 Hi, Restaurants in Hawaii. I'm Jay Fiedel. This is Think Tech on a Human Monday morning, and we're talking about how restaurants are encouraging tourists to return with Restaurants in Hawaii, and more specifically with Cheryl Matsuoka, who runs it. Hi, Cheryl. Welcome to your own show. Okay. Aloha, Jay. And yes, restaurants are encouraging our tourists to return to Hawaii. I'd like to introduce my two guests, Jay. Okay. Alan Farrinas, owner of Shorefire. He has Showfire Fresh Grill and Bar. He has two locations, both in Waikiki, both welcoming restaurants and welcoming tourists to come back. He's been waiting for this day where tourism can open up. And I'd like to introduce Rebecca. Rebecca, I'm going to say your last name. Tomakter. Tomakter. And she is the manager of Uncle Bo's and Yaya's chop house and seafood. Yaya's had just opened up when the pandemic hit. And so she's going to talk about a little bit about how they're welcoming and encouraging tourists to come into their locations. You know, Uncle Bo's is kind of a famous place. Okay, well, let me let me give you my thoughts to start. And that is okay, where we're going to start tourism. And it'll be ups and downs and it'll swing hundreds or thousands every time they change the paradigm and they will, because we're not out of this yet. And the question is, you know, what happens when a tourist comes here? And in case we forgot, you know, a big part of tourism in Hawaii is food. It's local food. It's exotic food. It's good food. It's interesting food. It's interesting ambiance and all that. And the fact is that it's part of the reason, you know, people come to Hawaii, it's not only that they eat while they're here, it's they come here so they can eat. I love that. Okay, so restaurants are critically important and will be more important than this really enough goodwill and enough, what do you want to call it, food magnetism to keep you guys going. But you have to be innovative. You have to, you know, belly up to new ideas. You have to be thinking all the time and watching, you know, how the industry is doing, watching how the tourism industry is doing so you can satisfy not only their needs, but their, you know, their perspective needs, their aspirational needs. Okay, let's let's talk to you first, Rebecca. So what a moment, huh? You start your restaurant in Bingo, this Corvid, you know, welcome to the industry that your COVID is telling you a little virus things in your ears, and you're welcome to the industry. So what did you do to adapt when all this happened? Right, man, what a whirlwind. Really, initially, we wanted to keep the momentum and energy, but stop the haemorrhaging of, you know, production, sea salt. So we really kind of hunkered down and just tried to wait out the storm. And at the first opportunity, we jumped back in and just picked up where we left off. We're really hoping with tourism reigniting, not just to be able to welcome tourists back, but our local patrons. Hopefully now with tourist back in the economy, there's money flowing back to our locals, and we can welcome them back through our doors. So October 15 was definitely an important day for us. For Yaya's, we are located in the heart of Cacaco, just adjacent to salt on Oahu's south shore. So tell us what, you know, what you've done that we would consider innovative and creative in the interim to, you know, get off the regular path of restaurants in Hawaii and become especially interesting to tourists. You know, that's a great question because typically our philosophy hasn't been much in your face marketing. It's been very organic, viral marketing, word of mouth, focusing on delicious food with a great ambiance where people want to gather and enjoy themselves and let our business kind of speak for itself. So with not having the audience physically around too much, a lot has been relied on social media marketing and just reminding people that dining out is enjoyable. It's a good time. It's what you want to do. So as soon as we're able to allow that and we can welcome you back through our doors, come see us and you'll have a great time. So have you been successful in the interim? How many seats are you filling? How many days are you operating? And what kinds of things are you doing to improve those numbers? So we're still at half capacity as mandated, but we are knock on wood, some wood around me. We've been able to, you know, fill our seats. The interest is there. The uptick happened with tourism reopening on October 15. We are also trying to reward our locals. And especially with the Hawaii restaurant card, we're offering fantastic promotion during the weekdays with a 25% off of your food tab. That's been exciting. We also have really tried to geared towards a good food experience for takeout and things for guests to enjoy at home or at their hotel. We've focused on our craft cocktails, craft cocktails to go, go take this, enjoy the beach or outside where it's