You won’t find soy beans, corn, or mango in the dishes at Unco Chad’s Hawaiian Flavaz. The bright blue food truck pops up around southeast Michigan, and offers something different than other local poke restaurants, owner Chad Kubo said. His menu — poke bowls, kalua pork, kalbi chicken and more — is authentically Hawaiian.
“A lot of these poke restaurants up here, they try to imitate it, duplicate it, but they ain't going to do it.”
Kubo’s approach has worked. Unco Chad’s has become a statewide obsession, and his dishes have gone viral on social media. Kubo sat down with The Dish to talk about how his childhood in Hawaii influenced his love of food, why he wants to offer authentic flavors to Michigan, and what it looks like to live out a spirit of “aloha.”
“Aloha is when you take care of people, you give from the heart,” Kubo said. “You talk to people with respect. You give the people respect.”
Growing up by the ocean
Kubo’s life began by the ocean. He grew up in Waipahu in Oahu, Hawaii, but lived in Kauai for more than 30 years.
Life on the islands was different from life in the mainland U.S., Kubo said. On weekends, when he was younger, he’d catch the bus to go to the North Shore. He’d go body surfing. He’d go to a Foodland, a super market chain, to eat. Kubo would even sleep behind fire stations for the night.
“Come back Sunday, do the same thing again,” he said. “Come over Sunday evening, catch the bus coming home."
It was a different pace of life, Kubo said. Home-cooked food also factored heavily into his upbringing.
“You watch your aunties and your uncles, they all cook. Everybody cooks,” Kubo said. “And we all learn from when we were young. You want to eat, you're gonna learn how to cook.”
Pursuing a career on the water
Kubo didn’t finish high school. He knew what he wanted to do, and where he wanted to be.
“School wasn't going to teach me what I wanted to do,” Kubo said. “And what I wanted to do was be in the ocean.”
Kubo became a commercial fisherman, and then a boat captain for Hawaiian tour companies.
“I had so many crew members working under me that had business degrees,” Kubo said. “They had a biochemist, they had psychology, all this. They're all working under me, and I never graduated high school.”
After years on the water he moved into kitchens, including nearly a decade at the Grand Hyatt on Kauai.
“You're working every day,” Kubo said. “Cooking for a lot of people. All the different restaurants. I cooked in a lot of different restaurants and all different styles of cooking. We had an Italian restaurant, we had a Pacific Rim restaurant. We had a burger restaurant. We had all different things.”
Bringing Unco Chad’s to life
After Kubo remarried in 2014, his family decided to make the move to Michigan to be closer to his wife’s family.
The idea of opening his own food truck began to take shape when he was working as a manager at a Tractor Supply in west Ann Arbor.
“I gave [Tractor Supply] six months,” Kubo said. “I told them I was going to step down and do this [food truck]. And I don't know if they believed that I was leaving. . . And then we opened up. We did our soft opening at Tractor Supply in Whitmore Lake, and from there it just kept moving all over.”
The food truck travels all over Michigan but can often be found at the Tractor Supply branches in west Ann Arbor, along with Canton and Whitmore Lake. The truck eliminates the rental costs a brick-and mortar would require, Kubo said, and it gives him more flexibility to spend time with family.
“And if I need to take off, I need to do something with the family, I don't got to open if I don't want to,” Kubo said. “And I get to cook what I want to give the people a taste of Hawaii.’”
One of his most popular dishes is the Hawaii-style poke bowl. Two scoops of rice are topped with crab salad, seaweed salad, masago, and green onion. The star of the bowl is a generous helping of raw tuna that’s been marinated in a secret sauce that includes kimchi base and sesame oil.
“Traditional Hawaiian poke is any fish. Could be raw fish and it's just seaweed, salt and fish. “That's it,” Kubo said.
Kubo also offers poke nachos. Instead of cubes of fish scattered across the chips, he piles one big serving of finely chopped ahi, lomi style, right in the center so it can be scooped, almost like Hawaiian ceviche. The chips are thick, homemade wonton crackers filling the base of the container.
“We cook with the heart and we cook things that people are gonna love to eat in Michigan,” Kubo added.
With what he’s built with his food truck, Kubo is grateful the public has embraced his food. He appreciates the freedom and flexibility of his truck. He may miss the water in Hawaii, but Michigan now feels like home.
“People ask me, ‘Where's home? You don’t miss home?’ I don't miss home. Because right here, this is home, where I put my feet.”
