 And welcome to Lillian's Vegan World, the only show in Honolulu where we talk about vegan lifestyle and plant-based diet. I'm coming to you live from the Think Tech Hawaii Studios in gorgeous downtown Honolulu and the times for my show have now changed from Thursday to Thursday, 1pm every second week. So looking forward to seeing you at this time again. I'm so excited to introduce my guest today from Vegan Hills, General Manager Kelly Camau. Yeah, hello. Welcome Kelly. Thank you. Thank you so much for taking out the time in your busy schedule and busy restaurant to come and talk to us. Thank you. It's exciting to be here. I know, do you know that when I first came to Honolulu for the first time two years ago, my first, the very first restaurant I went to was Vegan Hills. Nice. I was talking about how awesome the food was and stuff. So I do have sort of a little soft spot in my heart for your restaurant. And I did visit Vegan Hills a couple of weeks ago with my husband, who's a non-vegan, who's what I would call the opposite of a vegan. And he loved it. Good. Awesome. He honestly did. He loved it. I thought it was fantastic. So yeah, welcome. Thank you. How about it? How's it going? So you recently started working there as the general manager this year? Yeah, this year. I officially became general manager I think in June, but I was co-running it since the end of October of last year. Okay, great. And I've been a waitress there since the first month it opened. Wow. How awesome. Thanks. And you've worked your way up to now really running the show there, which is fantastic. And you're doing a wonderful job. Thank you. Tell us first of all for people that don't know what Vegan Hills is. What is Vegan Hills? Vegan Hills is an all plant-based vegan restaurant. We strive to showcase how eating healthy doesn't have to be eating boring. It don't have to go without flavor to eat a full balanced diet basically. So yeah, we just show that you can eat really, really good food. If you want to go vegan or if you want to go plant-based, and we've had so many people like your husband who is completely not vegan come in, I'd say like 85% of our return customers are not vegan. And they keep coming back. Really? Yeah, because they love how the food makes them feel. They love how it tastes. They say that they can't believe it's not vegan. And we've had a lot of people be like, man, I could go vegan if I could eat this food every day. That's amazing. Yeah, and except Tuesdays. Except Tuesdays? Yes. We're closed on Tuesdays for now. We're working on being open seven days a week in the future, but we want to really hone in ourselves first before we can expand to all the hours. If it were feasible, I would love to run like a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week vegan place that anyone could go into at any time and get whatever they want. That would be my dream. It's hard work. So for hours at the moment, Tuesday you're closed and you're not open for dinner at the moment. Not at the moment, no. Yeah, we're leaving those open more for special events. We do have a couple of those coming up at the end of the month, but we can talk about those later. Definitely. Yeah, so I'd love to hear about them. Yeah, I personally love eating dinner, of course. So we do have it in the works and we're trying to come up with the right menus for it, putting together the recipes, which is a lot of fun. But still, even if you're not open in the evenings, you still cover all of those food groups. You can have like an awesome breakfast at lunch. You can have dinner at lunch because your dishes are just sort of, you're covering all the gorgeous comfort food that you can think of and you've veganized all these dishes. So my husband in particular was just amazed at the pulled pork that is made from jackfruit that you served. You did some sliders, I think they were. Yeah, the barbecue jackfruit sliders, and we make our own coleslaw for that as well, using an almond milk-based mayonnaise kind of, but it's not like thick like mayonnaise. My boyfriend who hates mayonnaise, he really likes that slaw. And the jackfruit, we just marinate it with some barbecue sauce, a little bit of liquid smoke to give it that flavor, and it is insane how much it mimics that. As an animal lover myself, I used to be completely not vegan. The day before I went vegan, I was eating collo pork quesadillas, and then the next day I was like, nope, no more. So, someone who really misses those flavors and those textures, it's really exciting to be able to find out how to recreate those with plants without having to harm any living animals, and to be able to reproduce it for the public, basically. Exactly. I mean, how far has vegan food come? Even just in the past few years, it's just incredible, and I love that you're serving stuff like that, because going back to what you mentioned earlier on, vegan food is not only for vegans. I drum this through everyone's brains, everyone I meet, I actually don't cook for vegans. I cook for non-vegans, not because I prefer to, just because people are curious. We're at the age where people are curious. They are looking for healthier options. They are wanting to try these new things that are just not going crazy all over the