allowed to drink, those types of things. Okay. So I guess my question is, have you changed anything? Have you changed your menu? Have you changed the way you bring people in for takeout? Have you changed your staff? They're still with you. We have. We never can become complacent in our industry. So we're evolving and adapting. We have had to change our menu slightly for when we closed for inventory things. And we've tried to keep, you know, the local sense of our menu to intrigue our tourist guests and also locals love to eat good local food, great prime steaks. We have had to change and evolve. Have you had any issues with supply? Yes. Things are improving now. We did have issues with supply, getting things to the island. There was a lot of fear, especially in March and April of what was going to be allowed to come in, how, what would the cost be? So we're really taking it week by week with our vendors and trying to work with them. And supply has been an issue with things coming out of Japan. Our A5 Wagyu from Japan was a concern at a point to bring that in, which is an important component to our menu. We're just keeping an eye on things and trying to keep up. Are we able to pay the bills or have you needed help? Do you get any cares money? Do you get any money from the city and county? We're doing our best to, you know, reach out and apply for all things that are applicable to us. We have had to restructure some things internally, of course, to again stop the hemorrhaging and stay afloat. It has not been smooth sailing, but we're doing our best working with our landlords and, you know, our vendors and just continuing to build relationships for an understanding of we got to get through this together. So we're doing what we can. Okay. Let's get to Alan for a minute. Alan, can you, can you compare your restaurant and your experience here in COVID with the experience Rebecca has had? Yes. So we are in Waikiki, of course. We closed, I believe, our co-op location, which is behind the Hyatt. I think it was March 23rd or something like that or one of those days. And then we kept the International Marketplace location open a few days after that until basically there were just no more tourists. And so we completely closed. And we, when we reopened, we were reopened that first time in August, but then they shut us down the other two weeks. When we did reopen, our general manager, Alan Wolcher, he's just really amazing at coming up with ideas to keep us afloat and, you know, really just broadening us forward. We had an idea and also we also use modern media, which is Flash and Sydney. And they're very connected in the community with the musicians and stuff. So we all came up with the ideas of doing the contract series over at Shortfire. We had to figure out how to bring locals to Waikiki. How do we become a destination so people come into Waikiki? Because we all know locals typically don't want to come to Waikiki. We don't want to come to Waikiki because, you know, if we're going to come to Waikiki and we drink, there's cops everywhere. So you don't want to come to Waikiki. In addition to that, it's packed everywhere. The parking fees are atrocious, you know, in Waikiki. So there was just not a lot of, I mean, you really had to be motivated to be able to come to Waikiki, whether it was for surfing or a staycation or something. So we had to be pretty creative. So we came up with a bunch of, all the musicians were out of work. So we figured we could support our musicians and support ourselves too. And so basically what we did was we created these weekend concert series where Friday, Saturday and Sunday from six o'clock to eight o'clock p.m. on our open-air lanai, we socially distanced all the tables six feet apart. And I think we can only have 35 ticket holders out there somewhere in that range. And it's been successful. So the artists get to keep all of the whatever they're charging for their fee for that whole weekend. And the customers are purchasing those tickets on Eventbrite and stuff like that, Ticketmaster. And we're selling out all the time. People are just dying to get out. People are just waiting. And so like when we opened originally in August, we had all our concerts sold out. The last one was supposed to be Kingdom Spades. And it ended up happening where they shut us down again. And so we contacted all the ticket holders and we said, I'm so sorry, we'll refund your money. They're like, no, don't refund my money. Please hold on to my money. Just keep my space because I want to go out after this thing's done. So we did. And everybody was like that. Everybody's just dying to go out. So the concert series have been a blessing. It's not only helped us in our numbers, but it's also helped the musicians too. Now, because we are in Waikiki and we're on the Lanai and we're not enclosed inside, other people can hear us. So the tourists are now coming upstairs because they hear all the music of