Palaka

Behind the scenes of a tiny sauce company run by a food writer/chef/fiber artist/occasional professor

Aloha, Hi, it’s Kiki. Pardon my intrusion. If you’re getting this newsletter, it’s likely because you purchased something from Poi Dog previously – and for that I’m deeply grateful for your support. Can you believe Poi Dog started in 2013 as a little food truck? It’s been over a decade since I quit grad school, made the wise decision (surprisingly) of purchasing a very used (it was built in 1991) taco cart, which evolved into a restaurant that closed during the pandemic.

It's a constant marvel to me that customers and friends have stuck with me through all of this.

And yes, Poi Dog is a sauce company and has been since the end of 2020. Yes, we occasionally do pop-ups and collaborations around the country, but we (and by we, I mean I) sell sauce.

But I also do a lot of other things. Most of my daily tasks involve writing about food, how food systems intersect with sustainability initiatives and climate change, and restaurant culture. Running a sauce business has given me a crash course in CPG supply chains, global supply chains and of course, sourcing.

My hope with this newsletter, Palaka, is that I can tie all these experiences together, to delve deeper into what it means to write about food while working as a chef who specializes in seafood and while running a small sauce business and occasionally moonlighting as a fiber artist. (I also have continued to function with one foot in academia, with roles at Boston University and since the start of the pandemic, Penn Museum…though the latter is in the midst of evolving). There’s a lot going on.

Why did I choose the name Palaka? Because it’s the fabric of my life. My initial goal with Poi Dog, the food truck and then restaurant, was to honestly represent the flavors of my youth spent in Hawai’i. Represent – not replicate. We never served anything that was exactly how it was the way I first experienced it. Translating Hawai’i flavors for the mainland meant looking for different sources of ingredients (sometimes) and tweaking things so that they made sense for us being in Philly. It also meant a lot more scratch cooking than I was raised with. My great-grandparents and grandparents all grew up working on sugarcane plantations on Kauai. Palaka (easily mistaken by the untrained eye for gingham) was the fabric plantation workers wore on the fields. When my grandma grew up and moved to Oahu, she worked for a time in the notions (sewing) department of the Arakawa Store in Waipahu – the biggest plantation store.

Come to one of my dinners and you’ll see that we serve all our dishes on a palaka tablecloth. That Ari, my husband, and I wear palaka aprons. That there’s usually a palaka shirt or dog outfit floating around our social media. That it’s the same pattern that clothes all the bottles of Poi Dog sauce. This is a fabric that predates the floral print aloha shirts.

And by the way, I am obsessed with fabric. Fibers, textiles, how they affect our planet, what resources are used to weave them into existence, how they affect the same oceans from which we get the fish we eat. More on my fiber art practice later. But everything truly is connected.

I wrote about textiles recently, in an article about seaweed for The Guardian. I hope you read it! Mascara, smoothies, T-shirts: I spent a day (and $500) on seaweed products, The Guardian, December 2023. I have high hopes for seaweed’s future applications.

Researching for this article has utterly changed my life. I am unable to think of laundry in the same way – am I releasing microplastics into our waterways with every load? Probably. Microplastics are being found in our atmosphere, our oceans, our streams and bloodstreams.

Did I know that every piece of polyester clothing made (and it was invented in the 1930s) still exists? Now I do. I look at so much of our everyday items differently, from teabags to packaging to clothing. Are any of you being targeted by shape wear on TikTok? Those bodysuits will never biodegrade. And all those clothing brands using recycled plastic bottles for fabric? Making textiles have sundered the chain of recycling bottles. Instead of plastic bottles being made into more plastic bottles, they’re being turned into clothing…which will likely, once they’re worn out in terms of usefulness or appeal, end of up in a landfill. Seaweed seems like the answer for many of our problems with plastic but well, read the article and I’ll get into it more in a future installment of Palaka. We’re a long ways off from it being a pervasive and realistic alternative to plastic. But a bunch of companies are doing really incredible things with it.

I’ve popped all of my writing into one convenient place: https://www.kikiaranita.com/writing

This coming week I’m deep in research for an article on sugar and one about feeding our beloved Eagles.

I also want to tell you about Poi Dog’s newest batch of sauce. It’s named Noelani (after my sister) and the name means “Mist of Heaven.” Which is quite apt, I promise.

It’s in a neat squeeze bottle now – I wrestled A LOT with this packaging choice. Ultimately the students I was working with at Auburn University last year convinced me to go with PET bottles (at least for some of the sauces) because of our glass bottles’ high breakage rate (sorry if you’ve ever gotten a broken bottle) and presented me with a rendering that projected the impacts of glass versus plastic. In this case, plastic won.

Packaging is an evolving element in Poi Dog decision-making (and by evolving, I mean extremely stress-inducing).

That said, Batch Noelani is very, very good. The ancho and espelette peppers are, of course, from Boonville Barn Collective. Noelani is a tad spicier and a tad less sweet than previous batches (and yes, I named it after my sister…read into that what you will). Ari and I have been putting it on everything, from oysters to hummus.

You can get it here, or from any of the fine retailers listed under stockists on our website.

Aloha again,

Kiki