Easter Seals gets a sold-out event that raises critical money for its work with children and young adults. Kapi'iolani Community College culinary students get to work with and learn from world-class visiting chefs. And chef Alan Wong gets to see his friends. And along the way, Hawai'i's agriculture gets a boost, too.

Wong is the culinary coordinator for the annual Chefs du Jour event, sold out this Saturday on the waterfront at Aloha Tower Marketplace.

Each year, he invites chef friends he's made over the years to participate in the event. He encourages them to use Island ingredients in the dishes they prepare for the event. "You gotta eat Hawai'i," he says.

And while they're here, the chefs don't just cook: they teach, they encourage and inspire culinary students and they tour farms and learn about Hawai'i's increasingly diversified agricultural efforts.

One guest invited by Wong, Art Smith, Oprah Winfrey's personal chef and owner of the new Table 52 in Chicago, will give a free cooking demonstration at Macy's Friday at 5 p.m. and do a book-signing afterward. (Wong met Smith in 1981 when Wong was an apprentice at the prestigious Greenbriar resort in West Virginia, and Smith was an extern from Florida; they shared dorm space.)

Wednesday, pastry chef Stanton Ho, a former Islander who now works as corporate pastry chef for Chocolates a la Carte in Valencia, Calif., offered a master class for KCC students in the fine art of making ganache and chocolate mousse, using chocolate made from cacao beans raised in Waialua, O'ahu. On Thursday, he'll be touring the 20-acre cacao farm on former sugar lands, a pilot project of the Dole Food Co.

The third guest at Chefs du Jour this year is Raphael Lunetta of JiRaffe Restaurant in Santa Monica, Calif.