Lomi means to rub or massage, and that's exactly the technique: salted salmon worked by hand with tomato and onion until it breaks down into a cold, refreshing relish. It arrived with the earliest Western traders who brought barrels of salted salmon to the islands, and it became a fixture at every lūʻau table since.
This isn't a cooked dish — it's assembly and time. The salt cures the fish, the ice water tempers it, and the tomato juice pulls everything together into something bright enough to cut through kālua pig, lau lau, and everything else rich on a lūʻau plate.