world, or these new meat products and stuff, but feeding back to that jackfruit, those sliders. Definitely I hope that viewers go in and check out vegan hills. Kelly, I just want to step back a bit. You said that you just mentioned that you were eating collo pork or something the day before you became vegan. How did you end up? Yeah. It was pretty crazy, because for my entire life, basically, it was always like, I'll never give up. Me, vegans are crazy. How could they? The cheese, the wabachis, and that's so true. Yeah. I was at a point in my life where I was just eating out of control. I was working late nights as a waitress in restaurants in Waikiki, and then I'd get out of work, and then we'd just go eat bar food, and I'd eat 20 chicken wings in one sitting. Typical bar foods. Yeah, typical bar foods. I was just the heaviest I'd ever been, and I was not able to perform my work well. I wasn't feeling great, and I was just like, man, I really got to find something that will help me curb how I'm eating, because this is definitely out of control. I had kind of been thinking about it for about a week of what I could do to change my eating, because I was like, I know myself, I'm all or nothing. If I don't cut something out, or if I don't drastically change something, I'm not going to change. Then I saw this five minute video on YouTube called Dairy is Scary, and it's about the life of a dairy cow and how inhumane it is, and I always called myself an animal lover and environmentalist, and those facts in my face like that, when I was already in a very susceptible mindset, I was like, ooh, this is not something I want to put my money towards anymore. And I was like, wait, I'm looking for a way to eat better. I don't like what dairy is doing to the animals. I wonder if maybe vegan is right for me. And then I was like, I'll try a vegan challenge for seven days. I'll go complete cold turkey, so to speak. Yes. And I'll just try for seven days if at the end of the seven days I can't do it anymore than I tried it. And then at the end of the seven days, I had watched all of the documentaries on Hulu and Netflix and YouTube. I had read so many articles. I looked at the nutrition behind it. I looked into the environmental impact. And by the end of that week, I was so turned off by meat and dairy and eggs that I just never turned back. But it was pretty crazy. But yes, it only took you a week to realize how really you don't need it. That's just the fact is that you can live a very healthy life on a plant based diet, and you become aware of so many things, don't you? These documentaries that you talked about, there are so many now to even mention, but they are very eye-opening. And I do recommend people take a look at them. Why not? You've got nothing to lose. Exactly. You might just change your life for the better. Yeah. Exactly. Change mind for the better. It's definitely one of the best decisions I ever made. I'm so glad to hear that. Yeah, thanks. This was about three and a half years ago that I first went vegan. Yeah, February of, I can't math right now. Whenever three and a half years ago. So you never went back? You never cheated? No, there were a couple of times where I would accidentally be served something with it. And instead of letting myself get upset about it, I took it as a learning moment to observe how my body reacted. Because during that first week when I tried it, what I really noticed was how amazing I felt after just seven days. Like I felt amazing within the first couple of days. Then after seven, when my body had really fully detoxed all of the things I had eaten before, I was like, wow, I feel so good. And so anytime I would accidentally consume it, because with quitting anything, you have those withdrawals. And like, oh, if only. And the biggest thing was going out with my friends. Because they all still wanted to go to those same places after work. And I could no longer have. Most places you go, the only option for vegans is fries or rice, which is. Yes, it amames. As much as I love potatoes, I know only so many french fries you can have late at night. True, yes. That was the hardest part. But I only ever thought about it. But then I would even look at my friend's food and be like, maybe I could take a bite. And then the closer I get to it, I'd be like, nah. I'm good. Yeah. As long as you're balancing it out with all the other good stuff, you have to enjoy your food. And that's one of the things I loved about your restaurant. Really, it caters for every palate possible. So definitely do check out Vegan Hills. Kelly, let's have a look at some of the food that you serve there. Let's have a look at the first one. These are photos that I took from the lunch that I enjoyed there a couple of weeks ago. So I did get the loaded fries, the guacamole and chips. And what else, the sliders down to the left, the bottom left, the jackfruit sliders we were talking about earlier. The gorgeous salad that you recommended, the Brussels sprout. It's called the Brussels. Love it. Thank you. That was beautiful. And come back for more Vegan Hills and more vegan fun stuff. Aloha and welcome. