Restaurant, cafe to occupy old Matteo’s site in Waikiki

A multimillion-dollar renovation is underway to bring the Blue Marlin Restaurant and Hi Tide Poke Café to the spaces left vacant by the closure of Matteo’s Italian Restaurant and its more recent incarnation, Matteo’s Cafe Waikiki.

The restaurants, which are slated to open this summer, would fill two long-empty spaces on the ground floor of the Marine Surf Waikiki condominium at 364 Seaside Ave.

"We are excited to be a part of the Waikiki community," said George Kanemoto of Blue Marlin Restaurant. Kanemoto is president of George’s Donuts Corp., Blue Marlin’s management company.

"We selected this location because we wanted to be a part of the excitement and energy that naturally comes with being in Waikiki."

The outside of the condominium is shrouded by temporary fencing while two restaurants with separate entrances are being constructed by an undisclosed owner. A rock wall also will be removed to make a more open concept out of the traditional fine-dining restaurant that Frank Sinatra’s personal chef, Matteo Giordano, aka Matty Jordan, opened in the early 1970s.

In its heyday, Matteo’s was frequented by kama­aina, tourists and celebrities including entertainers like Don Ho, Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford; TV anchor Walter Cronkite and boxer Joe Louis also paid visits. There also was a time when local governors and statesmen conducted after-hours business from its dimly lit booths.

The original Matteo’s Italian Restaurant, which opened in 1963 on Westwood Boulevard in Los Angeles, is still operating. However, the Waikiki restaurant, which was purchased from its original owner in the mid-1980s by Fred Livingston, had struggled since the early 2000s when the Waikiki Twin Theatres shuttered.

In 2004, Livingston decided not to renew his long-term lease since he planned to divest himself of his restaurant portfolio and sold the business to a partnership that included Jim Boersma, former owner of the now-closed Zanzabar Nightclub. A build-out and renovation transformed a portion of the establishment into a cafe and wine bar. While Boersma and others had hoped to capitalize on their nightclub clientele, the idea never realized market success.

The new restaurants’ owner plans to invest between $1.25 million and $2 million to create new concepts in the leased spaces, according to The Surf Report, a newsletter of the Marine Surf Waikiki condo. The condominium’s board and owners association had to approve the concepts before the owner could proceed.

"Our goal is to create a unique dining experience with something for everyone," Kanemoto said. "We have really embraced the feeling of community and feel the aloha. We want our restaurant to reflect that through our people and our food."

The Blue Marlin Restaurant will be an open-air seafood restaurant and sushi bar featuring Japanese Pacific fusion with Japanese chefs preparing fresh fish flown in from the Tsukiji auction in Tokyo, according to the newsletter.

The newsletter also said the cafe, which will fill the space left vacant when Matteo’s Cafe Waikiki closed in November 2012, will be a "local"-style poke shop with takeout and dine-in options. Both restaurants will serve lunch and dinner seven days a week, according to the newsletter.