“Welcome to the last frontier in American cooking,” opens The New Cuisine of Hawaii, published in 1994. Three years before, 12 chefs had banded together to debut Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine, which the cookbook’s recipes exemplified. Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine would overthrow the culinary stereotype of the time: that Hawaiian food was pizza with pineapple, and that fine dining in the islands meant European dishes made with imported ingredients, including frozen fish.

The 12—Sam Choy, Roger Dikon, Mark Ellman, Beverly Gannon, Jean-Marie Josselin, George Mavrothalassitis, Peter Merriman, Amy Ferguson-Ota, Philippe Padovani, Gary Strehl, Alan Wong, and Roy Yamaguchi—were a motley crew scattered across the islands, some born and raised in Hawai‘i, others recent transplants hailing from Texas to France. What united them was a frustration with Hawai‘i’s culinary scene and reputation, and the desire to promote fresh, locally grown ingredients. Local boy Sam Choy, with two restaurants in Kailua-Kona on the Big Island, created Hawai‘i’s version of soul food with dishes like a hearty fish soup fortified with breadfruit and sweet potato, and a fried kajiki poke over soba noodles. Peter Merriman, originally from Pittsburgh, described his food at Merriman’s in Waimea on Big Island as “straightforward country style,” inspired by the ranches around him. He is credited with introducing the 12 chefs to the small network of farmers he had cultivated, opening the chefs’ eyes to the possibilities of what ingredients can be grown in Hawai‘i, from baby lettuce to vine-ripened tomatoes to lobster.

At the time, agriculture in Hawai‘i was geared toward export, primarily pineapple and sugar. Farms growing products like tomatoes, asparagus, and even basil were rare. Merriman, in fact, had to ask farmers to grow herbs for him, and it took him three years to develop a reliable source for tomatoes.

Mavrothalassitis, who served as the chef of La Mer and executive chef of Halekulani from 1988 to 1995, says the running joke of the era was that the best food you were going to get in Hawai‘i was the food on the plane. “Everybody was coming to Waikīkī and expecting to get bad food,” he says. “This was true of Waikīkī, because chefs were cooking with frozen [imported] food. But it wasn’t true at all for the rest of Hawai‘i. The Chinese, Hawaiian, Korean, Japanese, and Filipino were already here, already using beautiful ingredients.” The tourists didn’t know that—all they saw were Caesar salads and sole almondine and perhaps the occasional kālua pig and poi at a tourist lū‘au. So the Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine chefs showed them. Mavrothalassitis did so by highlighting Hawai‘i’s seafood: raw ‘ahi tartare, crowned with caviar and a taro chip; whole onaga, baked in a salt crust; a medley of seafood, including mahimahi, nohu (rock cod), and Kahuku prawns, in a tamarind nage.

Mavrothalassitis’ predecessor, and former Halekulani executive chef, Philippe Padovani says that when he was brought to Halekulani from France as a consultant, his superiors told him they wanted La Mer’s menu sketched out before he arrived. He responded that he needed to go to the markets first. “ʻWe’re not in France, this is Hawai‘i,’” Padovani recalls being told, to which he replied, “You have a Chinatown. I’m the chef here, I’ll give the orders, thank you very much.”

In Honolulu’s Chinatown, he found tiny moano, or goatfish, which he panfried and served over snow peas and bacon in a curry sauce. He bought ‘ōpakapaka and baked it, bundled in ti leaves, with ogo, shiitake mushrooms, and Szechwan chili sauce. From the Wailea Agricultural Group, a farm on Big Island, he ordered the star product, fresh heart of palm, and made a vichyssoise. “That is holy water,” he says. “If I had to date a girl or have the vichyssoise, I would take the vichyssoise. I can find a girl another time.”

It turns out that The New Cuisine of Hawaii was wrong. Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine was not the last frontier. For it continues to evolve, dissolve boundaries, and transcend generations. All its chefs continue to cook and reinvent themselves: Mavrothalassitis still helms his restaurant Chef Mavro, along with the next-generation chef, Jonathan Mizukami, where the pair’s creativity results in a constantly changing menu; after a string of restaurants, Padovani now produces exquisite chocolates in more than 40 varieties, such as one filled with a pirie mango ganache or one with a liliko‘i caramel. Merriman plans to open two new restaurants on O‘ahu by 2017; Roy Yamaguchi, who now calls his culinary style “Hawai‘i heritage cooking,” is opening two locations of Eating House 1849, his homage to Hawai‘i’s multiethnic island culture; Alan Wong, perhaps the group’s most famous icon, recently opened a restaurant in Shanghai.

But Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine isn’t confined to restaurant kitchens—its influence reaches far beyond that. Because of this local culinary renaissance, Wong says, “the spirit in which we look at food, ingredients, and cooking at home has changed. Today, you can go to a potluck, and some aunties are using a product from a specific farmer in their home-cooked food. That never happened 25 years ago. Or some uncle got creative with his fried ‘ahi belly and [made a] ponzu relish to go with it. This is all happening because some culinary barriers were broken a long time ago, and it [is] now possible to do much more.”