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea program. Every other Monday at 1 o'clock, I am here on deck with various guests talking about different topics of the world and the ocean and international law, different areas where we all have seen and wanted travel to and learn about. Please join me for my next Law Across the Sea program. Aloha. Aloha, everyone. I'm Christine Linders. And this is Think Tech Hawaii. My show is Movement Matters. And this is a show brought to you to talk about how to get rid of things like your low back pain, scoliosis, TMJ dysfunction, ankle sprains, pretty much anything that you can do with your body or hurt your body. I am here to bring to you the cutting-edge strategies that you can do right now easily on your own to help get out of pain and get back to doing what you love. Life is better when you listen to your physical therapist. Tune in Tuesdays at 11 a.m. every other week for Movement Matters. Aloha. Welcome back, everyone, to Lillian's Vegan World. I'm here with my awesome guest, Kelly Camau from Vegan Hills, my favorite vegan restaurant in Honolulu. It is delicious. And I did name today's program, Kelly, Vegan Hills, Leading the Way in Plant-Based Cuisine in Honolulu, Turning Comfort Food into Mouth-Watering Vegan Versions for All to Enjoy. Yes, yes, that's definitely a big part of what Vegan Hills is all about, just showcasing how diverse plant-based foods can be and how it can be made delicious for anyone. Exactly, I totally get your place. I think you need to make Vegan Hills in every little area in Honolulu, so I don't have to go far to get my fix. Yeah. Let's take a look, Kelly, at some more of the photos that you've prepared of these gorgeous dishes that you're serving there. Yes, look at that. Awesome, these are two of our cocktails. The one on the left is our morning moon rise with lavender simple syrup vodka, organic vodka too. We have an all organic bar. Right. Pineapple juice, it tastes like a spa in a glass. It's so good. And then the one on the right is our mega-marry. That's awesome. Yeah, it's like a 30-ounce drink. It's got your choice of either vodka or tequila, and then it comes with two potatoes and a breakfast lighter on top. It's been a dream of mine to have something like that. I don't even like Bloody Marys, or I never liked Bloody Marys before I was vegan. And I saw there are places around here that do like the crab claw, and they do like these massive Marys, and then I'm like, all of a sudden I want one. But most Bloody Marys have anchovies in them in the Worcestershire sauce. So it was always my dream to kind of make like a vegan version of that, that vegans can come in and enjoy and also have that epic time that I feel like a lot of it is like I really want to make vegan versions of epic times that I feel like I might miss out on sometimes. Yeah, that is such a great thing to have on your menu. The only reason I didn't order it is because I wanted to try so many dishes, and that just looked like it was going to be really filling and satisfying. But definitely I'll have to try one of those. I do have a mini Mary as well for people who want to eat more than that one thing. Great, I love it. That's very creative. Thank you. I like that. Let's have a look at another one, Kil. Yes, our taco salad. It's made with quinoa, walnut, black bean, air quotes, meat. It's just a toast of walnuts and quinoa together with a bunch of really good spices that taste like taco meat over lettuce, chips. I think I'm going to start dribbling, seriously. I think someone's going to nap. That looks so good. No one's going to miss anything eating something like that. You've got the crunch, you've got the sour, the salty, the savoury, the creamy, but there's so much going on in that bowl that it's just like one huge satisfaction punch. Yeah, love it. What did you call that bowl? The taco salad. The taco salad. OK, awesome. And another one, the pancakes. The famous pancakes that I keep telling everyone about. Yes, these are the banana pancakes. They have some bananas cooked inside it, a little bit on top for decoration as well, or for garnish. It comes with our house-made coconut with cream, chocolate sauce, and peanuts, and a side of syrup. Our pancakes are so fluffy. I love them so much. I suddenly feel like my bowl of fruit after the show is just not going to be there. It's not going to get me there. It's not going to cut it. I tried the berry pancakes with that gorgeous, luscious berry sauce and that coconut cream. I couldn't believe that they were vegan. I actually don't eat pancakes much, but the reason we ordered pancakes was that the table next to us ordered them, and my husband and I were going, oh, they look all right. We were so full by that stage, we were like, OK, well, let's just order some and try them. Kelly, they're the most fluffy, moist, oh, God, delicious pancakes I've tried. Oh, I'm getting hungry. In a restaurant. They are amazing. I'll go there just to eat that. Maybe try one of those mega-marys for research purposes. Yeah, exactly. That's all about the research. Let's do another one. What else have we got? Oh, nice. Yeah, on the left here we have our two-knot melt sandwich with potatoes, and then on the right is the breakfast slider, the one that comes on the mega-mary we were talking about earlier. OK. The two-knot melt is one of our more popular