Wade Ueoka

Comfort foods and local flavors sit at the center of Wade Ueoka’s cooking, and that preference shows up in the kitchens where he trained and advanced. Mid-Pacific School and Kapiolani Community College were the first stops before Zippy’s Restaurants, where the line work began as a Fry Cook. At Alan Wong’s Restaurant, he moved from Prep Cook to Head Chef, building the kind of kitchen discipline that comes from staying inside the work and learning each station from the ground up.

Since 2013, MW Restaurant in Honolulu has been the main site for Wade Ueoka’s work as Executive Chef and co-owner. Since 2020, he has also served as Executive Chef of Hawaiian Airlines, extending the same regional focus into in-flight meals. The throughline is clear: the craft stays rooted in Hawaii, even as the format shifts.

At MW Restaurant, Wade Ueoka’s role ties authorship to ownership. The kitchen output is his, and the room where it lands is his as well. That arrangement gives direct shape to the menus, where comfort foods, local foods, and local flavors are not side notes but the core vocabulary. His work at Hawaiian Airlines pushes that vocabulary into a different service model. "Learning how to cook for the in-flight meals has been such an educational experience," he says, and the phrasing fits the job: the format changes, the standards still have to hold.

Taken together, the Honolulu dining room and the airline kitchen show a chef working across two scales of service without leaving regional cooking behind. The discipline is in keeping the food legible to place whether it is plated in a restaurant or served in the air.

Wade's signature dishes include mochi crusted fish, Mochi-crusted Kona Kampachi, and MW Grandma's cookies.

Wade's honors include Rising Star Chef.