Loco moco Period AOrigin theory BVerified

Loco moco is white rice topped with a hamburger patty and a fried egg, then smothered in gravy. Quick and filling, it took root in postwar Hawaii.

Beef, rice and eggs could all be had locally in Hawaii. Cattle arrived on the islands at the end of the eighteenth century, and rice and eggs became established there through settlement and immigration. The ingredients were already at hand.

What makes the dish its own is the way they are put together: a hamburger patty and a fried egg laid over rice, with the gravy pulling everything into one bowl. It is a plain combination, but a satisfying one. It was born at a small cafe in downtown Hilo after the war, as something the teenage boys who came in could eat quickly, and its plainness still shows that.

The loco moco begins at the Lincoln Grill, a small cafe in downtown Hilo on the island of Hawaii, in 1949.

The owners, Richard Inouye and his wife Nancy, came up with it as a snack for a group of teenage boys who gathered there. The boys were tired of American-style sandwiches, but Asian dishes that took real work to make were too much trouble. It was Nancy who suggested what went into it: at first, simply rice topped with a hamburger patty and gravy. The fried egg came a few years later. Popular accounts add that the boys belonged to a club called the Lincoln Wreckers, and some say the dish sold for twenty-five cents.

The boys are said to have named it themselves, but the details of the naming change with the teller. In a 1983 paper in Social Process in Hawaii, "Loco Moco: A Folk Dish in the Making," the sociologist James L. Kelly wrote that the first boy to eat it went by the nickname "crazy," which is loco in Portuguese and in Hawaii's local pidgin English, and that moco meant nothing and was chosen because it rhymed with loco. A later, widely repeated version names the boy with the nickname as George Okimoto, and says that loco was suggested by George Takahashi, who was studying Spanish at Hilo High School. A 2006 column in the Honolulu Advertiser has Nancy naming it herself, saying the kids were crazy.

It is the naming that varies. The core of the story, that the Inouyes created the dish at the Lincoln Grill in 1949, is set down in Kelly's paper, the earliest account that can still be read in its original text.

Another shop, Cafe 100, is also well known for calling itself the home of the loco moco. Cafe 100 is said to have served the dish since 1949 as well, but Kelly's paper places the origin at the Lincoln Grill and does not mention Cafe 100.