sandwiches. It's made also with jackfruit, and we make a dill mayo in-house. And the combination of the two, the way that we prepare the jackfruit, it tastes like tuna wood. Really? Yeah, a lot of people come in and asking if it tastes just like tuna, and then they try it, and they're like, this is so crazy. It tastes like childhood. It's a melt, so we melt our vegan cheese right on there. Wow. We also made pickles in there, and I was a fan of tuna melts when I was a kid, so to, again, have that in this restaurant is so awesome. I thought you said, do you eat like that at home? I mostly eat at the restaurant. OK. But yeah, I do. I would work there. Yeah. Just so I could work in there, so I could have the food. Yes. Yeah. So sometimes I do try to recreate the recipes at home. The one that I always have trouble making on my own at my house is the cocoa whip. For some reason, I don't know. Maybe the walls of vegan hills are magic. No, I must admit that that's a gorgeous cocoa whip you've got going there. Thank you. Again, almost scary that it's not, it's the real stuff. It tastes very, very like a normal whipped cream, but it's got that nice, light coconut edge to it. So when you're eating it and devouring it, you don't feel guilty at all. That's another good thing about plant-based food. You eat it and you know it's good for you. It's doing good things for you. You haven't harmed anything to get it on your plate. So it's kind of a very nice experience. Thanks. Kelly, I'm going to show you some stuff that I've been making in the past few months, a little glimpse at Lillian's vegan kitchen. First, no, we do have to show this other slide. I made that one. He's been trying to rip off your dish. You sure you don't want to work at vegan meals? Is this a scramble? Oh, no. It's mac and cheese, actually. Oh, OK. It's really good, another one of our really popular dishes. We've just started trying some variations of loading the mac and cheese. So now we have like a chili mac. We thought we put some of the barbecue jackfruit in there with some Korean chili threads and a miso paste to make like a loaded jack mac. Yeah, so it's a nice twist to the mac and cheese. Yeah, we really encourage our guests to come in and add whatever they want to the mac and cheese. So what we'll suggest a lot is people add like jalapenos or a tempeh bacon, maybe some kale. We have a whole list of all the additions that we have and people can really build their own mac and cheese, just like our grilled cheese sandwich called Cheese Your Own Adventure. That is so I love the play on words. Thank you. So clever. Yeah, we're all about puns. I love it. No, I did notice on your menu that you do have all these additional add-ons and stuff that you can, so you can really walk in there and turn, yeah, like you said, a mac and cheese into your own funky version of it. Yeah, make it your own. That's what we're about. We love it when people express themselves through food because we're expressing ourselves through food. Definitely, what a great idea. I love that concept. If anyone out there hasn't been to Vegan Hills yet, I totally recommend it. It's in Kaimuki, by the way. Do you have parking available there? There is a paid parking lot behind us. We don't validate for it, but it's only like $0.75 an hour. It's definitely on the cheaper end of all the parking around us. And then there's a little side street across the road from us, and there are other metered parkings around. So no problem with the parking. And do you take reservations? Yes. What's the number? Our phone number to make reservations is 808-200-4488. If we don't answer, we can always call back or just leave a message saying how many people are coming, your name, your phone number to reach you at, or you can send us an email veganhills.hi at gmail.com. I'm sure that'll come up at some point. Or you can head to our website, and they have a lot of directions there. We highly recommend reservations. They're not required, but we are a very small restaurant. We only have 16 tables. And if we're wanting to feed as many people these delicious vegan food as possible, we try to make it as organized and easy to do as possible. But we do recommend reservations. So you're at least guaranteed to get a spot right when you want to, because it goes from zero to full in like two seconds. I noticed it was packed when I was there. And yeah, definitely do get a reservation in the hours, Kelly, that you're open. We're open every day except Tuesday from 10 AM to 3 PM. OK. It's a nice five-hour window there. Yeah. We do our last seating and last call around 2.45 ish, but we can still do takeout between 2.45 and 3. So if you're like rushing to get there, just call us ahead and place a pickup order. And we can do takeout, yeah. Yes, I noticed that you're doing takeout as well. So that's like get to vegan hills. Get your vegan fix at vegan hills. Let us feed you. You do have one more photo for us, Kelly, that I'd like to show. Nice. Yeah, there's the tuna. Sorry, the tuna, you get the milty gang. It's just so good you have to show it twice. Yes, it is. And then these ones on the right, those are our wine nachos. We have the ohana size and the mini. The mini is just a third the size smaller, but it's more personal