I grew up in the San Fernando Valley surrounded by sushi restaurants. By the time I was seven, sushi was already my thing. By thirteen, I knew I wanted to be a chef. I didn’t think it was cool. It was just the only thing I kept thinking about.

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I started as a dishwasher. Worked my way up through kitchens in LA and Chicago. Alinea. L2O. Providence. Sous chef at 21, executive chef at 24, opened my first restaurant at 25. I named it Scratch because that’s how everything gets made. I source fish directly from Toyosu. I treat LA like a region in Italy. Every ingredient has a story that starts somewhere specific, and I want to know where that is.

I thought I knew where Maui Nui venison came from. I'd been cooking with it for a while. I believed in the product. But knowing about something and actually seeing it, those are two different things.

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They run FLIR thermal imaging to find the deer at night, up on the slopes of Haleakalā, in 'Ulupalakua. The animals have been on the island since the 1950s. There are around 100,000 of them on Maui. The land can't support that number, and every harvest is working against that gap. What I witnessed was less of than a team doing a hard thing the right way. Fast, clean, zero waste. Field-inspected. No transport stress. No facility.

Here’s what I kept coming back to. These animals eat what they want, when they need it. Their whole life they’re completely free. You can actually taste it. There’s a density and a cleanness to wild venison that you don't get from animals that have lived any other kind of life. I've been cooking for twenty-plus years and I know what good ingredients taste like. This is different.

The best meat you’re going to find isn’t farmed. It’s out there. Alive and wild.

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I've always believed the source is where everything starts. Go back far enough on any great ingredient and there's a decision someone made about how to raise it, harvest it, and handle it. Maui Nui made all the right decisions in my book. Coming out here and seeing that for myself just confirmed what I already suspected.

I cook differently now because of it.