 Hi, I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech Hawaii. We're talking about restaurants, restaurants of Hawaii. And we're talking today about the restaurants, restaurant, restaurants that have opened now during COVID. It's very exciting. And the executive director of the Restaurant Association of Hawaii is Cheryl Matsuoka. She joins us. Hi, Cheryl. So nice to see your smiling face. Always good to be here. Thank you so much for having us. And Blaine Yashizawa. He runs a couple of restaurants and we're happy to have him here too because one of those is a brand new restaurant and we want to explore anything brand new right now. Welcome to the show, Blaine. Thank you. So, Cheryl, maybe you could give us an update on events in the legislature and the kinds of issues that restaurants, the Restaurant Association, for that matter, restaurants in general are interested in right now in this session. In this session in Hawaii, as you know, our restaurants were hit really badly because of the pandemic. So, right now, for us to have to deal with the minimum wage question, the unemployment increase, bill 40, which is the plastic spill, I can go on and on, Jay. You know, right now is not the time for restaurants to increase their cost of doing business when we were this last year in such a terrible financial situation. We're even to this day, you know, even though we are at, you know, full capacity because of the six foot distancing, many restaurants are tiny so they can't even use full capacity because of the six foot distancing. So financially, we don't have the revenue coming in that we, you know, when we do our business plan, we anticipate full dining rooms, right? Lots of activity, so we cannot have any other impacts that is going to cost us more money during a time where people still are not very actively getting out there. You know, the CDC just put out their new guidelines about now that people are vaccinated, we can try to get back to normalcy, you know, and we're still in Hawaii, we're not there yet. You know, we vaccinated 75 years and older, but at this stage, as of today, March 9th, you know, we're going down, right? So for the 70 years and below that have not been vaccinated, you know, those are the people that we're hoping will get vaccinated so they can come back to our dining rooms. Yeah, the CDC thing should have an effect. It's sort of the line at the end of the tunnel, I hope. But we all have to remain vigilant, you know? Yesterday, we had a show about Aloha Safe. Aloha Safe is a program using technology from Apple and Google to identify anybody around that, you know, that might be, might have been exposed, and then it'll send you a text message saying, you know, you want to get checked up. So you have a program on getting checked up on testing. Can you talk about it a little bit? Yes, we were gifted on a Wahoo, Mayor Blongiari gifted the restaurant industry and our suppliers. So, you know, a lot of times our suppliers are in our restaurants, they're delivering, they're handing things to us, so we are in contact with them. So it's the restaurant industry, so it's the restaurants and the suppliers, the employees, Mayor Blongiari has gifted us COVID tests. And so if you have any kind of concern, maybe there was a family member of one of your employees, and you just want to take precautions. And normally it's around 125, some medicals cover it, some medical programs don't, but it's free. And so they can contact me at infoathoayrestaurant.org, and I can send them the information. All you're going to do is go online, show up with a pay stub and your ID, and it's a free COVID test. See, Cheryl cares about restaurants. And so does Mayor Blongiari. Okay, I'll take that. So, you know, Cheryl cares about YouTube lane, and I do too. You know, this is a state where restaurants are part of the family. It's like Ireland, you know, Ireland has the pubs. Everybody spends all their time in the pubs. The pub's just a restaurant, and they bring their kids, and they have games, and they talk to each other. It's a community thing. And it's not exactly the same in Hawaii, but it's along the same lines where people spend a lot of time in restaurants as part of their lives. And we've been deprived of that for the past year now. A lot of restaurants have failed, some of them have hung on, a lot of them have changed the way they do business. We know that, Cheryl and me, because we talk to them all the time here. But let's talk about you. You're in your own category, because you started a brand new restaurant. Can you talk about your old one, and how it led to your new one, Lane? Sure. Well, the old one that I have, it's a barn grill in the Moili area. It's called Osoyami. And this year, we celebrate six years of being around, which is kind of nice. So, I've got to see a lot of ups and downs, a lot of different changes in, you know, how we operate and how we have to stay in business. But in 2019, the summer of 2019, I was kind of challenged to do a side business with a friend. And I thought, oh, I want to do a ramen. And at first, it started out as a pop-up idea, which kind of as a joke. I taught myself how to make ramen. And we were doing pop-ups at Osoyami, and it was popular enough. We turned it into a lunchtime thing. And then in February of last year, 2020, I went looking around, kind of jokingly, you know, see if there was any spots open. I could maybe turn this into