SEATTLE >> It’s 6 a.m., time to crank up the rice cookers. That’s four 55-cup cookers, each to run three cycles, for a total of 660 cups of steamed white rice.
At 7 they start cutting the fish — at least 150 pounds of ahi and the same amount of salmon — plus onions for the poke. And the contents of 30 cans of Spam.
At 8 a.m. they start loading the trucks, and at 10 they’re off.
A new musubi
Health inspectors in Seattle weren’t keen on pre-made Spam musubi, so instead the food trucks sell a $7.99 Reconstructed Musubi made to order.
The oversized musubi is built within its takeout box: nori on the bottom, followed by rice, slices of Spam, egg and various sauces, all rolled up.
Max Heigh says it takes longer to serve up one of these than anything else on the menu. “But we couldn’t NOT have musubi.”
So runs the morning routine at the commissary kitchen for Hawaii chef Sam Choy’s Seattle food-truck operation. The 1,600-square-foot space near Renton Municipal Airport, southeast of downtown Seattle, feeds, so to speak, three trucks and a food cart that move up and down Seattle proper throughout the workweek.
The daily routine is overseen by Choy’s partner, Max Heigh, a 32-year-old entrepreneur who has never lived in Hawaii, but has an affinity for the islands thanks to frequent visits to relatives in Pearl City.
It’s been 2-1/2 years since the first truck hit the road, and Heigh and Choy are ready for more. In May they open a brick-and-mortar restaurant in Columbia City, south of town, to be followed in late summer with another spot in Kirkland, to the east across Lake Washington. By early next year, Heigh says, the expansion will stretch to Los Angeles and Portland, Ore. All the new operations will share the name of the food trucks, Sam Choy’s Poke to the Max.
For Choy, age 64 and nowhere close to retirement, this makes 2016 one of his busiest years ever. Back home he just launched a television show, “Sam Choy’s in the Kitchen,” Sundays on KHON, and he’s perpetually doing the celebrity-chef thing — last weekend he was in St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, at a three-day culinary event that included a luau on the beach for 250. Several more projects are in various stages of development.
Seattle represented a new start for Choy after his last Honolulu restaurant shut down in 2013.
It all began when Choy and Heigh met on a flight to Alaska in 2012. Choy said he liked the younger man right away, impressed by his energy, ideas, love of food and interest in Hawaii.
Heigh comes from a food- service family. His mother, Lee Ann Subelbia, holds the franchise for Great American Bagel Bakery at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, and the family owns and operates Stone House Cafe and Bakery in Ranier Beach. (“My mother is Filipino, and culturally that’s the way I grew up,” he interjects. “My dad is Caucasian — that is why I’m so pale.”)
The two talked about a partnership, with Heigh thinking really big. “I had in mind an around-the-world-type menu, and he kinda wound me down a little,” he said during an interview last month at one of the food-truck sites, Occidental Square Park in downtown Seattle.
Choy, reached by phone on his way to St. Croix, recalled advising caution. “I told him, ‘Max, let’s refine the system and make sure it’s all on line, and go from there.’”
He said he was attracted to the potential of the region that’s home to Amazon, Microsoft and Starbucks. “There’s a lot of young money. … People are very excited about food, and not just any food, good food.”
Plus, decades ago Choy spent eight months as a student at Columbia Basin College in Pasco, Wash. “I liked it,” he said, “but I met my wife on one of my visits home, and you know how that goes.”
Their first vehicle, a converted former taco truck, cost $65,000, which Heigh financed.
“It was a little bit of a risk, but the response has been terrific,” he said.
Choy “brings this presence,” Heigh said. “Lots of people knew his name.” The menu, though, “we weren’t sure how Seattleites would take to it.” They printed fliers to explain poke, which was spelled with the dreaded accent over the “e.”
But sales have been 70 percent poke from the start, he said. Garlic chicken and Spam musubi (pronounced mu-SU-bi here) follow.
“It’s good Seattle comfort food,” said Randi Bagley, standing in line for a salmon poke bowl. “It’s rice and it’s always really hearty — stick-to-your-gut kinda food.”
Heigh said each truck earns $2,200 per weekday lunch stop, serving 150 to 200 people a day. “We go to some places and the line goes down the block and they’re waiting in the rain.” Often a truck will go out again to a dinner spot, and appearances at weekend festivals are common, too. A staff of 14 keeps it churning.
“It’s a very lucrative business, but it will take a toll on your life,” he said.
Thus the expansion to sit-down restaurants. Heigh said they will be “fast-casual,” carrying the same food as the trucks, with more fish dishes and malasadas added. Ten types of poke will be offered in deli cases.
They’ll open outside the downtown territory of the food trucks. “The trucks have created their own identity,” Choy said. “We don’t want to go in there and throw a monkey wrench into that operation.”
For his part, Choy is moving forward based on lessons learned in good and bad times in the business. He knows he has a brand to protect. “I need to make sure that there’s a good, solid foundation — my name, the food and everything we’re trying to address.”
He said he isn’t ruling out another Hawaii venture — his Kapahulu flagship closed in 1995 after 12 years, his Breakfast, Lunch and Crab restaurant in 2013 after 15. But like many local chefs, he sees the draw of taking his food to other parts of the country.
“Hawaii’s a great place,” Choy said. “We really do have a great food city, but we’re 2,500 miles away and a six-hour flight away from really being in the limelight.”