sized. Those are the ones that my parents still ask for me to find a way to send to them. Yeah, it's got like two different kinds of cashew creams. There's one cashew cream and then our jalapeno queso, which has that cashew cream as the base. And then we add some vegan cheese, jalapenos, and all sorts of other delicious spices to it to make it taste like queso. And then it has our house made quinoa black bean chili on there. Oh, yummy. Kelly. Sorry, I know I wasn't hungry before either. I actually don't eat like a normal person. I do what we call intermittent fasting. So I eat only for four hours a day. Oh, yeah. From about between 4 PM to 8 PM. Anyway, I feel like I'm really, really not going to stick to that today. Well, we are open today. I know. Geez. Well, let's have a look at my video, Kelly. So this is what I've been cooking up in my kitchen the past few months. And we can just chat while I show that. Yeah, oh, these are good. So I do have sort of a strong Japanese influence with my cooking having lived there for 30 years. And that's where I worked as a chef and cooking instructor and stuff. So there's all lots of stuff going on here. Oh, those are some fresh tempura. I remember was it last month that you had a very famous chef from Japan come in and do an event at Beacon Hills? Yes. Yeah, he came in and did an eat shop mostly where he cooked some of his, I still can't pronounce it, shōjin ryori. Shōjin ryori. Yeah, there we go. It's a type of cooking that's very basic and more honed in on the plants and simplistic eating and minimalist eating. And he did a demonstration on a couple dishes. And we provided a sake pairing with it with the dishes that he had. Yeah, right. How did you like the food? It was good. That food originally comes from the monks, what the monks used to eat. So it's very, as you said, very minimalistic, very simple flavors they don't really do much to the food. But it was crazy how even those, they were very simple flavors. We actually took one of the dishes that he made there. It was three or four ingredients that we already had in the restaurant. And so we asked if we could use that recipe for one of our dishes. And it was the carrot sesame oil one with just cumin seed and salt. And it's just those four ingredients. You just massage the carrots a little bit so that it incorporates the flavors. And it is just so powerful in flavor. Yeah, we were like, this is amazing. And it was really fun to watch all that. He did like a stuffed mushroom. What did he stuff the mushroom with? The cap of the mushroom. And then I think a little bit of tempeh. I forget the other thing. I was passing out sake as he was trying to look and talk at the same time and not get sake on the table. It's completely different to what you're doing at Vegan Hills, that type of cooking. So it's nice that you're having these little events that can introduce people to other types of vegan food. That shorting deity in Japan is becoming popular again because finally in Japan, the vegan movement, if you want to call it, that is starting. It's just starting to happen. So it's so exciting. So they're starting to bring back all of this old traditional way of eating, which is nice. So that's what I've been doing. Lots of stuff going on. I do have my events posted for the end of this month and my October events, which you can find on all of my forums under the Lillian Vegan name. So my Facebook page is under Lillian Vegan. I have about 200 recipe videos on YouTube, all of my original vegan recipes. So lots of stuff going on there. And of course, you can watch this awesome show every second of Thursday, 1 PM, live from downtown Honolulu. We're very lucky to be living here and in a place that allows this vegan food and restaurants like this to flourish. I'm so excited for you. Yeah, thank you. So what have you got at Vegan Hills that's new on the menu? Yeah, we are trying to put out weekly specials. So we've been playing our, I like to play chopped with my chefs. Say that you have to use everything that we have in the pantry, make me something new. I love it. It's done a lot of fun. But this week, we're actually revisiting an old dish that was really popular. It's called de Calbi. We take soy curls, which is very similar to tofu. But in the last stage, instead of putting it in the block, they freeze dry the soy and then curl it up. And then you just rehydrate it and marinate it. And we marinate it in a way that tastes like Calbi beef. And we put it with this spicy red miso paste and put Korean chili threads on top. And it's a very fantastic Korean inspired dish. That's fantastic. You've really covered all of the food groups, so many cuisines going on there. So Kelly, it's been awesome having you on the show. Thank you so much for taking the time out. You'll be seeing a lot of me. A lot of me. And I'm sure a lot of everyone else. So definitely, if you haven't checked out Vegan Hills in Kaimuki, please do so. The food is fantastic. Kelly will take care of you and make sure that you get lots of plant-based yummies in there. So thank you so much, Kelly. Yeah, thanks for having me. And huge mahalo to Think Tech Hawaii. Look forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks. Have an awesome day. And mahalo.