a brick and mortar. And a place popped up in Kamuki. It's the old Kamuki Chapsui, which has changed hands a few times since then. But they're up for sale. So I went to go take a look and I thought it would be a great opportunity. But again, this is all pre-COVID scare. So we didn't fully grasp what was going to be happening. And we got that set in motion and then COVID hit. Yeah, well, you're not going to imagine sitting at a table and signing a lease. And you say to the landlord or the landlord's representative, can you please include the COVID provision? And he looks at you like you lost it. Because there was no COVID provision. And even in the force measure, the force measure provisions that have been in the leases for 100 years, you know, they don't cover COVID usually. And so you're going bare when you enter into a lease on the evening, on the eve of an epidemic, a pandemic. So what happened? What happened? Well, for starters, I paid full price. I didn't pay COVID price. You didn't know what it was before that, right? It hurts me. It hurts me. Oh, wow. That was an expensive purchase to buy out the previous restaurant. But in April, all the paperwork went through, the money went through, and we were in the first shutdown, but we just had to do it. So got in there and actually a few days after getting the keys for our current restaurant, we reopened it as a takeout only and just kept going, trying to build our clientele. Did that work? Was that better than keeping it closed? Oh, absolutely. That was kind of a miraculous thing to happen. I know COVID has really been terrible and shut down a lot of businesses, but what did happen during COVID was it really reminded locals that they'd like to get out. They'd like to try new things. They'd like to support new things. And we were one of those things that kind of popped up during a time where everybody was stuck at home. No one's driving around on the streets. So we were kind of a friendly-faced new thing that was comfort food. Ramen is the new Simon. So Simon, of course, is our local comfort food. So being part of that, I think it really strange to say it worked towards our advantage. I don't know if that would have worked out the same if people were able to go out. But takeouts, sales, worked out really well for us. People came to try us out. More so than I think they would have if we weren't in a pandemic, strange to say. Did you have a place where people could stop, drive their cars and stop and pick up the food? Right in front of the restaurant, there was two I guess drop-off spots. We're right next to Surfing Pig across the street from Pipeline Acre on YLI. And there's those little stalls. One of them, the one in front of Surfing Pig, just got turned into a parklet. They're trying to change up kind of keys. So it's a little more social and modern. There were two stalls in front of us and people could easily pull in, grab food, drive off. There's also a large public parking space behind us. So that worked out really good for us. I was just wondering, just looking at you, what is your training and background in restaurants? Where did you pick up the skills necessary to run any restaurant? And I have a follow-up question after you answer that one. I've been working in restaurants for quite a while. I started out at McDonald's when I was at a high school. So I worked there for a little bit. Then I started working at Kiotaru, which is now Giotaku. All right, well Cheryl knows. And I worked there for about five years. And then I went to go work for David Nagayishi at the Ocean House in Shorebird at the Albergue Reef Hotel. And I did that for nine years. In that time, I opened up my first little bar. It was called Station Bar & Grill, or Station Bar & Lounge. I'm Capulani, and then I opened Osayami, and now I have nudes. But I'm not a cook. I'm a friend of the house guy, which is kind of a little thing. I never worked behind a bar until I owned one. I never worked in a kitchen until I owned one. Training by ownership. This takes it a slightly higher that way. You got to do what you got to do, man. Start up with a plan, and then you just kind of roll with the punches. What kind of attitude does it take to run a restaurant in a pandemic? You got to have a good attitude, man. There was a thing that happened during the pandemic and it's still occurring. Everybody on unemployment, no one wants to get out of unemployment. And there's various reasons for that, whether it's the actual income being equivalent or higher than what they were making before, or maybe you live with your grandparents and you don't want to expose them to possibly getting sick, things like that, but definitely finding employees. Very, very difficult. And then the employees that we could find also a little more difficult than pre-COVID in terms of the type of people that we are having to employ, if that makes any sense. Well, one element there too is that if I'm a prospective restaurant employee in the time of COVID, I'm going to be worried about engaging with strangers. I'm going to be worried about catching the disease, especially still before the vaccine and all that. And so did you experience that? Did you experience potential employees or actual employees who were worried and said, look, I'd rather not? Not necessarily. The biggest employee issues that we had were people that didn't necessarily qualify for unemployment. And I don't mean to talk bad about