what's going on. And so we're still at 50% capacity, which kind of sucks. But eventually, I know that will be lifted. And so we've created different things like some of the social distance barriers and between our booths and other things like that. In addition to a barrier, what kind of a barrier is that? Well, what we're what we're doing is we built these little plexiglass wood frames that we attached to the wall. So that's pretty much what we had to do. That's a really good idea. Yeah. Yeah. And then all of our tables are distanced outside. So that that's helped because you can have a live music in the open air. So a lot of people don't have that open air, so they don't have that option. Gratefully, we have that option so that we're able to do that. But we're taking people's temperatures at the door. We're doing contract tracing, getting their addresses, all the things that are required for us to do. Employees with gloves. Everybody, all the employees are getting tempt when they come before they step even into the property. We're tempting them because we can see them from the office that someone's coming in. So they know the way to the door. So we're trying to be very, very careful. Haven't had any cases and everybody's just been really, really happy that we're open and that we're doing what we're doing. So I think there's been a lot more gratitude from the public rather than kind of like, oh my God, they're, you know, they're, they're super spreader event or something like that, which, you know, of course, isn't true. So I think we've been getting a lot of good feedback and it's been extremely busy and every concert that we do moving forward has been selling out. But besides that, we do have a limited menu. We haven't, we're not offering everything on our menu. So we cut back our menu a little bit. Our hours have changed at this international marketplace location. We used to be open from 8am till 2am. After 10pm, we would turn into a nightclub from 10am, 10pm to 2am. So we'd have salsa nights. We'd have nightclub nights, New Year's parties. It was like just the heart of white sheep. And now we can only stay open till 10. So of course we shut down and we open on weekdays at 3pm and stay open till only 10. So we're only open for those seven hours because there's no lunch business yet. Not enough to keep us open. And there's not enough breakfast business when we used to be open to 8am. So we're playing it careful. But on the weekends, we're doing a little something different. We are opening at 10am and then closing at 10pm. So we're noticing that people are out to eat brunch. You know, they want that we serve brunch from 10 to 10 to 2. So and then our happy hour starts at 3.30 because we open at 3. So that whole schedule has been kind of working. We've done things that like $3 Heineken's because locals love Heineken's, right? But tourists love Heineken's too. So we've lowered our prices. We also give up 15% off for Kama Inas always. And if you're using the restaurant card, we're giving you happy hour on all the happy hour food items all day and all night long. So you get that discount on that also. But besides that, I think it's going pretty well. The tourists are coming in quick and they're here and they're just happy to be here. I think they're all just waiting. They're playing tickets for waiting for them to arrive. So yeah, we're excited to have them back. And I think everybody's being careful. They respect that we're being really careful at the door. I know it's frustrating when you go to a restaurant. You have to pretty much wait in line to be tested and stand five feet apart. And everybody's getting used to it now. So at the end of the day, everybody's leaving safe. And some of the other things that we're doing to attract people here are radio commercials through iHeart station through flash. He's also over there too and helps us out with that. So we're making funny kind of local style commercials. Hey, Chimo, come on down. That kind of fun stuff. So trying to get just a mix of everything. You could be on those commercials, Allen. That's good. Actually, I wrote them and I started recording them. But they have a couple local guys at the office. It's sound more authentic than my pigeon does. But I think we're just trying to do everything that we can. And we got a bunch of smart people on board that are just really full throttling us in every direction. And Cheryl has just been amazing. Cheryl's been reaching out to us and giving us advice on whether it's just PPP loan things or this and that. So the Hawaii Restaurant Association has been a huge asset to have on our side because who else would be fighting for us? I mean, who else would be talking, giving us advice on stuff? We don't know who else. So we're grateful for Cheryl and her organization and what they've been doing for us too. Okay, Rebecca, you've been listening, right? Have you been taking notes on this? I thought I saw you taking