Peter Merriman has announced the chef who will run his new Honolulu restaurant: Jon Matsubara, a veteran of several high-end Honolulu restaurants — Stage, Azure, Japengo and Forty Carrots at Bloomingdale’s.

Matsubara will be executive chef at Merriman’s Honolulu, set to open in June in the new Anaha complex in Ward Villages.

“Many people in Honolulu have admired Jon’s cooking for years, myself included,” Merriman said. “Jon shares our vision of minimalist cooking that showcases Hawaii’s great products.”

The restaurant will be the first in Honolulu directly owned by Merriman, an original Hawaii Regional Cuisine chef. Merriman’s more casual Monkeypod Kitchen and Moku Kitchen are partnerships with Bill Terry’s Handcrafted Restaurants.

Matsubara said he has been talking to Merriman for a year about the restaurant-to-be. He left Bloomingdale’s in January to join Merriman’s team.

He said he was won over by the management team Merriman already had in place, what Matsubara calls “the infrastructure.”

He was the opening chef at Stage in the Honolulu Design Center, Azure at the Royal Hawaiian and Forty Carrots, and in those cases, he said, he had to start building a staff from ground up, “playing catch-up.”

A Punahou School graduate, Matsubara, 45, attended the French Culinary Institute in New York and then went to work for some of thebiggest names in the business: Daniel Boulud, Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Floyd Cardoz. He returned to Hawaii as chef de cuisine at the Mauna Lani Bay Hotel & Bungalows on the Big Island.

The crucial lesson he takes with him into this venture is that awards and acclaim may build reputations, but financial sustainability is what really counts. “When I was young it was ‘I want to work at the best restaurants.’ If I was smart I’d work at the most successful restaurants.”

Merriman has a proven track record in both, he said.