New upscale Wailea restaurant staffing kitchen with culinary graduates from UH Maui College

When husband-and-wife team Taylor Ponte, the chef, and Natasha Ponte, the general manager, were staffing their new upscale restaurant Aurum Maui, they knew exactly where to find kitchen talent in the tight job market.

Taylor Ponte went back to his roots and hired 10 graduates from the culinary arts program at the University of Hawaiʻi Maui College, the same place he honed his cooking skills more than a decade earlier.

Those former community college students now make up nearly half of the 21 kitchen positions for the eatery that opened in July at The Shops at Wailea.

“I don’t have to break someone’s old habits,” the 33-year-old chef said. “The students have the skills, they know better, and they’re trained very well. It’s a win-win for all of us.”

Over the years, Ponte has returned to his alma mater often, usually lending his knowledge. But during the first few months after the 2023 Lahaina and Kula wildfires, which displaced more than 12,000 people, he donated his skills. Taylor Ponte was part of the effort that delivered up to 10,000 meals a day, using the community college’s culinary stoves, ovens, refrigerators and prep area.

“I’m just an admirer of the program,” Taylor Ponte said. “My friends teach there. One of my mentors, Craig Omori, teaches there.”

Omori would stay late to help Ponte with projects and train him for competitions. Omori also taught him, and all his students, to try new tastes with the introduction of different cuisines in his classes.

“Local students, they have a kind of a particular palette of what foods they appreciate when they come to college,” Omori said. “A lot of it entails maybe shoyu and gravy and Tabasco sauce and things like that, or Sriracha. So I think my sub-goal, beyond just teaching them how to be professionals, is to kind of broaden that palette.”

Ponte also visits the UH Maui College campus when he needs comfort or to “figure things out. If I’m stuck on a menu item, the kids kind of pump life back into me when I feel burnt out.”

Ponte works 12- to 16-hour days to get his restaurant off to a solid start. Natasha Ponte, the Aurum Maui general manager, is with him every step of the way.

“At the end of the day, if I’m going to be totally and absolutely exhausted and working hard, I’d rather be doing it with this team,” Taylor Ponte said. “I don’t think there’s anyone that I would want to do it with other than these people. This way, I also have the excuse of being at work all day and I still get to see my wife.”

The Pontes have been together for 10 years and married for 17 months. Taylor proposed in Bath, England, where Natasha has family ties. They married on March 28, 2024, at Fujisan Winery in Japan where Taylor has family ties, and now have a 5-year-old French bulldog named Lily that Natasha Ponte calls “our only child.”

The pair first met as students at Makawao Elementary School, but became an item when they reconnected at The Mill House restaurant in Waikapū, which closed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The closing forced them to pursue other options.

Natasha Ponte, who got her culinary degree from the Art Institute in San Diego, encouraged her husband to go back to UH Maui College to reconnect with his roots and mentors including Omori after The Mill House went out of business.

“When I was in culinary school we had some of those instructors who were just kind of done with being a chef. They collected the paycheck,” Natasha said. “But that’s definitely not the case right now at UHMC. There’s a really nice group of talented chefs who are passionate about teaching these young kids the right way for the industry.”

She added that her husband is happy that with the hiring of UHMC graduates he is able to support the culinary program that taught him so much.

This includes learning how local cuisine can be combined with foods from other parts of the world to make unique dishes.

While the Pontes live in Makawao, Taylor Ponte said he is heavily influenced by the food he tries while traveling or the food he reads about. He cooks the food he wants to eat at other restaurants, and he serves the food he wants to make.

“A lot of people are like, ‘Why are you doing sage and brown butter with pumpkin?’ It’s because I like it,” he said. “I’m tired of going to places and eating the same things. We have ingredients that are fun, whether it’s an import from Italy or something that we have local. And, we pair it together and make something fun. I want that to be the showstopper.”

When Natasha Ponte interviews candidates to work at Aurum Maui, it is natural to stay close to home because she wants people who are excited about Maui and connected to the community.

One of their community college hires is Raiden Baraoidan, a 21-year-old sauté cook who graduated from Lahainaluna High School in 2022 and UHMC in May. He works closely with 23-year-old Asha Shimada, a 2020 graduate of King Kekaulike and a UHMC alum.

“He’s the A.M. guy, I’m the P.M. guy,” Baraoidan said of his connection to Shimada. “We communicate a lot.”

Baraoidan said the staff at Aurum Maui is “all on one team. … I’m working sauté, but I could be helping the grill guy, I could be helping the pantry guy. So there’s not really much of a title, it’s more like just a line cook, and just help, being there for everyone.”

Shimada got into the local culinary program by chance three years ago after he met UHMC Chancellor Lui Hokoana and struck up a conversation while working on a catering line.

“At the end of the night, he offered me a choice if I wanted to go to culinary school (via scholarship),” Shimada said. “He said that he just loved my ambition for cooking.”

At UHMC, Shimada met Taylor Ponte and it led to his job at Aurum Maui.

