By Dave Donnelly
Wednesday, December 4, 1996
Heidi Chang, Marie Quiban
Heidi Chang, Marie Quiban
WHY is it, one wonders, that while women in most households do the lioness' share of the cooking, the huge majority of prominent professional chefs are male. There are notable exceptions, of course - Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley comes to mind - but some eyebrows continue to be raised when women chefs step up to the burners. Hawaii's Mark Ellman is playing guest chef with two of L.A.'s leading ladies of the culinary world, Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger of Border Grill. The two will be joining Ellman tomorrow through Friday as part of the "Grand Chefs on Tour" program at the Kea Lani on Maui ... And Beverly Gannon of Maui's Hali'imaile General Store and Joe's Bar & Grill bested two other female chefs in a "Mystery Box" competition at the Ihilani Resort recently. Each chef was given five key ingredients and had 45 minutes to create an original dish. "It wasn't easy," relates Gannon, "especially when the main ingredient in your box is yucca root." ... Top female chefs
on Valley IslandSPEAKING of ladies, Heidi Chang has come home again to the place where she got her start in radio in the '70s. Since 1982 she's been working as a TV and radio reporter on the mainland, and is presently contributing to National Public Radio as an independent reporter/producer. She plans to continue doing profiles of isle musicians like the ones she did for NPR on Keola Beamer, Hapa and Byron Yasui, but will no longer have to commute back from San Francisco to produce the pieces ...
SPEAKING of jazz, Bill Cox of the Over the Hill Gang, is back from a jazz festival in San Diego where he ran into pianist Paul Reed, whom old-time patrons of the late, lamented Red Vest may remember ... It doesn't seem all that long ago that Christmas trees here sold for about $1 a foot. But on reflection it must have been ages ago, because I recently saw an ad for a seven and a half foot tree for $57.50 ...
GIVE a bunch of Iolani grade school kids 600 pounds of newspaper, 300 yards of chicken wire, 1,512 yards of plaster bandages and 10 cases of wall paper paste and what have you got. Either a world class glop or "Artsy Animals." Luckily, it turned out to be the latter, and the menagerie of animals which came out of all those supplies includes a Komodo dragon, elephant, giraffe and rhino. The Artsy Animals will be on display tomorrow for the first time at the Honolulu Zoo's "Zoo Lites" along with more than a dozen sparkling animal light sculptures and can be viewed Thursdays through Saturdays, through Jan. 4 ... You light up my Zoo
SEEING the cheery, smiling face of Marie Quiban on the early morning KHNL-TV news with Lee Cataluna these days sure makes getting up in the morning more enjoyable ... Readers of my World Wide Web page (http://www.kestrok.com/~donnelly) know that former local Sheraton public relations exec Simon Cardew has a rare debilitating disease called Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, for which there is no cure. He and wife Joan left their London flat to winter in San Diego. They've learned a cat burglar hit their Belgravia flat - on Thanksgiving Day, yet - and stole everything of value ...
WHILE Hawaii Business publisher Kim Jacobsen was still faxing out copies of a news release announcing the sale of the magazine to a group put together by businessman Duane Kurisu, he got a call from old pal Phil Kinnicutt of Ogilvy & Mather. Himself a Hawaii Business alum, Kinnicutt already had got wind of the sale - announced minutes before - and was calling to congratulate Jacobsen on the deal. After 40 years of publishing, Hawaii Business has an impressive alumni association including Diane Chang, senior editor at the Star-Bulletin, Ruth Ann Becker, who has her own p.r. firm, Elyse Tanouye, now with the Wall Street Journal, and former editor Mari Taketa, who's in town this week taking a break from her studies in Vietnam, where she also assists in the placement of Vietnamese orphans ... News travels fast
