HUALOA, Hawai'i — When chef and restaurateur Alan Wong takes his staff on a field trip, everybody learns something. And that's the point.

At Hamakua Springs Country Farm, lettuce supervisor Susie White learned that, for Wong, smaller is better — he urged her to develop a hydroponic lettuce cluster that's less than 3 inches in diameter, a miniature romaine bouquet to bloom right on the salad plate.

At Hamakua Exotics mushroom farm, Alan Wong's chef de cuisine, Wade Ueoka, got an answer to a question: Why do some of their mushrooms develop a white coating. Are they going bad? Owner Bob Stanga explained that the mushroom is just sending out mycelium — little root-like hairs — trying to grow some more. The white stuff is perfectly safe.

PROBING QUESTIONS

In a hilarious but informative talk-story session with meat-smoking expert Alvin Jardine and his friend Kimo Ha, they learned why a pig hunter goes to Office Max: to buy paper clips, because that's what they use to hang the strips of meat in the smokehouse.

In the van between farms, Wong probed, shooting questions back over his shoulder as he drove: What did you learn? How is it going to change what you do?

He reminded them of farmer Richard Ha's story: How Ha diversified when he saw bunchy-top disease coming for his banana crop, so when bunchy-top inevitably attacked his yellow fruit, he had other crops to sell. "What does that tell you? If you only get your revenue from one source, it's not a good thing," Wong said. "How do you apply that in your life?"

"Keep learning, keep getting new training. Don't just know how to do one job," said chef Ueoka.

At Hawaii Island Goat Dairy in Honoka'a, owner Dick Threlfall said that if the day's batch of cheese is the slightest bit less than wonderful, they throw it out, even if they have to leave customers short. "The thing I've gotten so far with all the people we've gone to is the respect and honor they give their products. If it doesn't meet their standards, they start over from scratch," said Alan Wong's restaurant manager Kerry Ichimasa. "A lot of times when you get into bigger companies, they lose that."

And culinary facilitator Nicole Tajima, who serves as Wong's administrative assistant, mused, "Now, because we know these people, the things coming in the door are not just boxes — it's the cheese from the farm where the people know all the goats by name."

This kind of insight — plus the information value of seeing products at their source — is exactly why Wong periodically gathers a group of employees and takes them on field trips like this one a couple of weeks ago to the Hamakua Coast. The jaunt doubled as a thank you as well, with the chefs hosting a dinner for 50 farm workers, suppliers and friends, all cooked on propane stoves under a tent in a parking lot. A third reason for the trip is team-building, problem-solving together in not-always-perfect circumstances.

During the two days, the young chefs and front-of-the-house staff carry notebooks and jot observations that will help them, as waiter Ichimasa said, "tell the story at the table." Half-formed ideas for new dishes are scribbled down. There's a lot of laughter and joking, but when "Chef" calls a meeting to plan the farm party, they are all business.

SHARED PASSION

The food producers and the restaurateurs have two things in common: Both are passionate about what they do and both never stop learning more about it. Even after eight years, Heather Threlfall of Hawaii Island Goat Dairy calls herself a novice cheesemaker. "We have so much more to learn," she said. "The only problem is finding the time to experiment."

The culinarians are full of questions, and the food producers clearly love to answer them. Threlfall is intrigued when Alan Wong's pastry sous chef, Michelle Karr, asked if they could make sweetened condensed goat's milk. At Mealani Research Station, farm manager Milton Yamasaki fielded queries about experimental crops. When Wong suggested they try to raise tiny, sweet wild strawberries, for which he says chefs would pay a premium, Yamasaki perks up: "I gotta talk to you some more because this is what it's all about, niche marketing. No sense we raise something nobody wants to pay for."

The "Wong Way" crew loves to talk about their work, too. Even when everyone is bleary-eyed with lack of sleep after a long day on the road and staying up late to play Boggle, a lively conversation ensues about how best to present a goat cheese dessert that pastry chef Michelle Karr wants to create. It's the eternal struggle between the front of the house and the back of the house, with waiter Ichimasa arguing that some people are just resistant to goat cheese, and the chefs retorting that waiters don't try hard enough to talk up difficult-to-sell dishes.

Wong listens, pleased to hear the debate.

Later, he reveals there's even a method behind the late-night Boggle games he suggested. There are two ways to play the word-building game, he says. You can dart around all over the map trying to make words out of random letters. Or you can focus on one group of letters and create as many combinations as possible before moving on to another group. He wants his chefs to "get" the latter technique, because it's an effective way to create and solve problems in cooking, too, he said. "There's a reason for everything we do."

Reach Wanda A. Adams at wadams@honoluluadvertiser.com.