By ERIN MILLER
By ERIN MILLER
Stephens Media
Every time Waimea chef Philip “Ippy” Aiona is mentioned on the new season of “Food Network Star,” the term “laid back” always seems to come up.
Perhaps that’s because the 23-year-old chef at Solimene’s Restaurant — an Italian eatery owned by his mom — is always wearing an aloha shirt on camera, when he’s not wearing a chef’s jacket. But with his wavy, flowing locks and winning smile, he exudes local-boy charm and charisma.
“You come to Hawaii to unwind, not to wind up,” Aiona told Stephens Media recently.
In the opening episode, Aiona’s warm mushroom salad made quite an impression on the show’s mentors — Iron Chef Bobby Flay, “Iron Chef” and “Good Eats” host Alton Brown and his own team leader, Giada De Laurentiis, host of “Everyday Italian” — as well as guest chef and “Restaurant Impossible” star Robert Irvine.
But all wondered if he may be too laid back — yes, that description again — to make it all the way from cheftestant to Food Network star.
In his casting tape, Aiona places a whole pig onto banana leaves in a smoldering imu and says: “All right, Food Network, you’re always asking for something different. It doesn’t get much different than this.”
Food Network’s viewers are apparently finding Chef Ippy’s laid-back style appealing. As of Thursday afternoon, he was the leader among the show’s 15 cheftestants on the network website’s fan favorite voting with 21 percent of the vote, five percent ahead of his closest competitor.
Growing up in his dad’s plate lunch restaurant, Ippy started making how-to cooking videos at age 13. He attended Le Cordon Bleu in San Francisco, where he refined his culinary techniques. He also injects Pacific ingredients into traditional European cuisine. He said his decade-plus of restaurant experience served him well in the competition.
“I’m so used to controlled chaos,” he said. “That’s all I know. I felt right at home.”
Aiona, a 2006 graduate of Hawaii Preparatory Academy, survived four rounds of interviews and several cooking demonstrations to be selected for the program, which pits chefs, home cooks and television host hopefuls against each other, with the top prize being a show on the network.
De Laurentiis chose Aiona as one of five cheftestants for her team. He was, he noted, the only Italian on her team.
“She said I was a free spirit,” Aiona said, then laughed, adding he wasn’t entirely certain what she meant. “I don’t think too much about what other people are doing.”
He took seriously his role as ambassador for Hawaii.
“You don’t even know how pumped I was to be the first from Hawaii,” he said.
Although friends and co-workers knew he’d applied for the show, he couldn’t tell them he was flying to the mainland for filming. Some people thought he’d gone to New York City to care for his grandmother, he said. He told some he was going to the mainland to work.
Now that he’s back, he can’t say anything about the show’s outcome, including how many episodes he’s in. The experience was great, he said, but the taping process was grueling, with long hours and lots of attention by the production staff to every detail, including makeup, wardrobe and lighting. The crew might spend two hours getting the lighting just right, Aiona said. During that time, he and other contestants sat in the stew room, eating, napping and talking.
In true aloha spirit, Aiona made friends with other contestants and the crew, even when he wasn’t supposed to talk with them.
“I constantly tried to give the crew food,” he said.
They’d try to turn him down, because they weren’t allowed to take it. He’d sneak it to them anyway.
Because he came on the show with professional culinary experience, Aiona said he didn’t learn many cooking techniques. But he did learn more about timing in the kitchen.
“I had it under control the whole show,” Aiona said. “I never wanted to be racing the clock.”
“Food Network Star” airs at 6 p.m. Sundays on the Food Network, channel 321 on Oceanic Time Warner digital cable and channel 1321 on Oceanic Time Warner digital cable HD.
John Burnett contributed.