notes a minute ago. What is that Allen is doing is something you could emulate? Yeah, I love the ideas. Live music has been very trending and of interest with our local community. So if that was an opportunity for us at our locations, that would be something that we would love to have. I love the happy hour for locals. They do love that happy hour. We offer a happy hour all day at our bar, but our bar is limited seating. So we've had to encroach our dining space and outdoor patio area for those happy hour loving folks. Lots of good ideas. Yeah, I'm reminded of, I date myself, the Hawaiian region in Manukawa years ago. They had Kanaka Pila. Oh, Cheryl was there. I don't know what it is now. Cheryl, do you know what it is now? It was really popular. You put a few musicians in, you haven't seen a little slack key whatnot, and people come from miles around. You can't tear them out of there. It's so good. Cheryl, have you got any reactions to this? Where is this going as far as you can see? Yes, absolutely. All of the media has been welcoming back our tourists. As you know, the Visitors' Bureau and D-Bed, the message for the Hawaii Restaurant Association, we are putting in all the safety guidelines. We're following the CDC, the FDA, the Department of Health. As you hear, Alan and Rebecca are practicing all the safe protocols. So the message to our tourists is it's a safe destination. We're safe for our state. I just saw the numbers by this weekend. We are not a red state. It's safe to come here. I think they're going to start wanting, as the snow rolls in, as the cold rolls in through the mainland, to come to Paradise and enjoy not only our beauty of our islands, but the wonderful food and all of the different cuisines that they can enjoy. I've been to Yaya's, and they have an outdoor seating. Alan is all open air, and that's safe. A lot of the tourists, that's what they look for, is they look for enjoying the, you know, Hawaii has a certain smell. Right? So when you're in Hawaii, you want to be in open air, and Yaya's has an open air seating right outside their restaurant. Alan has a lanai, and he overlooks, literally, if you look down from his lanai, you see Kala Kala Avenue, like literally. And he has all, you know, glass, it's beautiful. So I think our tourists are going to really enjoy coming back and coming back to our restaurants. Yeah, you know, the idea of having entertainment, you know, and music, of course, is number one, but there are other things too. Who knows what? You could show people how to make sushi. Who knows what? You could give them a, what, what are you turning your camera again? Oh, I was going to show you the lanai. This is a dynamic program. Yes, it is. Whenever you have, whenever you have restaurant tours on, restaurant tours are very dynamic. They're very clean. Restaurant tours are clean. And we'll set up over there, and it's all over there. We got a ocean view over there that you can kind of see. And then we have our nice little VIP area. So everybody's kind of distanced apart. And here's Kala Kala. So basically, our music plays and everybody in the world or out here can hear it. And yeah, that's pretty much it. Well, you know, your comments really make me think that this is a time for developing brand loyalty, not only among tourists, but among locals, like those people who are perfectly happy to let you keep their money on the failed concert. That's a statement. You know, it's like the opera. The opera could not, you know, actually perform some of the operas that were scheduled for the Hawaii opera theater season. And they said, well, you know, you can ask for your money back, we'll give you money back, you can let us keep your money, and it'll be a support thing. And, you know, like 99.999 people said, you know, percentage people said, keep the money. We love you. We support you. In the time of COVID, you know, we have brand loyalty. And I think this is a time to exploit that, if you don't mind me using that term, but also develop it, you know, for the future, which takes me to the next question. I want to ask both of you guys. And so COVID should not be a big surprise. Despite President Trump's remarks about turning the corner, COVID is not over. And it's probably not going to be over for a while. And whatever you're doing now, you know, is a solution maybe, until now. But you've got to keep on coming up with stuff. You got to have ideas in the pipeline. You got to, you know, maintain your relevance and your cachet, because COVID is going to be corrosive the longer it goes on. So Rebecca, what have you got up your sleeve? You know what I mean? We can't give all of our secrets away. You know, holidays right around the corner, we have some great ideas to welcome our, you know, holiday parties back in safely. Some great to go box items and continuing the happy hour trends and the rewarding locals for their patronage trends. And you'll just have to keep following