Maui locals Taylor and Natasha Ponte both have a culinary background — the husband-and-wife team even met while working in the industry. Now they're hoping to strike gold with Aurum Maui, a new restaurant set to open this month at The Shops at Wailea.
Aurum — the Latin word for gold — is a culinary brand known for seasonal, chef-driven cuisine in Colorado. This is its first expansion to the Islands. Taylor is chef partner while Natasha is general manager partner.
Aloha State Daily recently spoke with the pair about their new endeavor and how they got here.
Pandemic pivots
Natasha says she and Taylor were working at the Mill House at the Maui Tropical Plantation, where they met — him as the executive chef and her as the sales and events manager — when they were both laid off in 2020, amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
That was the year Taylor was named chef of the year in the ‘Aipono Restaurant Awards, she says, "and I just felt like we needed to pivot and do something and we knew we weren't going to get hired at a restaurant or a hotel ... so we had this idea of creating curated experiences for people in their homes."
About a month after their layoffs, the couple launched Kamado, a private chef and catering business and also was doing pop-ups.
It took off and the pair got busy, Natasha says. But they always envisioned getting back into the restaurant industry, Natasha says.
In 2023, they met Phillips Armstrong, the CEO and founder of Destination Hospitality Group, the parent company of Aurum, which has several locations in Colorado, among other dining concepts.
Natasha says they first met him on a Zoom call. At the end of the call, she says he then invited the pair to Colorado to see his restaurants and if they might be interested in partnering with him — and they went.
"Then they came out and we hosted them Maui style and showed our style of hospitality, and then we decided we were going to make the leap," Natasha recalled. "That's how we got involved with Aurum."
They closed their private chef business at the end of March and are now fully focused on Aurum, she said.
Maui roots
Natasha says she and Taylor are both "very community-based."
"We focus a lot on overall hospitality, but I think our local Maui community and stimulating that and putting money back into local businesses is a huge part of what we love doing. Being in a restaurant, we're able to do that on a larger scale, as opposed with a private chef. That's such a small blip. For us, it's exciting to not only be able to work with local people, bring jobs to people who were born and raised here, who are living here, but also put money back to local farmers and fishermen and cattle ranchers and things like that."
Both Taylor and Natasha hail from Makawao in Upcountry Maui.
Taylor, who comes from a part of the community that's "more ranch and agricultural land," says a lot of his early food memories weren't the greatest.
"I had to go to work early just to help out, and some of the best meals that I had, like food memories, usually were related to the ranchers," he told ASD. "The ranchers had fresh beef. They were trading with the fishermen and the farmers, so we had fresh fish and produce from them. Whether I was digging fence posts for them or helping them out with anything on the ranch, those were usually my earliest food memories."
Taylor says, too, that he's always been a dreamer — always imaging having better meals and eating better food, "as opposed to the Campbell's canned mushroom soup over the force-thawed pork chop that was completely cooked in the sink before it even hit the frying pan."
He eventually landed a dishwashing job, something he says was "probably the most stable environment in my life."
Getting into the kitchen gave him structure and the chance to learn new skills.
"I did that for a handful of years and was lucky to land a fine dining job, when I moved to Kīhei, with Alan Wong, and that kind of started my culinary journey."
Working there for a year, Taylor says he earned enough money for his first semester at Maui Culinary Academy. There me met many who helped along the way and finished an externship at Vintage Cave under Chef Jonathan Mizukami.
"That gave me the really fine-end finishing touches to becoming a really organized and methodical chef, having a lot of intention in everything I do."
Natasha, meanwhile, grew up in hospitality. Her mom is the general manager and vice president of Mama's Fish House in Paia, she says, and her dad, a design-and-build contractor, builds restaurants and is consulting on the Aurum project.
"I've just never known anything else."
In fact, Natasha says her first job was at Mama's Fish House, where she worked as stocker and food runner.
She went to college and culinary school in San Diego then worked as a chef for a while in a few restaurants there, before realizing the front of house was more her calling. She ultimately returned to Maui and took the job with The Mill House.
Aurum offerings
Because there's so many flavors, Natasha says they classify Aurum Maui as modern American bistro style.
Taylor says that his cuisine showcases a lot of hallmarks of modern American cuisine, with whole-animal butchery, artisanal bread "and typically the best of everything."
"Because I had such terrible food as a kid, I look at things on a plate and I ask myself how to make it better," he says. "... I really just look at executing the little things well to make an overall great dining experience for people, and give them something maybe they haven't eaten on Maui [while] showcasing the produce here."
Some of the offerings are inspired by Taylor's heritage.
"There's just lot of hallmarks of our favorite things to eat," he says. "We want people to come and feel like they're eating food that chefs want to cook that's approachable but you don't have to be a scientist to understand what's going on or speak a different language to understand what the techniques are."
Taylor says the cuisine "definitely rides on the back of supporting local produce and local businesses," but there's wiggle room to find other sources.
When ASD spoke with the pair earlier this month, an official opening date for Aurum had yet to be determined, but they were aiming for the end of June.
Natasha says the goal for Aurum Maui is to "really have these community connections, have a place where families and tourist alike can feel like they can come and enjoy in a space that's unique with a fun ambiance. We've got a really fun bar program, tropical cocktails, really intentional food."
Looking ahead, Taylor says he hopes to kick the endeavor off with a "great response from the community."
"I think my largest goals are just to have a place to showcase what we're doing and create a great environment for culinarians as well as all hospitality workers," he says. "I'm very ambitious as far as what I'd like the restaurant to get in awards of cuisine, but I'm working to create the best product I can [out] of what I have and what I'm working with and the team I'm working with. My largest goal is just to make a delicious meal for everyone who comes in, in a beautiful space with great service. Everything else will come if we put all of our blood, sweat and tears in that and to supporting our team to being able to sustain that."
Stephanie Salmons can be reached at stephanie@alohastatedaily.com.
