived in Hawai'i, explained Nancy Archer, director of publicity for the Downtown region of Boyd Gaming Corp. "When he came here," she explained, "he knew Hawai'i people liked to gamble. And they liked food. And he knew there had to be that hospitality. That became his niche. He knew this would be the perfect market."

In describing how the Boyd hotels try to stay attuned to Islanders' needs, Archer said, "The word I love to use: ingratiate."

The challenge is to find ways, and (the right) employees who know how to give back to Island customers, many of whom return four or five times a year.

She estimates at least 80 percent of visitors from Hawai'i stay at Boyd properties while in Vegas. It's an Island home away from home for those who prefer to vacation in such a setting.

Regular customers bring all kinds of gifts to their favorite hotel employees or casino pit bosses: pineapples, crack seed, macadamia nuts, flowers and lei, senbei, kaki mochi. It's vacation omiyage, backward.

There was one short period when the hotel tried to suggest the folks stop bringing gifts: "After Sept. 11, we knew how difficult it was to get all the gifts past security. But nothing we did could get them to stop," Archer said, laughing.

The gift-giving is only one of the Island traditions in the Boyd casinos and restaurants.

"You can see it in the lobby," said Tomita. "They dress like they're at home: slippers, T-shirts. Even when we opened our (award-winning fine-dining) restaurant in the Fremont, we (billed) it as 'casual fine dining' — just so we didn't offend customers in slippers, shorts and puka shells."

Like the fictional TV pub, Cheers, staying at the "local hotels" presents another common denominator: "Everybody knows your name," said Archer. "Go to any other casino and you're a number. Here everyone addresses customers by name. Customers know each other."

And as it's commonly known, by the end of a week's stay, visitors from Hawai'i are sure to have seen as many acquaintances at the California Hotel as you would at the mall back home.

As easygoing as Hawai'i folks are, they can be exacting taskmasters, said Tomita. "They know what they're used to! When they say they want stew and rice, it's not brown Dinty Moore — it has to be red, or you're in trouble."

The biggest seller on the hot buffets? Believe it or not, said Tomita, it's corned-beef hash.

And local people are "really big" on duck. "It's like going McCully Chop Suey — gotta have the duck with bok choy."

As for the rice, "That's a funny story," said Tomita. "When I first came here, the rice was more like pudding. It was the biggest (customer) complaint, with miso soup close behind. They didn't taste authentic. It actually tasted like warmed-up dishwater," she admitted.

Now, with little changes by Tomita and the luxury of a "back house" with 20 to 30 percent of the kitchen workers from Hawai'i, the fare has taken on a just-like-home flavor.

Some of the tweaks are subtle, as in the macaroni salad: "I bring in Best Foods (mayo) just for that," said Tomita. "And, you know Hawai'i mac salad must have tuna and eggs!

"And no Dijon!" she added, glaring.

Oddly, said Tomita, there's never been a big calling for chili rice, even during cooler weather.

So, exactly how does Tomita, who's been away from Hawai'i for more two decades, stay current? Besides the obvious methods — perusing community cookbooks like the Honpa Hongwanji series, or hitting the new eateries on visits back home — she goes "niele-ing" among the various tailgating food fests in Hawai'i. It's a technique that has brought contemporary Island culinary trends, such as mochiko chicken, Spam musubi and katsu curry, onto her radar screen.

Besides Tomita's trade secret of "giving back," she also relies on another — "looking back," bringing to the Vegas hotels the comfort foods on which Island folks grew up: curries, stews and oyako donburi.

"Here's one word you probably haven't heard in a while," she teases: "chicken hekka," conjuring up memories of those huge metal bowls of the Japanese-style shoyu-based stew served in typical Hawai'i school cafeterias a generation or so ago.

And if imitation is the sincerest a form of flattery, the Boyd hotels should be proud: Other casinos and resorts are taking notice, said Tomita, adding Island food items to menus, and hosting "Hawai'i night"-type events. Island musical favorites such as Society of Seven are now familiar attractions at showrooms. Coffee shops boast saimin and chicken teriyaki on the menu.

One of the more surprising developments, said banquet manager Kathy Nemoto, is the number of typically somber Island traditions now being staged among the bright lights and glitter. Not only do Hawai'i folk celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, and class and family reunions, but also traditional Japanese anniversaries of the death of a loved one at years 1, 3, 7, 13 and 21 years. "They bring a picture and have a small memorial service," Nemoto said. "In Vegas!"

Another "local"-ization of Vegas: Even prominent clothes retailers are adding lucky red items for Hawai'i visitors. "I have red shirts for the husbands and red bras for the wives," said saleswoman Kathy Goodman of Robinson May department store. "And, I have red Jockey underwear — and I sell it!"

Reach Wade Shirkey at wshirkey@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8090.