A letter from the kitchen
A note on this issue.
A pot of rice on a Sunday is the most useful thing a kitchen can produce. The recipes in this issue are organized around that single anchor — what you can spin out of yesterday’s rice on a Tuesday, and what you reach for on a Friday when there’s a friend at the door.
There are six dishes here. They are not the loudest dishes I have ever cooked. They are the ones I keep coming back to: a loco moco that tastes like home rather than diner, a shoyu chicken with the gravy reduced, a cold poke for the heat, a butter mochi for the end of it. One Mai Tai for after.
Read the way you would flip through a small magazine on the counter while something simmers. Skip ahead. Come back. The pot of rice will wait.
— CurtisJ · Honolulu, April 2026
