A July opening at DFS Galleria is planned for Sakai of Hawaii restaurant, the decade-long dream of Japanese chef and restaurateur Hiroyuki Sakai, who became globally known via the original, Japan-based "Iron Chef" television show.
A restaurant should be "like fireworks, prepared well and built step-by-step," Sakai said through an interpreter at a news conference Wednesday at the DFS Galleria in Waikiki. "This is the first restaurant outside Japan with my name on it."
Sakai of Hawaii will hire about 70 employees to staff the 3,500-square-foot restaurant that will seat 150 diners in the ground-floor space now occupied by Starbucks. The kitchen will occupy an additional 1,400 square feet.
Renderings show the open-air space covered by a series of transparent round panels reminiscent of parasols. Landscaping currently in Starbucks will either be removed or moved closer to Lewers Street, from which access to the restaurant will be possible.
Sakai of Hawaii will not be as expensive as Sakai’s French cuisine restaurant in Japan, La Rochelle. At Sakai of Hawaii the average check per person at breakfast will be around $10, while dinner might be $50 to $60. The restaurant will be open from 6:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. and validated parking will be available.
Sakai will use as many locally grown ingredients as possible, and in designing his menu has been meeting with ranchers, farmers, fish and produce purveyors and others, he said.
Sakai, known for his "Iron Chef-French" TV persona, brought La Rochelle director and Grand Chef Toshiyuki Kudoh to Wednesday’s news conference. Kudoh will train the chefs hired for Sakai of Hawaii.
Sakai will continue to be based in Japan, though "I wish I could" move to Hawaii, Sakai laughed. He will travel to Hawaii and will cook in the restaurant several times each year, as do fellow "Iron Chef" alumnus Masaharu Morimoto and famed Japanese chef and restaurateur Nobuyuki "Nobu" Matsuhisa, both of whom have eponymous restaurants in Waikiki.
Since the closure of Sakai’s restaurant in Shibuya, there remain La Rochelle locations in Sanno, Minami Aoyama and Fukuoka, Japan, but a new Shibuya location is being sought, a publicist said.
The restaurant’s parent company, Chef Sakai USA, is led by president Miho Makimura. It is "humbling and very exciting to be able to share chef Sakai’s creativity with Hawaii," she said.
Sakai first came to Hawaii 10 years ago, about the time that Japan-born Hawaii chef Roy Yamaguchi opened his first restaurant in Japan. That was when Sakai’s dream of expanding his restaurant business in the opposite direction was born, he said through son Shingo. The younger Sakai, 39, serves as executive managing director of Sakai Shokuhin Corp., his father’s Japan-based restaurant and packaged foods company.
An earlier collaboration with a Dallas-based investor has been succeeded by this one. Sakai has no ownership interest in the restaurant and is not an officer of the company, but has total creative control, officials said.
Sakai was long referred to on "Iron Chef" as the "Delacroix of French Cuisine," a reference to a famous French painter. In 2005 he was named a Chevalier, or knight, in the Ordre National du Mérite Agricole, the National Order of Agricultural Merit, by the French government.
The Japanese government in 2009 presented him with the Gendai no Meiko, or Contemporary Master Craftsman award, an honor reserved for the nation’s foremost artisans.
