Pahu i’a is the Hawaiian word for “aquarium.” When you walk into a restaurant of that name in the Four Seasons Resort on the Big Island, your eye is immediately drawn to a huge, stunning, salt-water tropical aquarium. Many visitors naturally assume that this is the venue’s major architectural showpiece. But at Pahu i’a, the aquarium is only the prelude to the visual “main course”—the beauty of the Big Island itself.

And what a feast for the eyes it is. The Big Island can be breathtaking. With lava flowing into the ocean and stunning sunsets, nature here seems more vibrant than on any other of the Hawaiian Islands. At Pahu i’a, the utter brilliance of minimalist design meets nature in all its glory. With tables set a few feet from the sandy beach, within a whisper of the ocean, Pahu i’a has taken this beautiful location and made the sea, along with its bounty, the focus.

An evening’s dining here should start at sunset. As the sky changes from blue to orange and purple and then into the blue-black of early evening, the restaurant comes alive. That the menu features fish is no surprise. What is surprising is how successfully the chefs, led by executive chef Graham Quayle, constantly update and change a menu that already seems near-perfect.

“The great thing about being on an island is that there’s more choice,” Quayle explains in his soft English accent. “The daily call for fish, is for us, straight from the boat. There’s no fish auction or market or downtown industrial area where the fish goes before it comes to the kitchen.”

The Big Island has come a long way in the past couple of years. Small family farmers have learned that profitability in paradise means staying in constant contact with chefs and growing what they want.

New farms are replacing the redundant sugar cane plantations, and many farmers have turned to organic growing to ensure their produce is of the highest quality.

“We have great, somewhat obscure food,” enthuses Quayle. “Having a grower come to us with only five or six pounds of fruit is just great. We have a really close relationship with our growers and fishermen.”And it’s the relationships with farmers and fishermen that make the chefs all the more creative, he adds.

“It builds excitement in our kitchen on a daily basis,” he says.“And, because many of our guests come here from incredibly food savvy cities, like New York and San Francisco, they can have very high expectations.” Quayle and his team have no doubt that they can meet these expectations and oftentimes surpass them. “Everything about the restaurant, from the food to the china we use to the presentation, is surprising to most people,” he says with an infectious smile.

If you want to taste of an island seafood favorite that offers something more than chopped raw fish with shoyu, choose the Trio of Hawaiian Poke. The salads are beautiful, both to look at and taste, and the Roasted Baby Beet Salad shows great attention to detail in both the presentation and on the palate. The combination of flavors between goat cheese, caramelized pecans and locally grown beets is delightful to the taste buds and the eyes:the colors run into each other after a forkful or two have been shared, resembling oil paints oozing out of a tube. To look from colorful palette to dazzling sky and then towards the breaking white waves, is to feel almost overwhelmed by the color and beauty of The Big Island.

Brian Doherty, Executive Sous Chef is passionate about the presentation of the food—and the local produce. “We’re really trying to capture all of the flavor of the islands in our menu,” he says. “We can ask the farmers to grow us baby carrots, for example, and two months later we’ll have them on the menu. ”Puahi’a wants to serve food that is visually stunning, “but we also want people to walk away thinking that the restaurant is fun and trendy, too,” he adds.

Slow Baked Macadamia Nut Crusted Mahi Mahi is a beautiful dish, with asparagus, wilted spinach and a Ka’u (an ugly skinned, beautifully sweet, locally grown orange) sauce. Steamed Onaga has hints of Pacific Rim cuisine in its ginger, Hamakua grown mushrooms and sesame oil dressing, and the Ahi steak is one of the signature dishes that even those “tired” of Hawaiian Ahi should try. “People say that they’ve eaten too much ahi on vacation and want to try something else, “says Quayle, “and then they try this (with a red wine lobster sauce and Molokai sweet potato puree) and they just love it.”

The roasted rack of lamb is divine—and cooked so perfectly that the lamb remains tender with a gentle, almost buttery texture.And the menu offers nightly specials depending, of course, on what the fishermen bring in. “What we’re trying to do here, “ says Doherty, “ is maximize all the natural resources the island has to offer. That’s the direction we’ve chosen to go.”

Guests at this outstanding restaurant may rejoice that these dedicated chefs have taken a path that leads through mountain roads and farms and back down to the ocean.For at Pahui’a, a guest may taste the bounty of the Big Island in all its glory.