About us

Two cooks, one
kitchen, one island.

Big Island Grinds is Mele and Kimo. We've been married thirty-one years and cooking together for all of them. The catering started as a favor and turned into a life.

Auntie Mele

Menus, rice, sweets, peacekeeper

Mele grew up in Kalapana back when the road still went through, before the 1990 flow covered Kaimū. Her mother ran the kitchen at a small plantation-era camp and taught her to cook by feel — a pinch of this, a handful of that, taste it, fix it. She keeps her grandmother's recipes in a green metal box on the shelf above the rice cooker, most of them written in pencil, some in Hawaiian, one in Ilocano.

She handles every menu conversation with our families, builds the grocery lists, presses every musubi by hand in the wooden mold she's had since 2007, and makes the haupia the night before because it has to set. Her mac salad recipe calls for a specific brand of mayo she will not compromise on.

If you ask her what her favorite thing to cook is, she'll say "whatever's in season." If you press her, it's the poke.

Uncle Kimo

Fire, pig, grill, heavy lifting

Kimo learned the imu from his uncle in Nā'ālehu, in a pit behind a corrugated-tin shed that still stands today. He's the one who shows up at four in the morning the day before a luau to start the fire, and the one who stays up watching the pit through the night from the driver's seat of the truck.

When he's not cooking for the business, he's fishing off the rocks near Punalu'u, fixing something on the '98 Toyota Tacoma that carries all our gear, or re-sharpening the two knives he's had for thirty years (one for fish, one for everything else — never swap).

He doesn't say much at events. He just nods, refills the pan, and keeps the line moving. If he hands you an extra piece of pork wrapped in foil on your way out to the car, that's how he says thank you.

How we work

Same-day cooking, always.

Nothing gets made the night before except the haupia and the marinades. If your event is Saturday, we're shopping Friday afternoon and cooking Saturday morning.

Island-first sourcing.

Fish from Suisan when we can, pork from a ranch up in Kahuā we've used for fifteen years, taro and sweet potato from a small hui on the Hāmākua coast, salt from Hanapēpē. Not every ingredient — but the ones that matter.

We cap the calendar.

We only take about forty jobs a year. It's the only way to keep the food right and still show up to our own grandkids' birthdays.

Referrals over marketing.

Every family that hires us came through somebody. We like it that way. It means we already know your aunties before we meet you.

We leave the kitchen cleaner.

Your kitchen, your aunties' kitchen, the church hall kitchen — we leave it better than we found it. Every time. Non-negotiable.

We don't cut corners to fit more jobs.

If the calendar's full, we say no, and we say it early. That's the only way "yes" means anything.

The short version

2003First catering job — a neighbor's daughter's eighth-grade graduation. Thirty plates out of our Pāhoa kitchen.
2006Bought the third rice cooker.
2009First full imu luau. 120 guests. Kimo didn't sleep for 36 hours.
2014Started working with the Kahuā pork supplier we still use today.
2018Eldest daughter started helping with prep. She still does, when she's home from O'ahu.
2020Did small family cook-and-drop plates through the quiet year. Mele says it's the kindest work we've done.
2024Capped the annual calendar at forty. Haven't regretted it.

Ready to talk?

If you've been pointed our way, we'd love to hear about your gathering.

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Two cooks, onekitchen, one island.