Lisa P. Gaynier is an organizational effectiveness consultant and leadership coach to major corporations (see her website at CreativeChange.biz ). She is the product of a multicultural household --- Chinese-Hawaiian on her mother’s side and French-Italian on her father’s side.

Throughout Lisa’s childhood her family was active in international activities and introduced their communities to their special multicultural cuisine --- whether it was fund-raisers for local charities or entertaining friends at home or in the restaurants they later owned and operated. By high school, Lisa had also caught the entrepreneurial bug --- baking bread and sweets for the local farmers’ market.

In college, as a social science major, living in Japan, first as a student and later working for United Press International, she became well acquainted with contemporary Japanese cuisine and cooking trends. Little wonder then that Lisa dropped out of graduate school to go into the restaurant business! She opened her first operation in 1981, running it for six years before opening the Diamond Head Cafe in Kerrytown, Ann Arbor, a charming old world style mall. She developed the restaurant concept and recipes for the Diamond Head Cafe, which she ran for another six years before retiring in 1993.

Writing Remembering Diamond Head, Remembering Hawai’i was a five year project that combined writing and recipe testing with a deep exploration of her cultural heritage. Lisa continues to indulge in her love of food. She reads cookbooks and cooking magazines, is a member of the Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor, and of course, continues to experiment with fusion cooking!