people, because everybody's dealing with their own things in their own lives. It's definitely not the most committed type of people that we're not having to rely on to employ. It's definitely not the best work ethic type of person. So that made it very difficult. And then dealing with attitudes and different kinds of situations, that made it very hard. Even resources aren't anyway, even in the best of times. I mean, you're most important resource of people and you've got to maintain somehow. I imagine that you have to be nimble and you have to be quick and you have to think of new ways to do old things or new things better. Because you have that experience of inventing new restaurant systems, new approaches in operating and staffing and, for that matter, equipping these restaurants, both of them, during the pandemic. Absolutely, absolutely. Prior to COVID, we were definitely looking at more of a dining type of situation, especially with the ramen shop. Nudos with broth don't really transport. That's why I'm sure anybody who's ever gotten ramen, maybe gotten like fa or something like that, you don't get it to go. That's almost a rule. You should put the liquid in a separate container. That's what we do. But the problem is it's just not the same quality. It's kind of like getting a really nicely cooked steak and it's plated and it's worth 50 bucks when you go to highs, but you get that same thing and you order it to go and then you eat it on a paper plate. The product is the same-ish, but there's a perception of value. There's also with noodles, the starchiness in the noodles, it really changes the texture and with rice noodles, like in the pho example, it's really, really obvious. The same components just take 10 minutes away from being plated fresh and it's a completely different product. What about cooking it all together as you normally would to prepare it and then sluicing off the liquid into a separate container and giving the noodles, say, which are cooked already and which are wet, but they're not sloshing around in liquid and then you give them two packages and the customer pours the liquid that you took off and pours it back on the noodles with that help. So that's what we already do. That's what most places get. That's a wild guess. How about me? Maybe I should go into the business age. You should. That's what everybody does because the liquid with the noodles, it starts to degrade the quality of the noodle, but that's also part of the problem. I don't know if you've ever cooked a pot of, say, spaghetti noodles and then if you don't address it right away, the starches that are on the noodles then it really just kind of turns it into this block. So that's the problem that we have. That's the problem that every noodle with a broth to a place has to deal with. Every minute counts. But it gets to that point so quickly that it almost doesn't matter. So once you get it to go, even if I made it for you right now and then I just put it into those containers and you took it home and you did five minutes away, it's still going to be very, very different from if you sat down and I served it to you fresh. So as they used to say in McDonald's, what's the special sauce that makes this attractive to a customer? I assume you've kept your customers at least in the noodle shop. What have you done to keep them? Well, I don't know. Honestly, I don't know. It's magic. What I found in a lot of the business things that I've done is there's no recipe for success. We've got the best intentions. We think we have a good product. We think we have a good location. We think we have some kind of good promotion running or whatever it is, but it's really that stroke of luck, that influencer that comes in, that a little bit of media attention or something that just keeps you moving in that direction of positivity as opposed to just becoming stagnant. Because we've seen great concepts and great locations and great products just utterly fail. It's kind of unexplainable sometimes, but I've been really lucky. We're with you on that. Right now, we're in a situation you've been able to survive and even in a modified way thrive on both of these operations. That's to your credit and also to the credit of having some resources, some funding so that you're not hand to mouth. I think that's got to be important for anybody in suffering through a crisis like this. But as Cheryl says, the CDC is making nice affirmative statements. There are things happening. There's an array of things. Like you pointed about success. At some point along the way, things are going to gel for the public. They're going to say, I'm really tired of eating gruel at home. I want to have my restaurant life back again. I'm willing to do whatever it takes. And they're going to come back. So the question is, are you going to be ready for them? What are you doing? What will you do to ramp up back to more open operation? That's a good one. Well, I think we're already kind of in motion with us moving into tier three. What we saw definitely in the in Osuyami was more people coming out, more people feeling safe. We're trying to normalize and reopen everything and make people feel like it's okay to come back out and to go to restaurants and all these things. So we've seen a big drastic move from takeout being the primary source. For example, at Nudes, we only have six or seven tables for seating. And so primarily, we are a takeout