Huli Huli Chicken: The Anthropology of Hawaii's Fundraiser Sauce

Years before I moved to Austin, a high school friend of mine got married, and the reception was at a place called Hula Hut — a Tex-Mex spot built out over Lake Austin that bills itself as “Mexonesian,” which is exactly as chaotic as it sounds. Somewhere on that menu was a Huli Huli platter. I have no idea if it's still there; I'm a little ashamed to say that once I actually moved to town, I've only made it back a couple of times. But the sauce on those ribs stuck with me. Sweet, salty, and something fruity that wasn't quite citrus — more like an acid I couldn't place.

I didn't think about it again for years, until a work trip landed me in Oakland later than planned, which is how every one of my work trips goes. Too late to go find somewhere, I opened DoorDash and noticed something odd: an unusual number of Hawaiian restaurants for a city nowhere near Hawaii. One of them had huli huli chicken on the menu. I ordered it, and it turned into a habit — now it's the first thing I order to my hotel room every time work sends me back to Oakland.

Turns out both halves of that story have real answers — the sauce, and the Oakland thing.

Born at a Farm Bureau Meeting

The chicken predates the fast-food version of Hawaiian BBQ by decades, and it starts, of all places, with a chicken farmer. In 1954, Ernest Morgado — a Portuguese-American World War II naval intelligence veteran — teamed up with farmer Mike Asagi to found the Pacific Poultry Company in ʻEwa, on Oʻahu. The next year, at a routine farm bureau meeting, Morgado grilled chicken basted in his mother's teriyaki-style sauce. The farmers went crazy for it, and he had a business on his hands.

The Word Is the Cooking Method

The chicken was cooked on a makeshift double grate over the fire, and when one side was done, someone in the crowd would shout “huli” — Hawaiian for “turn” — so the whole rack could be flipped and basted again. The name wasn't a marketing invention. It was crowd noise that stuck. Morgado took the dish to fundraisers next — churches, schools, community groups selling plates to raise money — and huli-huli chicken became one of the most reliable ways to raise a few thousand dollars in Hawaiʻi, a tradition that's reportedly brought in millions over the decades. He trademarked “huli-huli” through Pacific Poultry in 1967, and didn't bottle the sauce for retail until 1986. He never published the actual recipe.

What's Actually in the Bottle

That mystery fruit note I couldn't place at Hula Hut? Almost certainly pineapple juice, which shows up in nearly every huli-huli recreation alongside soy sauce, ketchup, brown sugar or honey, ginger, garlic, and a hit of sesame oil. Some versions add rice wine vinegar or sherry vinegar for extra acid alongside the pineapple — which tracks with what I remember: sweet and salty up front, something tart underneath that wasn't lemon or lime. Traditionally it's not just a sauce dumped on at the end, either — the chicken goes on a spit or a double grate over kiawe (mesquite) wood, getting basted and flipped, basted and flipped, until the smoke and the glaze both do their job.

The Trademark War (This One's Real)

In 2014, a company called Noh Foods released a sauce called “Hula-Huli.” Pacific Poultry — still family-run, still holding that 1967 trademark — sued. Noh's defense was that hula (a dance) and huli (to turn) are different words, so the names weren't really the same thing. The court didn't buy it: close enough to confuse a shopper on a shelf, close enough to infringe. Noh had to change the name. It's the same shape as the DC mumbo sauce fight, just with the roles matched up differently — the family that's held the name since a 1967 filing successfully defended it nearly fifty years later.

Why Oakland, Specifically

As for the Bay Area's suspiciously deep bench of Hawaiian restaurants: the Bay Area has the largest Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander population outside Hawaiʻi itself, concentrated especially in the East Bay — Oakland, Hayward, and Vallejo have been called, only half-jokingly, the world's biggest “Little Island.” Chains that started in Hawaiʻi, like L&L (operating since 1952, later expanding to the mainland), followed that population to California. It's not a coincidence that DoorDash surfaced a menu of huli huli chicken in Oakland at 10 p.m. on a delayed work trip. It's a decades-long migration pattern showing up in a delivery app.

Want to Try It?

A couple of places to start:

• How to Make Hawaiʻi-Style Huli-Huli Chicken at Hawaiʻi Magazine — a homemade version from a Hawaiʻi-based publication, if you want to run it on your own grill.

• Pacific Poultry's Huli-Huli Sauce — the original, still trademarked, still bottled in the spirit of that 1955 recipe.

I still don't know if Hula Hut's Huli Huli platter survived whatever menu changes have happened since 1993. But I know the DoorDash order in Oakland isn't going anywhere. Some sauces you research. Some just find you twice, a decade apart, and you stop asking questions.