At this Hawaii Resort, Oysters Are Pond-to-Table
With Hotels With Great Taste, we’re pulling back the curtain for a peek at the “special sauce” that hotels use to create memorable, meaningful culinary experiences for their guests.
As you watch the sun set over the waves crashing on the beach at the Four Seasons Hualalai, you might turn around to find that the torches lining the resort's meandering pathways have all been lit. But your night's theatrics are just beginning—the real show is at dinner.
Choose to dine at Noio, and you’ll sit at a 14-seat omakase counter, where delicate plates of sashimi seem to appear from nowhere over the course of your meal—six courses curated by the chef. If you’re craving some punchier flavors and a special occasion vibe, request a table at Miller and Lux, an outpost of Tyler Florence’s over-the-top San Francisco steakhouse. There you’ll be treated to tableside Caesars, steaks as big as your face, and, naturally, a flaming bananas foster for dessert.
The dining room magic isn't conjured with a bit of fairy dust; it's quietly powered by hard work and impressive sustainability efforts behind the scenes. An on-site water bottling plant uses reusable aluminum containers, which means guest rooms are free of single-use plastic bottles. Food waste from the resort's restaurants is offered to local farmers to be used as animal feed, and more than three quarters of the ingredients used in its food and beverage services are sourced from local fisheries and farmers. But its oysters are even more local to the resort: They're grown and harvested from an on-site pond
There are fresh oysters, and then there are oysters that you eat just moments after they’ve been pulled out of the water and shucked right in front of you. The former are good, the latter are spectacular. That’s what I discovered under a blazing Hawaiian sun as I slurped briny oyster after briny oyster on the banks of the resort's Punawai pond, where 700 oysters are harvested a week.
The oyster pond doubles as a water feature by the fifth hole of the property's golf course, and the bivalves were originally introduced to the water hazard to act as a filter. But the baby oysters, just half an inch long—the size of your pinky nail—thrived in the pond's cages. And before long the oysters, juicy kumamotos and sweet Pacifics, had grown so well and were found to be so tasty, they were added to menus throughout the property. To ensure consistent flavor, the resort adjusts the pond's salinity—lowering it slightly from ocean levels—to create a distinct flavor for the oysters grown in the pond.
The pond and its oyster beds have grown into a major feature for the Four Seasons Hualalai. Beyond the bivalves, indigenous animals have also come to call the pond home: Nenue fish and milk fish swim lazily through the water and the small islands dolloped throughout the pond are inhabited by spindly-legged Hawaiian stilts, endangered birds that build their nests there. And guests can book an experience with a staff aquaculture expert who will grab oysters fresh from the pond, and after a quick shuck done right on the bank, serve them along with a freshly popped bottle of Champagne. The hardest decision? Which sauce to try—aguachile, cocktail, or mingonette?
Four Seasons Resort Hualalai
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Source: This story originated with Bon Appétit.
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