Long-time foodie and self-taught gourmet cook Lisa Atkinson recently rebranded her food business from Paradise Hand Pies to Paradise Creative Cuisine to more accurately reflect the broad range of cuisine and services that she has provided Big Island residents and visitors over the past several years.

Lisa started cooking when she was eight years old, under the tutelage of her mother, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers. It wasn’t until after she lived in France for a year that she began to educate and expand her palate and learn to appreciate local food culture, including her own Native culture.

Lisa has traveled to the far corners of the world searching for innovative ingredients and techniques to use in her dishes. She is an adept game meat cook, having grown up cooking elk, duck, pheasant, and buffalo from Oregon; Lisa has sampled numerous varieties of pork in Sardinia, and utilizes techniques and flavors learned during her visit; dined on red deer with gravy and whitebait sandwiches in New Zealand; has shared community favorites of musk ox, moose, Eider duck, halibut, salmon, and crab in remote villages in Alaska; and explored local meat delicacies in Ireland and Scotland (Scotch egg, anyone?).

Transplanted from the rainy Pacific Northwest to sunny Hawai’i Island, Lisa decided that the time was right to embark on a new adventure to blend her passion for food with her love of sharing that food with others, and thus began her private chef, catering, and cooking class business. Blending Island favorites with a Native and global perspective, the results are delicious.

Photos above: crab and Puna goat cheese bites, caprese bites; uni chawanmushi; clarified turkey bone broth; Ehu poke.