People’s Cafe will reopen Tuesday after about a four-month closure, according to a sign posted on its door.

The popular place for Hawaiian and Filipino dine-in and takeout meals closed in April for reasons unknown, as the owners have not been reachable.

Calls to the restaurant’s phone number on a banner outside the restaurant saying "Opening Soon" netted a recording indicating the number had been changed or is no longer in service.

TheBuzz left a business card under the door of the longtime eatery last week begging for a callback, after other attempts at contact, but the request went unfilled. Lettering on the door indicates the restaurant’s hours of operation were 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

The restaurant is at 1310 Pali Highway, mauka of Kukui Street, on the ground floor of the See Dai Doo Society Building next to Longs Drugs.

Society officials would not comment.

Some online reviews about the restaurant are negative, but on popular sites including Yelp.com, Urban­Spoon.com, TripAdvisor. com, Yahoo!Travel and local blogs including Tasty Island Hawaii, the positive reviews far outweigh the negative, and liken People’s Cafe to other well-known Hawaiian food institutions in town including Helena’s Hawaiian Food, Ono Hawaiian Food and Yama’s Fish Market. Another well-known Hawaiian food institution worth mentioning while we’re at it, is Waipahu’s Highway Inn. It’s not mentioned in the posts observed by TheBuzz, but your columnist suspects there’s a rule somewhere requiring that Highway Inn be mentioned in any conversation about Hawaiian restaurants on Oahu.

Kimo, not Kalani

The call letters KIMO now belong to two broadcast facilities in the U.S., one, a TV facility (not a station, but something known as a DTV channel substitution) in Anchorage, Alaska; the other, to KIMO-FM 107.3 in Helena Valley Southeast, Mont.

The Montana Radio Co. LLC took over the call letters effective Sept. 18, 2011, after no Hawaii broadcaster stepped forward to claim them as was predicted in this space in March of last year.

Jeff Coelho, a now-retired lifelong broadcaster and behind-the-scenes political figure, observed at the time that the KIMO call letters would present a local station with "a great local identity, great local branding" possibilities. A station seeking to rebrand itself "would grab those call letters in a heartbeat," he said and theorized that nimble neighbor island-based broadcasters not burdened by mainland corporate bureaucracy would be likely candidates.

Coelho predicted "that within 72 hours somebody will be applying for ’em."

It didn’t come true.

Oh, the "Kalani" reference? It’s directly connected to Montana.

Those of a certain age will remember a TV commercial advertising land for sale in "Ponderosa Pines" in the "Big Sky Country" of Montana. The spot ran at least from the early 1970s into perhaps the early 1980s and ended with a cute, local-looking boy of elementary school age identified as Kalani, who encouraged the viewer to "call now — for sure."

His intonation of "for sure," was unnatural to the point that local folks of a certain age will be able to either hear it in their heads, or replicate it aloud, immediately upon reading this.

It may have been seen at the time as a could-have-been-way-better bit of voice-over work by a kid, but to have generations of people remember it, lo these many years later, means the company got way more value from its advertising team than whatever it was billed. Late longtime Honolulu ad-man Jim Winpenny has been credited with creating the commercial.

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Reach Erika Engle at 529-4303, erika@staradvertiser.com, or on Twitter as @erikaengle.