us and wait to see. You know, I first started practicing law was before any of you people were born. And my boss said to me, Jay, in your legal career, never, never forget one rule. What's that? You should never underestimate the power of parking. And Rebecca Allen was talking about that. You know, it seems to me that the city and county or the Waikiki Improvement Association or the Hawaii Lodging Tourism Association really wanted to do guys a favor. What they would do is somehow support the parking. Because it is really an ugly experience to come to Waikiki for anything and have to go through the parking. I mean, Allen mentioned that completely. And I would like to, I would like to mention that the international marketplace, the manager has been very, very flexible with us through these challenging times. They're just really awesome landlords. And what they've done is they've given us a four hour validation for anybody that comes for our concert series. So that's a nice big thing. Because basically you're going to come into Waikiki with free parking, get a 15% off, come Aina, have a great experience, have an ocean view and then, you know, and get nailed. Yeah. So what about you, Rebecca? You have parking issues? Is there anything you can do to improve your, you know, your experience by improving the parking? We are fairly fortunate to have parking available and validation accompanying your dine-in. And as of now, parking hasn't been too much of an adversity for us, thankfully, just outside of Waikiki. So we don't have those issues over there. Okay. The other thing I wanted to ask about is something I mentioned before the show began. And that is, you know, Rebecca, you mentioned that you have new ideas, new packaging for takeout, you know? And I think for local people, takeout is pretty important because, you know, I can't stand being my house anymore, I got to get out, even if it's just to go buy a takeout. I don't care about eating it, I just want to get out of the house and get it. Just want to feel it in your hands. Smell it in the car, you know? So the question is, what can we do to make takeout really wonderful? And, you know, to me, it's part of the question I was asking earlier. What can we do going forward when COVID continues? So how do you see takeout evolving, Rebecca? You know, I think it's still going to be an important component of our restaurant and our business and continuing to be able to have the food look, smell, taste delicious just as it would on a plate sitting at one of our tables. You know, the only thing that they would be missing would be the service component. I mean, you have to throw away your own rubbish if you have it at home, but luckily no dishes. So just being thoughtful of how people are going to take your item home or wherever there may be to enjoy together. A simple experience where you still are catered to, you know, let us take care of you with this dineout item. Yeah, I think there's all kinds of possibilities. I mean, for example, I get the limited number of people I can to come to my family picnic. Alan and I, and I would like to have a wonderful meal. So I called you up and I say, can you deliver X units of this and that and the other thing to Alamo on a park where I'm going to be sitting with my family? And just call me when you're ready to meet me at the curb. And I'll come and get it at the roadway that goes through Alamo, just for example. I mean, are you doing that? Are you doing this kind of catering thing, either directly or through Uber or Lyft or what have you? Well, that was something in the future for you. Yeah, so what we've done is before we actually reopened again, we've already engaged our bite squad, our grub hub. And I think we're doing Uber Eats too, just to be able to cover all the bases for the takeout side. Because if we like, like typically, we don't deliver internally, just because we are not staffed for that, we haven't set that component part of our business up. But when people contact us for different types of caterings, we get a lot of military requests for catering because we have some friends over there and they're always wanting our food. So I'll drive it out there, you know, right after it's prepared and I'll deliver it personally if it's kind of a larger order. But every other order does go through the delivery components that are set up through grub hub and bite squad and stuff ready. Okay, you're not reluctant to do that. Are you in agreement, Rebecca? This is what you would do too. You would get this done somehow using Uber Eats or one of the others to my picnic in Alamo. Right now, we're kind of in the boat with our wiki key friends and, you know, we're working with a very small crew, but we want to make it happen. So we've been doing our best to just be in all hands on deck to make those types of requests and accommodations. We haven't partnered yet with a formal delivery team, but it likely is in the very near