When Chris Chmiel first organized a “pawpaw night” at an Ohio restaurant focused on local foods in 1999, he was happy to have a hundred people show up. The goal of the event was to spotlight the largest edible tree fruit native to North America: the pawpaw, which grows from northern Florida and western New York to eastern Kansas, and boasts a soft, custardy flesh with a mild flavor somewhere between a mango and a banana.
Chmiel became a pawpaw evangelist after a trip to the Yucatán peninsula proved to him how popular the guanabana, a Central American cousin of pawpaw, was in Mexican food and drink. Convinced that the pawpaw deserved similar treatment in the US, Chmiel set out to champion it in Ohio, where the tropical-tasting fruit grows plentifully in forests and backyards across the state.
