Every Sunday morning along a nondescript stretch of highway in Big Island’s Puna District, local vendors of every stripe arrive at Maku’u Farmers Market to set up their elaborate village of pop-up tents, flea markets, produce racks, food trucks and display tables crammed with all sorts of handmade merchandise.
They arrive to the market space’s unassuming gravel parking lot early – some even before dawn – and set to work stringing up tarp awnings and deploying seemingly endless ranks of plastic folding tables. Their booths are arranged in several long, compact columns running nearly the entire length of the parking lot, with walkways running between them that bring shoppers down the line from one table to the next.
There doesn’t seem to be any particular order to the layout of the market, either; a beeswax candle seller can be found next to an old woman hawking baked goods next to a flower-print dressmaker next to a colorful booth adorned with psychedelic-looking art. The only real segregation here seems to be near the main entrance where it’s mostly populated by hot food vendors, who cook up everything from burritos to fried rice and noodle dishes to crepes to potstickers to tamales all on propane grills. This block of apron-clad cooks rushing about to and fro and serving up paper plates heaped with delicacies sends the enticing aroma of roasting meat and frying oil billowing down the line of stalls.
In the height of the late-morning rush, this area of the market usually swells into a bustling beehive of activity, with lines of hungry patrons waiting for their plates to come off the grill. Everywhere there are groups of people rushing around with cardboard to-go containers, some of them stopping to munch on the typical mounds of noodles, crispy spring rolls, and platters of tacos, while others dig into more exotic fare like spicy papaya salad, falafels and hunks of grilled tropical fish. The mix of smells emanating from this sprawling line of grills can be truly overwhelming sometimes, combined with the hissing roar of frozen food being tossed into large woks full of hot oil.
Hungry market patrons who came to Makuu looking for some true island cuisine crowd around an old Hawaiian man offers up homemade poke (the legendary cubed, seasoned raw fish dish currently enjoying immense popularity on the mainland) with a light green and very thin wasabi sauce that is mind-blowingly spicy. Another local uncle, whom many have simply dubbed “dry fish guy”, works a stall nearby this improvised “food court” area and has been a dependable market fixture for years, selling a variety of different species of fish which he cures himself, like ahi, ono and mahi-mahi, in addition to other homemade seafood side dishes like squid salad and seaweed salad. He serves all of these dishes to-go from a series of coolers stacked in the bed of his pickup truck, which he backs right up to the edge of his stall.