future. Yeah, good. So before the show began, I was, this is what I was getting to last question really is the idea of getting into the supply line for the big food markets and, you know, doing vacuum pack, you need a machine for that. Doing a flash frozen, you need a machine for that. Gotta have labels and then you could probably sell your packaged meals to Safeway or one of those. Any interest in that or is the investment too expensive? Alan? So my wife and I also used to own a company called Grilt and we were in like Alamoana, Alamoana, and Grilt also did meal prep. So we had a company called Built by Grilt.com, which focused 100% on meal prep and the difference with our meal prep is you could customize each meal. Whereas typically meal preps out there, you kind of got to buy a group of, or a series of meals that might be the same as what everybody else gets. So I had a lot of experience in the meal prep. I actually built all my own meal prep business websites and the components to it and everything. When we closed the last Grilt restaurant, that component went with it too. We were thinking of keeping it and now through COVID, we're thinking of bringing it back. But it's a whole other ballgame because we just have different stuff and it would just take a lot of time to engineer the website. So it would be seamless because what people were doing before is they'd go onto my website. They would basically choose their proteins, choose their starts to their veggie. How many options do they want? When do they want to pick it up? What location they want to pick it up? They could choose any of our retail locations. So it was already in microwavable containers and stuff like that. But because we have totally different food at short fire, I never even thought of doing meal prep out of here because we've always been so busy with just tourist business typically. So it is something that we have discussed. I don't know if we're ramped up to do that because now the tourists are coming back. So it might not be necessary to do it. But we're willing to do anything to stay open. We just don't want to close. We had 97 people that we laid off and we brought about 50 of them back so far because we only opened this international marketplace location. The other location is there's not enough tourists to open that location up yet. Alan, do you see a time when there will be consolidation of restaurants where some well-heeled investor from the mainland will come and say, you know, these guys really are pretty good. They're resilient. They know how to stay in business. I'm going to buy them. I'm going to buy half a dozen restaurants. Some of them are going to be on the same block. And I'm going to be a restaurateur that's going to own all the restaurants that need to be sold. You see that happening? This is the thing is, you know, our business needs us. And to sell our business just to someone coming from the mainland, I'm not interested in that. We didn't build this business and work this hard. I grew up here my whole life. So there's a lot of infusion of Hawaiian here. You know what I mean? Like I'm not Hawaiian, but I basically have been here all my life. You can do a pretty good pigeon. I'm not going to go there. But I think, you know, like understanding this market and the components that I go through on a daily basis from even just guys on the street, marketing, passing out flyers, stuff like that, some mainland owner, it won't work. These business owners need my wife and I. It's our passion. It's like what we love to do, what would we do? I don't know. I'd be bored every day. So I love doing, I come here every day at 5 a.m. and work on stuff. So it's my passion. So I don't know if I would never sell it. So Rebecca, where do you stand on all those things? Yeah. No, I echo what Alan says. Our company is locally owned, homegrown. So we run the same boat. I hear you. Yeah. Okay. All right. Cheryl, it's time for you to summarize. What have we learned today? What profound truths have broken through to you, Cheryl? Tell us about the overarching wisdom here. As I've mentioned before, Jay, our restaurants are ready. We are looking forward to welcoming all of our tourists back. And as you can hear by just these two restaurateurs, they're already implementing all the different things so that if the tourists don't want to leave their hotel room for a meal, they can take out. And that is the resounding. Some people still don't want to go into a restaurant, but they enjoy eating the Hawaiian food and all of the blend. So they both have outdoor dining. It's also very safe to eat in an outdoor, fresh air dining. The Hawaii Restaurant Association, as Alan said, is a resource. And we are the voice of Hawaii's food service and restaurant industry. And as always, Jay, we look forward to dining together again. Thank you, Cheryl. Thank you, Alan. Thank you, Rebecca. Great to talk to you guys. Yeah, carry on. Stay safe. Take care.