When offered a job to be on the staff from opening night on July 19, Shimada jumped at the opportunity, saying the chef is “a very big inspiration to me personally.”

Rai Kaona, a 2023 Baldwin High School graduate, also has been working full time at Aurum Maui since it opened. She has a baking degree from UHMC and is currently taking a purchasing class in pursuit of her associates culinary degree, which she will finish in the spring.

One major thing she has learned on the job is “just how to be organized. It’s something that I used to struggle with. And now that I’m working here, it’s something that I’m definitely getting better at.”

Kaona said the opportunity she is receiving at Aurum Maui is preparing her for her culinary future that she hopes will perhaps include owning a catering business.

“I like creating my own dishes and experimenting with flavors,” she said. “So, I want that to be in my future for sure. But right now I’m just like trying to learn as much as I can.”

RJ Domingo started attending the UHMC culinary program in 2011 with Taylor Ponte, finishing his degree in 2014. He now works at Aurum Maui as the executive sous chef.

“It’s cool to have the culinary students from the program that we came from,” Domingo said. “It’s easy for them to be shaped because it’s the same way that we were shaped.”

Kaona said the time she has spent at UHMC has been invaluable to her current job. In her first year in the program, she learned basics, including knife cuts, the fundamentals of baking, “like making muffins, the cream method, how to make cookies, cakes.”

Later in the first year, culinary students move to the Pā‘ina food court to work at World Plate and Paniolo Grill restaurants, where they also serve the public.

“At World Plate, we have a rotating menu,” Kaona said. “We have Asian, Italian, Mexican, just so that we can learn more skills and be introduced to other flavors. And then Paniolo Grill is more about like speed and efficiency and setting up stations.”

In their second year of the two-year associates degree program, culinary students move on to the Class Act, a fine dining restaurant. “We do French, Italian, Asian, and we learn more fine dining-style cooking,” Kaona said.

Taylor Ponte said the learning process for “the kids” continues at his restaurant, where they are being taught how to break whole fish, chickens and pork.

“I say kids because they’re younger than I am, but I’m also a kid and I’m still learning,” he said.

At Aurum Maui, in the location that used to house Lappert’s Ice Cream, a jewelry store and a realty office near The Shops at Wailea’s north entrance, Taylor Ponte said 75% of his restaurant’s food items are locally sourced, including produce from Hua Momona Farms, Lopes Farm, Lapaʻau Farm and Kona Kanpachi.

The menu includes everything from Lapaʻau Farms pumpkin soup and ahi tataki salad on the soup and salads section, to a pan-seared kanpachi and 32-ounce bone-in ribeye on the entree list, to apple banana cake and ube coco milk panna cotta on the dessert menu.

“I’m not doing American food, like diner American food,” Taylor Ponte said. “We’re doing modern American food, which is essentially the same thing we’ve been doing in Hawaiʻi for years. It’s a cuisine defined by the immigration and sharing of many cultures.”

Taylor Ponte’s favorite items on the menu include: 

• Fresh catch entree: Crispy skin Kona kanpachi, cauliflower puree, yuzu kosho and dashi emulsion. Taylor Ponte said this is “by far one of our best-sellers.”
• Island Okonomiyaki: Kaua‘i prawns, bacon, cabbage, Japanese bbq sauce
• Oven-roasted bone marrow with Blue Door Bakery sourdough, house pickles and parsley garlic emulsion.

It is all part of a mixed plate, just as the 50th state is, he said.

“As Americans, we have Italians and Germans and Filipino people. In Hawai‘i, we have Portuguese and Filipino and Hawaiian and Chinese,” Taylor Ponte said. “And all of us came together, traded crops, and the different things that we had and shared food.”

Enrollment in the UHMC culintary program has fluctuated with as many as 120 students at one time in the early 2010s to only about 70 this fall, said Omori, a chef instructor at the school for the past 15 years.

The drop has followed the COVID-19 pandemic and the loss of more than 100 eateries in the Lahaina wildfire two years ago.

Of all his students, Omori said Ponte was a standout: “Honestly, a few years after he graduated, I talked to him and I said, ‘you surpassed me,’ which is a great thing for an instructor to see.”

Omori draws satisfaction from seeing his students excel with a smile on their faces: “Seeing where they are now, what they’re doing, how successful they are, how happy they are. For me personally, that’s more important that they’re happy doing what they’re doing.”

The financing for Aurum Maui comes from the Destination Hospitality Group. The Pontes are partners with the group that also owns Aurum restaurants in the Colorado towns of Breckenridge, Aspen Snowmass and Steamboat Springs.

The Aurum logo has a 79 in the corner as it is a play on gold on the periodic table of elements. 

Omori said that the entire Aurum Maui saga that has been more than two years in the making for the Pontes is special, and the fact that his students and recent graduates are excelling there is gravy.

“For my students and recent graduates who this is their first really serious kitchen job, for them to not just be in over their heads or feel overwhelmed, it is amazing — they feel they’re actually welcomed there,” Omori said. “And they really like the environment there. That’s a testament to the way Taylor runs a kitchen.”