Back in April, I got to tag along with the production crew for the Emmy Award-winning food genealogy show, “Family Ingredients” (@familyingredients), to Okinawa in a search for delicious dishes. (Yeah, tough job.)

And when you’re traveling with a foodophile like Chef Ed Kenney (@edstown), you’re bound to eat a lot — and a lot of everything.

We blasted through bowls of Okinawan soba, grilled pig parts that sounded more like medical terminology, and licked more ice cream cones than I thought humanly possible on a single trip.

And while we were busying touring the small island, Kenney was smack in the middle of building out his latest restaurant concept, Mud Hen Water, in Kaimukī.

I remember him constantly checking his email — I was the bearer of the mobile WiFi — and ditching us for dinner to work on the menu and check in with his staff about the new restaurant.

And he took a lot of mental notes at every restaurant we visited, asking about certain flavors and analyzing the texture of noodles and meats. He was planning to serve at least one dish — like soki soba (top) — from his experience in Okinawa.

So when the restaurant opened late last month, Kenney shot my husband a text and said, “Come. And bring your wife.” So we went.

Inside the restaurant on Wai‘alae Avenue.

Kenney’s new concept is perched on the corner of Wai‘alae and 9th avenues, in the old Champa Thai Restaurant spot.

This grows Kenney’s restaurant empire in Kaimukī to three: Kaimukī Superette is literally next door to Mud Hen Water and his flagship, town, sits across the street. (In case you’re wondering, the mo‘olelo behind the name is this: Mud Hen Water is the translation of Wai‘alae, which loosely means the watering hole where the mudhen — an endangered native water fowl — gathers. It’s not the easier name to remember, but the meaning is very appropriate.)

The place, itself, is oozing with cool. Repurposed furniture and wood everywhere, a mix of rustic and industrial, QR codes on the menu that link to the bios of the fishermen who caught tonight’s special. I mean, it’s just everything you’d want in a modern restaurant except for the lack of parking.

It’s truly the hottest restaurant in town right now. Everyone has either been here — and blogged or Yelped about it — or is dying to try it.

So why didn’t Kenney just text me? We’re friends, right?

Well, he wanted to invite my husband, who runs the aquaculture at Mari’s Gardens in Mililani, because the farm supplies the tilapia that’s on the menu. (See above)

A note about tilapia: I know it’s gets a bad rap for being that muddy-tasting fish that lives in the filthy Ala Wai Canal. But really, this is a mighty little fish with a mild flavor that chefs actually love to use. And according to the National Fisheries Institute, it’s the fourth most eaten seafood in the U.S., behind only shrimp, salmon and canned tuna.

It’s also an eco-friendly choice, these raised on the farm in Mililani as part of its aquaponics system. (The fish waste is used to fertilize plants, but that’s another blog.)

And Kenney knows this.

So instead of salmon skin, he uses tilapia skin to top his salad. Bonus plus for supporting sustainability!

As you can see from the menu, Mud Hen Water serves smaller plates, great for sharing, and the dishes definitely boast both local and Asian flavors.

Cold ginger rabbit with puffed rice: a twist on a classic Chinese dish.

Grilled beef stew with kalo (taro) and gravy all over: quintessential Hawai‘i with a modern flair.

Kenney really got creative with this menu.

Here’s what we ate:

The dinner started with a local-style amuse-bouche: slices of mountain apple, in season at the time, topped with some chili flakes for a little kick.

As a starter, we tried the corn-on-the-cob ($6), four little baby corn — or cornlettes — smeared with Old Bay butter and katsuobushi, or dried bonito flakes, something I remember Kenney obsessing over in Okinawa.

This was a super fun app: the preserved ‘akule (bigeye scad) in a sardine can ($9) — love it — with pickles and limu (seaweed) butter served with soda crackers. Not fancy crackers; soda crackers. It was fun to eat and super tasty, though I wish we had ordered two.

Of course, we had the tilapia skin salad ($14), which came with silken tofu, Maui onion, bittermelon (another Okinawan find), slivers of hearts of palm from Wailea Agriculture Group on the Big Island, crispy shallots and strips of nori (dried seaweed). It’s an interesting take on the izakaya staple salmon skin salad, but with a milder flavor. (Tilapia, especially farm-raised, isn’t fishy.) I wish there was more meat on the fish, but I suppose that defeats the purpose of the tilapia skin.

I’m a fiend for pa‘i‘ai — a childhood favorite of mine — so I will order that wherever I see it. Pa‘i‘ai is pounded taro in its purest form, really undiluted poi. It’s like candy to me. So when I saw the yaki o pa‘i‘ai ($10) on the menu, it was the first thing I ordered. The pa‘i‘ai blocks were lightly flavored with shoyu and sugar, grilled, then wrapped in nori. (“Yaki” means grilled in Japanese.) It was like eating shoyu-flavored sweet mochi hot off the grill, really, wrapped in nori, which I thought was clever and interesting. I may have not shared this…

The dish I really came for, though, was the soup noodle ($15). It was the dish Kenney was mentally concocting on the trip. He’s getting his noodles — traditional Okinawan soba — from locally owned Sun Noodle (the only noodle manufacture in the U.S. that makes these kinds of noodles, by the way) and created a dashi (broth) that managed to reflect the flavors of classic Okinawan-style soki soba while meeting the expectations — and, let’s face it, demands — of a local palette. When we were in Okinawa, Kenney had a bowl of soki soba and loved how the broth tasted a lot like Hawai‘i’s saimin. I think that’s what he was going for with this dish — and marvelously succeeded, down to the braised spare rib. Best dish of the night.

While I order anything that says, “pa‘i‘ai,” my husband orders anything with the word “kimchi.” Case in point: we sampled the pig face and kim chee omelette ($12), with fried pig skin — another Okinawan memory — and housemade kimchi stuffed in an omelet and paired with a scallion ketchup, which was unique and addicting.

Remember: the plates here are small. So despite everything we ate, we still have room for dessert. (In fact, we almost ordered two.) Our server highly recommended the pineapple polenta upside-down cake, which, I’ll be honest, wasn’t my first choice. I’m not a huge polenta fan — actually, I’m a polenta snob. It has to be creamy, not hard, or I won’t eat it. In this case, the polenta was perfect — and not entirely creamy, either. It had the consistency of cornbread, actually, which I didn’t mind. And the coconut gelato and kiawe bean molasses were great accompaniments.

My husband — rocking his Rainbow Drive-In T-shirt (LOL) — and Kenney, who texted me later, saying, “Farmers are royalty at our restaurants!” I won’t tell you what he said about bloggers.

VERDICT: I’m a big fan of Kenney in general — as a chef, as a person, as a travel partner — so I’m a bit biased. But I will say, while the plates are small — I’m warning you! — the flavors are strangely unique — and in a way that works. You want something different, something you’ve probably never had before? This is it. And it’s quite a scene, too, if you’re into that.

Mud Hen Water, 3452 Wai‘alae Ave., Kaimukī, (808) 737-6000, mudhenwater.com