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Izakaya Dinner to Fight for Interracial Marriage

Hapa Kitchen girls, Cathy Erway and Akiko Moorman, relax out back after toiling in the Queen County Farm kitchen all day.

When I first joined Hapa Kitchen, I thought it was simply a chance to cook some inventive Asian-influenced cuisine with a few friends. The fact that we were all the results of interracial marriages (hapa is a Hawaiian term, originally derogatory, for a person of mixed race) seemed none too important to me. As a child growing up in stunningly diverse Los Angeles, the idea of interracial marriage as taboo seemed as antiquated to me as persecuting someone for postulating that the earth did, in fact, revolve around the sun. When we teamed up with The Loving Day Project (founded to celebrate Loving v. Virginia (1967), the Supreme Court case that legalized interracial relationships in America), I thought it a nice gesture, but the cause itself didn’t seem terribly urgent. Then, recently, I heard about the interracial couple who was denied a marriage license in Louisiana–this month. In the year 2009. Surely my dad did not perform in a high school production of “West Side Story” in vain! So we’re fighting back the only way we know how–by cooking. Hapa Kitchen and Loving Day are serving a six-course, Izakaya-inspired menu on Sat, Oct. 24 made of organic, sustainably-raised chicken, pork, duck and rabbit, plus produce from a local multiracial-owned farm, to benefit The Loving Day Project, and we’re inviting the Louisiana couple to dine with us (we hope they’ll come!). Tickets are $75 and are available here.

Keith Wagstaff