The question is when, and the only clue he'd give is that he'd like to split his time between restaurants in Hawaii and California once he reaches his semi-retirement years. But Mina says it won't be a matter of decades. He'll have to slow his pace sooner, he says. If I'm still doing this at 61, I'll be in a box. Visiting chefs Under the Lanai Visiting Artists Program, chefs prepare dinners Saturday and Sunday nights and offer free cooking demonstrations Sunday afternoons.
Events are open to the community.
July 8 and 9, Lodge at Koele. He took over as executive chef at Aqua when he was just 25, and won the James Beard Foundation's Rising Star Chef of the Year award in 1997. Calif. With a name like Mina's in the kitchen, a restaurant can insist that its customers eat fish, but when Aqua first opened in 1991, the chef didn't yet have all that starpower. San Francisco was simply the right place for him, Mina says. It has a sophisticated restaurant market that embraces seafood.