Poni Askew: Visionary Behind "Eat The Street"

by Maria Kanai

Twenty-five lunch wagons and vendors. 3000+ people. A parking lot the size of a city block. The second "Eat The Street" was no doubt the biggest food event in Hawaii, offering hungry customers everything from French crepes to Gogi Korean tacos in a massive, all-out food truck rally that took place last week.

maria kanai / KA LAMAKUA

Poni Askew is the talented visionary behind "Eat The Street", a food truck rally that she hopes will become a monthly event.

So, who came up with this ingenious idea?

Meet Poni Askew, organizer extraordinaire and the inspired mind behind the feast events. Poni studied Hawaiian language and Hawaiian studies at UH Manoa for two and a half years and was on her way to becoming a Hawaiian immersion teacher, when she moved to Nashville for 13 years where she did bookings for the music and talent industries. 

Since then, she's shifted from the entertainment industry to food and beverages. Despite her deviation from college plans, she says she's now found her niche. (And no matter how you look at it, this is encouraging news for us college students.)

"I'm in my place, that's my element," she says happily, "It's fun. Meeting everybody, getting out there, meeting different people.  The people [lunch wagon owners] are entrepreneurs, motivated people starting a new business and making it work. I have a lot of respect for them."

It all innocently began with streetgrindz.com, a website Poni and her husband Brandon opened last September as a place to list the lunch trucks in Hawaii. As fate would have it (or more likely, very clever planning), the lunch wagon craze hit Hawaii around the same time and Street Grindz was in the middle of the momentum.

"Unless you're driving around between 11 to 2 pm, you don't get to eat at these food trucks."

"It's the specialty lunch wagons that are coming out. You've got Korean tacos, Melt, Xtreme tacos; something you can't eat every day. Also," Poni adds with a smile, "These trucks have this "the more the merrier" kind of thing. They like to travel in a tribe, and they believe if you build it [a lunch wagon], more people will come.

The more, the merrier is right. Poni hit the same idea with "Eat The Street."

"The next smart thing to do was to start pulling them together," Poni says, "Unless you're driving around between 11 to 2 pm, you don't get to eat at these food trucks. The hours are part of the beauty of the lunch wagon; short, fast hours. It's a catch 22. With "Eat The Street", we're bringing them together on a Friday night, and Kaka'ako is near downtown, so it'll be a great pau hana spot for the weekend."

Since then, it's been nonstop for Poni. Her driving force is her determination to get Hawaii recognized for its street food. "Everybody's getting wild about food trucks in LA, but we've been doing it for so long. We've put our claim on the map for our destination to eat street food too, and we can't let LA take our trophy away from us," she laughs, half-jokingly. "We have great food in Hawaii!"

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To see more of Maria's Eat the Street coverage, check out her review here!