“This place was called the Hubba Hubba room or the Swingers’ Room, or something,” says Jesse Cruz, the 39-year-old chef and proprietor of Livestock Tavern, an ambient restaurant in a former brothel in Honolulu. “There are delights of a different variety here today.”

Nestled on the corner of Hotel Street in Chinatown – formerly the stomping ground of sailors seeking earthly pleasures in the city’s clandestine corners – Livestock Tavern is emblematic of the neighbourhood’s recent revival and, more broadly, the renewal of Honolulu’s improving restaurant culture. It bills itself as American-inspired, which is a tough sell in a city where drive-in diners and mom-and-pop restaurants have long been firm fixtures.

But unlike many chefs here, Cruz’s aim is to elevate American comfort food by using ingredients from nearby farms: lobster rolls made with critters netted off the Hawaiian coast and served on home-baked bread, or Hawaiian prime-rib beef smoked for hours in his kitchen’s kiln. “We are [about] simplicity; we’re not a cutting-edge restaurant,” he says. “We really want to make sure these flavours are something that you come back for.”

Cruz was born in Honolulu and his first job was as a kitchen-hand at a steakhouse in the city. At the age of 20 he left for San Francisco before moving to the kitchens of the Caesars Palace hotel in Las Vegas, where he worked for a decade before returning home.

Hawaii has long been considered something of a culinary curiosity, even a black hole, and “fusion” was a standard term here before it became a buzzword in kitchens around the world. When migrants arrived at the turn of the 20th century from Asia, the US and continental Europe they brought their national menus with them and appropriated them using Hawaii’s scant produce. “As a kid I had neighbours who were Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Filipino,” says Cruz. “But the fusion became confusing. When you start adding wasabi mashed potatoes to a red-wine sausage, the food has no root.”

Hawaiian produce is hard to farm given the volcanic soil and up-and-down topography, not to mention the turbulent Pacific climate. They are challenges that explain why the food industry here is so dependent on imports; 80 to 90 per cent of the islands’ edibles arrive from elsewhere. Cattle ranchers, for example, will often raise their herds on imported grain before selling the stock to be matured on the mainland; then the meat is shipped back to Hawaii for consumption. Despite the food here being vulnerable to the changing weather and many producers being hamstrung by an underdeveloped infrastructure, Livestock Tavern has worked hard to be a boon to locals by filling its menus with ingredients grown on the islands. “Supporting a farm or a food business in Hawaii will only make it more independent in the future,” says Cruz. “Our farms are very fragile. A little rain and a little wind will destroy the crops. It’s a challenge but when we do get the product, it’s amazing.”