A FREE week-long bilingual culinary adventure where youth explore the flavors of Hawaiʻi by creating healthy, delicious meaʻai with traditional and local ingredients using both traditional and modern cooking methods.
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Food
Introduce youth to Hawaiian and local ingredients through traditional and contemporary dishes while building practical culinary skills that support confidence, creativity, and everyday life readiness.
Langauge
Encouraging language use through hands-on cooking. Showing youth that ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi is easy to learn and can be incorperated in daily life when you are in an fun and engaging learning environment.
Culture
Deepen youth understanding of native foods by exploring the stories, songs, ʻōlelo noʻeau, and cultural knowledge connected to them, helping students recognize that these foods carry history, meaning, and identity beyond the kitchen.
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Friday July 10, 2026
4 P.M. to 6 P.M
Join us at Kō Education Center for the Kanaka Kitchen Hōʻike, where our young chefs will proudly share what they’ve learned with family and friends through a special presentation and tasting of the delicious meaʻai they’ve prepared.
Meet the
Kanaka Kitchen Kumu
Makana Oliveros-Kahakalau and ʻIʻini Kahakalau, a husband-and-wife duo, bring over 30 years of collective culinary experience, serving delicious and distinctive Hawaiʻi-inspired cuisine that has nourished thousands of Kanaka.
Raised in families where food was both sustenance and tradition, Makana and ʻIʻini have been hunting, harvesting, and preparing their own food since childhood. As cultural practitioners, they weave ʻike and pilina into their work, sharing the deep familial connections to food through stories, chants, songs, proverbs, and ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi.
One of their greatest joys is passing on this knowledge through fun, engaging, and interactive experiences that connect people to culture, community, and ʻāina.
