Super Bowl weekend will be the last leisure days for Lance Yamamoto for the foreseeable future.
After that he will be preparing to reopen Sushi Bay restaurant at Kapolei Shopping Center under his ownership and management on Tuesday.
Sunday will be “my last day off for a while, so I want to enjoy that day,” he chuckled.
Yamamoto bought the kaiten, or conveyor belt, style sushi restaurant from Chung Ae and Peter Park for undisclosed terms.
The restaurant closed on Wednesday, but Yamamoto said he will retain any and all of the 10 employees who want to continue working there.
The biggest immediate change he will make is to the sauce for the spicy ahi sushi, to better suit customer tastes. Spicy ahi sushi is the No. 1 seller, he said.
Yamamoto will spend some time assessing the market, learning the customer base and listening to “what they’re saying.” He may tweak some menu items but won’t make other major changes for the first month or so, he said.
“I have a good idea of what I need to do here.”
While he doesn’t have a formal culinary background, he has plenty of experience in the kaiten-style sushi business, having worked at various restaurants over about 20 years, he said.
His résumé includes 11 years at Genki Sushi, where he was vice president for Hawaii operations and traveled to Japan multiple times.
He joined Kuru Kuru Sushi parent company Ginshari Inc. as a partner in December 2004 when there was just the Pearl Kai Shopping Center location, and helped the company’s expansion to Kahala Mall in June 2011.
He retains his partnership in Kuru Kuru, while Sushi Bay is “100 percent” his.
The store seats about 40 customers and measures about 1,200 square feet, smaller than the 2,000-square-foot Kuru Kuru locations, and there are two other conveyor-belt sushi restaurants in the Kapolei area, but he believes “there’s a good customer base here.”
The growing population should be enough to successfully sustain all three, in addition to the area’s other Japanese restaurants, Yamamoto said.
Beginning Tuesday, Sushi Bay will be open daily from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. for dine-in and carry-out service.
SELF-PROMOTION COULD BE REWARDING
It is time for prolific users of social media in Hawaii’s travel industry to brag on themselves a little bit, or a lot, for possible awards.
The nomination period for the second annual Travel + Leisure Social Media in Travel + Tourism (SMITTY) Awards is open through March 1, and 16 new categories have been added, the magazine has announced.
Entries are being collected online at www.travel andleisure.com/smittys/ 2013, and SMITTYs will be awarded to those entries that make the most innovative use of social media.
Entries will be judged by a panel of social media experts, and winners will be announced in June.
Winners also will get coverage in the July 2013 issue of Travel + Leisure magazine and on its website.
Last year’s winners and the entries that got them there can be viewed online at www.traveland leisure.com/smittys.
Travel + Leisure will host a Twitter chat about the evolution of social media and travel Feb. 21 at @travlandleisure with several of last year’s winners from 9 to 10 a.m. Hawaii time.
Hashtags for the online conversation will include #TL_Chat and #TLSMITTY.
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Reach Erika Engle at 529-4303, erika@staradvertiser.com, or on Twitter as @erikaengle.
