Cool & Collected
Ask Lanai Tabura about the framed set of boxing shorts mounted in his Punchbowl home and he’ll tell you about the time he was hanging out in Jesus “The Hawaiian Punch” Salud’s dressing room after the Filipino boxer’s last professional bout at the Blaisdell Arena. There’s blood on the trunks; Salud had lost the match and this loss, coupled with several recent losses, helped convince the boxer it was time to call it quits. Salud, always the consummate gentleman, signed his shorts and gifted them to Tabura.
On the wall not too far from Salud’s boxing trunks is another local sports memorabilia gem: the Olympic jersey of Allen Allen, the University of Hawai‘i’s first three-time All-American men’s volleyball player, who became a member of the U.S. National Team in the early 1990s. (Tabura received Allen’s jersey after the last game the Olympian played in the Islands.) But the crown jewel of Tabura’s collection? That would be a Hawai‘i Islanders jersey belonging to Barry Bonds, from when the former San Francisco Giants left fielder briefly played for Honolulu’s relatively short-lived minor baseball league.
“From little kid time, I was always a big Hawai‘i Islanders’ fan,” says Tabura. “My cousin, he once gave me an Islanders’ bat bag made out of heavy-duty canvas. When I was doing radio, I used to talk about the Islanders and one day, somebody gifted me Barry Bonds’ jersey. Gotta be over 25 years ago.”
Today, Tabura is probably best known as a professional foodie and local television personality—for the past seven years, he’s been the host of Cooking Hawaiian Style, a cooking and travel series that airs on Lifetime and OC16, where Tabura gets to wine and dine local celebrities in Hawai‘i and on the road. When he’s not filming, Tabura hosts private food tours, taking guests to enjoy curated feasts at hotspots across O‘ahu. Food, in one way or another, has always played an impor- tant role in his life. “Growing up with no money and three brothers, you really had to be creative. We’d stir-fry big pots of stuff, make soups and stews for the week,” Tabura says. “We had a half-acre garden so we were always picking whatever we could. When we got a little older, we fished and dived, and my brothers hunted.”
But 30 years ago, Lanai was mostly known for his work on the radio. At age 17, he started working as an on-air DJ; at 21, he joined the 3 Local Boyz, a radio mu- sical group that made parody songs like “Rice Rice Baybee” (their take on Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby”) and “Me So Hungry” (after 2 Live Crew’s “Me So Horny”) that scored airplay on airwaves throughout the United States. “Back in the day, radio was like social media,” says Tabura. “And we were lucky to have the No. 1 radio show in Hawai‘i for a long time so whenever big names were performing on the Islands, I usually got to interview them.”
Over the years, Tabura had the opportunity to speak with Justin Timberlake and NSYNC, Boyz II Men, New Kids on the Block, Eazy-E, Ice Cube and Ice-T, among others. His secret for keeping cool around some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry? Treat everyone the same. That, and keep it casual.
“I would ask dumb questions. I think that’s what made the show special,” says Tabura. “I asked Vanna White where she lost her virginity and, without missing a beat, she said on a golf course behind her house. We had Cindy Crawford on the air and I’d throw in a burp sound effect after she was done talking. She caught on after the second one and played along, saying, ‘oh, excuse me.’”
In an era before cell phones, Tabura collected more autographs than selfies. After interviewing Janet Jackson, she signed four CD covers for him. On another occasion, Tabura interviewed Mariah Carey in her room at the Kahala Hotel and she also signed a few CDs. “I framed them. There are also photos of me with Mike Tyson and Tupac, but they were taken on Instamatic cameras or by photographers I don’t know, so I can’t find them. When you’re that age, you think this stuff is no big deal but now? I wish I saved everything.”
Tabura started figuring it out once he branched into television. Clothing brands, such as Local Motion, sponsored shows that he appeared on or hosted— often, with gifts of iconic aloha shirts. “In the beginning, I used to donate shirts. Then I saw people collecting them and I thought, maybe I’ll hang onto a few ...” says Tabura, who now has a collection of more than 200 aloha shirts, with brands ranging from old-school Kahala to Manaola to Kini Zamora.
Besides hosting, Tabura appeared in guest roles—usually as the delivery man or beach boy on shows like Jake and the Fatman and Baywatch Hawai‘i. But he often appeared as himself; in 2008, he hung out with Anthony Bourdain on the Hawai‘i episode of No Reservations. In 2013, Lanai and his brother Adam Tabura (a professional chef, who previously cooked for the likes of Steve Jobs and Steven Tyler) competed against seven other teams that traveled more than 4,000 miles to win $50,000 and their own food truck in the fourth season of Food Network’s The Great Food Truck Race. In 2018, a documentary that Tabura and cinematographer Andrew Tran produced, about hole-in-the-wall ramen shops in Hawai‘i, won “Best Lifestyle Program” at the 47th annual Northern California Emmy Awards. The Emmy is currently on display in Tabura’s home, not too far from the aloha shirts, sports jerseys—or a Funko Pop vinyl doll custom-designed to look like Tabura himself. (As for the food truck, it’s too big to fit inside the house.)
“I’ve kind of been an entrepreneur from a young age,” says Tabura. “I’m always hustling. But there’s also always something happening and I want to have two or three—or a bunch—of things going on.”