Kaimukī Shoyu Works

Kaimukī Shoyu Works runs out of a tucked-away kitchen behind a Waiʻalae Avenue storefront, where Dean Fukunaga ages shoyu in small oak barrels and bottles the poke sauces his family argued over for thirty years.

The base shoyu is brewed elsewhere — Dean is upfront that he is a saucier, not a brewer — but everything after that is his: the limu-and-sesame poke shoyu, the spicy ʻinamona blend, the ginger-scallion that sells out every Friday. The koji and the patience are local; the soybeans are named on the label.

Dean's whole pitch is that a good poke is mostly a good sauce and an honest fish, and he can only help you with one of those.