Zach Cummings, the executive chef at Timbers Kauai Ocean Club & Residences, can hold his breath for about three minutes when he’s out spear-fishing in the ocean.
“It depends on what kind of hunting I’m doing,” he said. “But generally, I’ll dive in a range of 30 to 70 feet. It takes about 30 seconds to get down, I’m probably down for another 30 to 45 seconds, and then it usually takes at least another 30 seconds or so to come up.”
Cummings was born and raised on Kauai, and he started spear-fishing there with his father around age 5. Today, it’s not uncommon for guests dining at Hualani’s — the oceanfront, open-air restaurant at Timbers Kauai — to find themselves eating fish the chef caught himself.
Cummings said he’s thrilled to offer visitors a better understanding of where their meals come from, and he was quick to describe the tranquility he encounters while spear-fishing on Kauai’s reefs as “ocean therapy.”
“Everything we’re doing down there is very relaxed,” he said. “We don’t want to cause too much commotion under the water because we’re hunting, and we want to be as calm as we can. [We] just think like a fish.”
During a recent stay at Timbers Kauai, I spent a little over an hour with Cummings making Hawaiian poke, an increasingly popular dish that traditionally consists of cubed, raw ahi (tuna) mixed with sea salt, seaweed and crushed kukui nuts (a local ingredient).
My poke lesson actually began earlier in the day, however, at the resort’s Farm at Hokuala. There, I met farmer Cody Meyer, who regularly takes guests on tours of the nearly 17-acre farm and helps those enrolled in Chef Cummings’ poke class to harvest the necessary fresh ingredients.
Meyer, who grew up in Cincinnati but has lived on Kauai for years, started the Farm at Hokuala in 2017 on land that was previously a golf course fairway. The first step was planting banana and coconut trees, followed by avocado and mango to shade and cool land that sat fallow for a long time.
Meyer said the farm started growing food in earnest for the property’s restaurant in 2018, including crops such as kale, broccoli, Napa cabbage and bok choy, along with a range of herbs and edible flowers.
Chef Zach Cummings (left) cooks with food grown by farmer Cody Meyer (right).
Credit: 2021 Timbers Kauai Ocean Club & Residences“I would say we have over 40 different crops right now that go into the restaurant,” Meyer said. “We just harvested probably 300 pounds today for dinner tonight.”
Timbers Kauai guests can not only sample food from the farm at Hualani’s restaurant, but they’ll also find a box of recently harvested farm-fresh produce in their room on arrival, often featuring papaya, mangoes and bananas right off the tree.
During my morning visit to the farm, Meyer helped me gather parsley, green onions and some red Hawaiian chili peppers for my upcoming poke lesson, and he also spoke a little about food the farm grew for furloughed resort and restaurant workers, as well elderly members of Kauai’s community, during the island’s transpacific tourism shutdown in 2020.
“We were pumping out thousands of pounds of produce for those few crucial months during the [COVID-19] lockdown,” he said. “We just delivered whatever we had to the food bank every week — bananas, papayas, oranges, limes, bok choy, kale. We were just giving them everything we could.”
I enjoyed a terrifically lively lesson on how to actually make poke, an instruction session also loaded with insight into Hawaii’s rich food traditions.
Back at Hualani’s around midday with Chef Cummings, who cleaned and prepped all of the ingredients I brought back from the farm, I enjoyed a terrifically lively lesson on how to actually make poke, an instruction session also loaded with insight into Hawaii’s rich food traditions and wonderful stories about what it’s like to grow up fishing and surfing on Kauai.
And, with the chef’s help, I ended up making some delicious poke.
Both Meyer and Cummings said they take a great deal of joy from sharing what they know about life on Kauai with resort guests. And for the chef, much of that insight came early from his mother, a Hawaiian language immersion teacher and longtime cultural practitioner.
“She always made it a point for me to learn and understand [while] growing up who we are and where we come from,” Cummings said. “I just love sharing that with people, and you can see they enjoy it. They flew thousands of miles to get here, and that’s what they want to experience.”
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