restaurant. We actually run two different restaurants in the same space. Whereas a normal restaurant will be all dine in and then, oh yeah, you happen to take out a few orders here and there. We are now basically running a takeout window with a ton of business and then a small ramen shop that has seven tables. But we are moving in that direction and we can see it where there's less takeout and there's more dine in. People are getting out more and people are feeling okay about it. And I think that's really good. But we're already there. The restaurant is already rolling. So we don't really have to do very much. We're just kind of adjusting how the different employees are kind of working in their stations to focus on more of the takeout or dine in as opposed to the takeout side. So, Cheryl, I have a hard question for you. All right. Are there a lot of Blaine's around? Well, remember the list I shared with you, Jay? We named a few restaurants that has opened up. Blaine was in a situation where he signed his lease, was ready to roll and then, of course, the first shut down and then the second shut down. But right now, as we discussed, Jay, there's still restaurants opening up even as recent as this month at the Alamoana shopping center. There's some new concepts, restaurants that are here. I don't know, Blaine, if you heard, but like Tanaka, Simon opened up at the Alamoana shopping center. So we still have people who are in the restaurant industry still opening up restaurants, Jay, and go figure. Even after going through a pandemic, restaurant tours still are opening up more eateries. Yeah. You know, in Yiddish, the word is chutzpah. You've got to have chutzpah. In Japanese, it's kamon. Yes. Yes. And Blaine's got it because, you know, as an experienced, you know, businessman and restaurateur, he had his bar and grill and then decided to do another concept. But because of the experience that he had for the last six years, right, at his first location, that really helped him. And I see the lines on Wildlife going into his restaurant and they're very busy. The good thing is Blaine has chosen areas that are more supported by our local people. As you know, Jay, there's still restaurants in Waikiki that are still struggling. Even though tourism has slightly come back, it's not at the volume that it used to be. And so Blaine... Local restaurants are a better bet right now, aren't they? In the residential areas. So Blaine, knowing that, you know, like in real estate, right, location, location, location, the locations that he selected, both the Makali and the Kaimiki, those residents will support local businesses. And local people want to support local businesses. Our Hawaii restaurant card, you know, the business holiday card, Jay, that was the second card, not the CARES funded card, but the second card that was funded by local businesses. That one is expiring at the end of March. So you're going to see me out there again, campaigning to people, if you've got the green holiday card, please spend it in a restaurant. And, you know, it's very different Blaine than the first card, because the first card was only CARES fund. So you couldn't put alcohol on it. The second card, the business holiday card, the green one, was purchased by corporate money. Or businesses purchasing it. So that can even have alcohol on it. So you can put alcohol, you can put your tip on it. So my new campaign that's going to be from March, is going to be spend that holiday card, because we want the monies to go into our restaurants. Well, luck or not, Blaine, you know, you have evidenced a kind of philosophical approach, you know, to treat it as a confluence of considerations and vectors and find luck in there is, it's more than luck. You understand, you've found an understanding of the business, perhaps maybe it's the experience in all these other restaurants that make the difference. But now that you have that, now that you've made both of these things go, such as they are, what's the future for you? I mean, I see in you more restaurants, do you see in you more restaurants? It's funny that you say that. I am currently part of a project that's going to be opening up in Hawaiian Brains, maybe at the end of this month or at the very, very first weekend of April. And it's a speak easy concept. So Lucky Belly is involved in that as well. Hawaiian Brains, obviously. And it was initially supposed to be Isekai Atani, which is a vegan restaurant on Baritania. They're great. They're the best. But they pulled out and I got tagged in last week. So apparently now I'm developing a vegan sushi restaurant concept. Oh, no kidding. Well, you know, we have a vegan show. You should watch our vegan show on Thursday. Lilian's Vegan World. She's been, she's had a lot of press and she's very good and she brings in these chefs and vegan lovers of all kinds. She talks about dishes and you got to watch her. You got to meet her. I'm happy to put you together with her. She's very nice. I'll check it out. But Nudes and Osayami both feature vegan foods. Almost every single ramen dish that we have at Nudes is vegan or can be made vegan as well. So it's definitely a field that I've been dabbling in the past few years. More popular now than ever. People are getting really sensitive to that issue. With vegan, there's no negative to it at all. You're doing the right thing for the right reasons and having a good health experience too. What are you