Carving A Reputation At John Dominis

Reviving the lost art of fruit and vegetable carving is just one of the ways that Chef Jean-Pierre Maharibatcha adds flair to the venerable John Dominis restaurant

Wednesday - July 13, 2005
By .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
E-mail this story | Print this page | Archive | RSS | Del.icio.us

Share

“We always joke on the show that we can’t understand half of the things chef says, and he says he can’t understand us either,” jokes Perry. “That always gets a big laugh. He’s a star and it’s a fantastic restaurant.”

Maharibatcha admits that he speaks English very well, unless he gets excited. That’s when people, including his own staff, have a hard time understanding him.

“Then they tell me to calm down,” laughs Maharibatcha, who also speaks Spanish, Vietnamese, a little Italian and, of course, French.

But when it comes to Hawaii’s pidgin English, chef says he can’t understand one bit of it.

Yim adds it’s Maharibatcha’s accent and his upbeat personality that always win over the guests. “People just love to hear him talk,” says Yim. “He has this happy, jolly personality and people think his French accent is romantic. Every Saturday on the Perry and Price show, chef comes out and says what the specials will be that day and at the Sunday brunch. He really gets people’s attention.”

This reporter met the charming chef next to green and white sea horses dancing in a bed of coral. They were flanked by a lone oyster, cradling in its pink flesh a solitary white pearl.

Far from a trek to the bottom of the ocean, I first shook hands with Maharibatcha as I stood admiring his intricate carving of sea creatures that came to life in a sturdy, oblong watermelon.

It was one of several pieces on display at the restaurant’s weekly Sunday Brunch, which celebrates its 16th anniversary in September.

“Hello, chef, I’m just admiring your work,” I said, noting the other tallow carvings at various stations depicting turtles and various sea life.

Chef explains how he’s trained in ice carving, but ice is hard to come by here so he started using fruits as the canvas for his artwork.

“It gives more value to the brunch presentation,” says Maharibatcha, who in his spare time enjoys snorkeling, playing tennis and cruising the island on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle. “It takes me two hours to carve one fruit and it lasts two days. When I do the tallow, it takes two days to make, but can last one to five years.”

Carving like this is a lost art, says Maharibatcha. “I don’t see nobody in Hawaii do this. I think it’s something we should bring back.”

Chef’s favorite items are watermelons because he likes the green, pumpkins and daikon radish. All, he says, are sturdy and firm — ideal for carving.

“I have to say that one of chef’s strongest points is his carving. You don’t see that often,” says Yim. “So we try to make sure we showcase his talent at the restaurant and at special events like the Easter Seals’ Taste of Honolulu or the Ilima Awards.”

Besides his formal training at French culinary school, Montpellier College, where he earned two distinctions for restaurant chef and hotel chef, Maharibatcha says he learned a lot (including his carving techniques) from watching other chefs in action.

“At school, they give you basic skills, but they don’t train you for everything,” he says. “You watch and you learn. I watch every chef’s style and I make my own style. Achef has to know everything from A to Z.”

To keep his skills fresh, Maharibatcha is known to jump in the line with his other chefs and whip something up.

“It’s hard to find a chef who wants to work for a free-standing restaurant,” says Yim. “When you work as a chef in a hotel, you get to delegate work. Here, he has to be able to do everything. It’s a challenge, and most chefs would rather be the guy behind the desk and not the guy on the line.”

But Yim says he “laid it on the table” when he hired Maharibatcha. He needed a chef who could both maintain and reinvent the legendary John Dominis — one of the few upscale restaurants that has continued to draw crowds since its opening in 1980.

Yim says, over the years, the restaurant has been lucky to have such a strong local following. “That really makes a restaurant,” he says. “You can depend on your tourists to a certain extent, but your local clientele is much more important for a restaurant of our caliber to be able to continue year after year.

“I told Jean-Pierre we wanted a working chef — someone who could get on the line as well as work with our staff,” says Yim. “When a new chef comes in, the staff has to adapt to his ways and vice-versa.”

Page 2 of 3 pages for this story  <  1 2 3 >

E-mail this story | Print this page | Comments (0) | Archive | RSS

Most Recent Comment(s):