Tasty Crust

Wailuku is the old county town of Maui, a few minutes inland from the resort coast, and Tasty Crust has been part of it since 1942. It is a diner in the mainland sense — a counter, a griddle, orange booths, a menu of plate lunches and short-order breakfasts — and also something entirely local, because on Maui a plate lunch is not a novelty, it is lunch. For more than eighty years this room has fed the people who work in the town rather than the people who visit the island, and it is still doing that every morning.

The plate lunch is the order: a scoop or two of rice, a generous scoop of macaroni salad, and a main — pork, chicken or fish, cooked simply and served hot. The macaroni salad matters more than it sounds; on the islands it is not a side dish so much as a signature, cool and creamy against the rice. Then there are the pancakes, which is why locals come early: fluffy, griddled hotcakes with butter and syrup, or the banana and macadamia versions that turn breakfast into something closer to dessert. Order both and you have eaten the way Maui eats.

Come in the morning, when the counter is full of people heading to work, and do not be surprised if you have to wait. There is nothing touristy about the room, and that is the appeal.

Bourdain brought Parts Unknown to Hawaii and was after exactly this: not the resort buffet but the local diner where the island's food — Japanese, Portuguese, Hawaiian, American — has been mixed into something of its own for generations.