Hawaii's Independent Food Authority
Thirty years eating Hawaii professionally. Sixteen consecutive years as the state's #1 ranked food experience. Former restaurant critic. 1,000+ restaurants personally reviewed. Zero paid placements. Zero comped meals. Author of two books.
See Matthew's Books ↓Matthew Gray has been eating Hawaii professionally since the early 1990s. Not as a tourist. Not as a travel journalist on a four-day press trip. As someone who lives here, who made it his life's work to know the difference between what is genuinely extraordinary and what is merely adequate.
He founded Hawaii Food Tours in 2004. He built it into the number one ranked tour and food experience in the state of Hawaii — and held that position for sixteen consecutive years. He was a restaurant critic for Hawaii's largest daily newspaper. He has personally reviewed more than 1,000 restaurants across all six islands.
He has never, in thirty-plus years, accepted a free meal, a paid placement, or an advertiser's dollar in exchange for a recommendation. That's not a marketing claim. It's the operating principle that has governed his entire career.
He is the author of two books: The Ultimate Eater's Guide: Hawaii Edition 2026 — the distillation of three decades of independent eating — and How To Start A Food Tour Business, the complete operational playbook for anyone looking to build a food tour company from the ground up.
Most Hawaii restaurant guides involve some form of commercial relationship between the recommender and the recommended. A gifted meal. A sponsored placement. A hotel partnership. An affiliate commission. The mechanism varies. The outcome is the same: the guide recommends what it has been compensated to recommend, not what is actually worth your time.
"Every restaurant Matthew recommends, he paid for himself. Every place he tells you to skip, he has the receipts."
That independence is not a marketing claim. It is the operating principle that has governed thirty years of eating and writing about food in Hawaii. It is also, frankly, rare. Which is exactly why the guide exists.
The same principle carries into everything Matthew writes — including the food tour business playbook. When he tells operators what works, it's because he built it, tested it, ran it, and refined it for sixteen years in a real market. Not theory. Not consulting. The actual receipts.
One tells you where to eat in Hawaii. The other shows you how to build the business behind the experience. Both are written from the same place — thirty years of doing, not advising.
