Origins
According to University of Hawaii professor, Jon Okamura, the plate lunch likely grew out of the Japanese bento because they "were take away kinds of eating and certainly the plate lunch continues that tradition". Although the exact origin of the Hawaiian plate lunch is disputed, it goes back to the 1880s when plantation workers were in high demand by the fruit and sugar companies. Laborers were brought from around the world, including from China, Japan, Portugal, and the Philippines, who would eat "leftover rice and a lot of things like canned meat or teriyaki or cold meat or maybe scrambled eggs or pickles, and almost no salad or vegetable," according to The Honolulu Advertiser's former food editor, Ms. Kaui Philpotts. Mayonnaise macaroni and gravy for the meat were later added.
As the days of the plantations came to an end, the plate lunches started being served by lunch wagons to construction workers and day laborers. Later, local "holes in the wall and other stand-alone plate lunch restaurants" began popping up and then franchises for the plate lunch. Eventually plate lunch franchises made their way to the mainland in the U.S. beginning with L&L Drive-Inn coming to California in 1999. At that time, one of the founders of L&L, Eddie Flores, rebranded the restaurant chain as L&L Hawaiian Barbecue. Flores explained his reasoning for renaming the franchise, "When we went to the mainland, the name 'Hawaiian' is a draw, because everyone just fantasized, everyone wants to come to Hawaii". From that point on, plate lunches became known to mainland America as Hawaiian Barbecue.
Read more about this topic: Plate Lunch
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