going to call it? You can share it with us. It's okay. We'll never tell them. We'll never tell the soul. I'm told that they're calling it wild orange. So that's probably the first time anybody said that outside of private doors. But yeah, there it is. In a larger sense, okay. In a larger sense, I want to ask both of you the same question to close and that is, you know, I said earlier and I say, actually I say this to Cheryl every time we meet is a Hawaii is a restaurant kind of place. And what do you see for the industry going forward? I think it's a good point to say it's moving toward vegan and things like that, health foods. But how do you see it coming out of this pandemic? What's it going to be like for us? Not only what's it going to be like, but what are we going to do to engage within and support it? What do you expect? That is a tough question. You've got to be thinking about it, Blaine. I can talk a little bit about trends, you know. Okay. So what it is is you're right on the nail, Jay, because of all us baby boomers and I'm in that category, right? I'm 65. I would have thought you were 16, but never mind. And everybody's looking at food as medicine and especially during a pandemic and we've all had this terrible health scare, right? Everybody's trying to build up their immunities and they realize that vegan, as long as it tastes good, some people are like, this is vegan. I can't even believe this. I'm eating something that's vegan until, you know, you just serve it to people and you're like, ha, ha, ha, you know, you really, because I've been to that vegan restaurant on the Baritania Blaine and it's excellent. I mean, they're sushi and they're sashimi. That's not even sashimi. It's beat on a sushi that you think is sashimi tastes just like you're eating a sushi with sashimi on it, right? So I think, Jay, you're right. You're going to see a lot more vegan restaurants because people are going to start saying, Hey, this tastes great. You know, and it's healthy for me. And as people have more awareness of that food is their food can is your medicine, right? You're going to eat anyway, but you might as well eat healthy and help with your lower your blood pressure, lower your cholesterol by eating vegan. You can be, you can have, have eaten all kinds of crummy foods your whole life, but it's not too late. No, it's not too late to get healthy. It's never too late. So, Blaine, what would you, what would you add to Cheryl's comment? Well, besides people eating healthier, when people's, when I think when people start coming out, we're we're going to see a lot more comfort food things like the Simon spot that took over the old Agu, Papa, Papa, they're not open every day, but they're making a big splash and all they're doing is, is comfort food. And you know, we have a, like I said, ramen comes from, from Simon and it's a nice little throwback and they're doing really well for themselves. So I, I kind of see a lot of that little retro throwback things, you know, and especially with all the, the old time restaurants that have unfortunately closed during COVID time, you know, it's going to be nice to bring them back to life in a way. You know, you mentioned my last point. I am trouble leaving this conversation. My last point goes to something you said about not having local restaurants in Waikiki. Do you think there will come a time when people are akamai, I mean tourists are akamai enough to accept local restaurants in Waikiki and to have, you know, really good ones, but local food, that may not, that may be, you know, unusual for these people to eat, but still, you know, worth presenting to them. I think that'll happen. I think that they're popular. I mean, as you know, the, the, I want to say the last show or two shows ago, we talked about how people when they come to our visitors, when they come to Hawaii, on their bucket list is to go to a luau, is to eat Hawaiian food, is to try poi, even though they've been told it tastes like wallpaper paste. It's to try, right, the Filipino food, right, is to venture out and, and go to, you know, eat malasadas and, and do the things that our local, our local residents enjoy. And I, I know that they venture out and they look for that. And it worked, Blaine? Well, I know what she said. I, I agreed to that. I, you know, I don't, I don't think it's going to be a while, I think, before we have any kind of real local things hitting Waikiki. There's a very kind of whitewashed or commercially acceptable type of cuisine that's in Waikiki right now, and it caters to different ethnicities, but not necessarily to local culture. But that kind of works a little bit better for us, those, because you can make people get out of Waikiki to go to. That's a, that's a really good point. To the other side of the island, to go grab Giovanni's or something like that. You know, so our local, local establishments are, are kind of almost better where they are, you know, and it, it makes them special, as opposed to they're just really available, you know, when you come down the elevator from your hotel. How very thoughtful of you. Thank you for that. I think that's a very worthy point. Blaine, Cheryl, thank you so much for coming on the show. Always appreciated. This is one of my favorite shows and I always enjoyed it, and frankly, it always makes me hungry. Thank you very much. You're very welcome and I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.