Chef D.K. Kodama
The hottest chef in Hawaii did not go to a pedigreed culinary school. He did not study under a famous chef. Although he did operate a bulldozer and other heavy equipment at construction sites. And for the first 15 years of his restaurant career, he was a bartender and nightclub manager.
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Del.icio.usVino, in partnership with Chuck Furuya, Hawaii’s only master sommelier, feature great wines and “Italian-based Pacific Rim cuisine” in the form of tapas, small-plate dishes.
Hiroshi’s, in partnership with Furuya and Hiroshi Fukui, formerly of L’Uraku, serves “Japanese-fusion” and shares space with Vino in the former Sansei (Black Orchid, World Cafe, etc.).
“When we started on Maui, I woke up, did the books, went upstairs and set up the sushi bar in the kitchen, and during that time I’d be ordering. Then I worked the line and afterward closed up and bagged the money. Then I did the same thing the next day. It was like that nonstop for three years. It was gruelling, but it was mine, my first restaurant alone. I was in control of everything. It was exciting to see the restaurant grow, and we were having fun in the kitchen. I kind of miss it.
“If you have one restaurant, you spend 100 percent of your time there. Two restaurants, 50-50. As you grow, you spend less time there, but the way you control it, and I hate to say it, is with numbers —you look at the numbers and you visit each restaurant periodically, and you go to every quarterly meeting for every restaurant, every annual budget meeting, and you’re always in constant contact with your chefs and general managers. And you have a lot of friends telling you how the restaurants are doing. The main thing is you need great people working with you.
“I miss cooking, the focus on one restaurant … Maybe that’s why you see people who have a lot of restaurants, they sell them and open one restaurant and do what they really want to do.”
Still, life is good outside the kitchen.
“I like cooking,” he says, “but I love eating.”
HE WAS supposed to be a civil engineer, like his father Tamateru, who for years helped run Ralph Inouye’s engineering company.
“When I was young, people would ask what are you going to be? My dad was an engineer, so I said, I guess an engineer.”
He attended UH-Manoa and studied engineering, “but I didn’t finish. I got the restaurant bug.”
The third of five brothers (who would be followed by a sister), Kodama worked summers, even Christmas and spring breaks, at his dad’s construction sites.
“We were laborers, at first doing ground work with shovels and picks. Then we graduated to actually operating heavy equipment.”
But there was also time for baseball. “I played baseball all my life, and so did my brothers,” he says. “If we had a few more brothers, we could’ve had our own team. I played the same era as Derek Tatsuno. We won states a couple of times, went to the Mainland a lot. It was fun, that was a great team. I made a lot of friends I’m still friends with today. It was good.”
THE RESTAURANT bug bit when he was in college and went to work at the old Horatio’s.
“First busboy, then waiter, finally to bartender,” he says. “Ever since Horatio’s I knew I wanted to run my own restaurant. I’d worked construction sites and didn’t want to do that — I liked dealing with people going out to dinner. I liked the party atmosphere, it’s very social.
“Some friends from Horatio’s were opening a restaurant in Seattle in 1979, and they said why don’t you come up and manage for us. OK, I’m there. Bartending took me all over, three years in Seattle, then to Aspen managing bars and nightclubs for 10 years.
“But after a while you get tired of that, the games, the drinking, and I missed Hawaii. So I started catering with this one lady, Julie Murad-Weiss, whose family used to own the Tropicana in Vegas — a socialite, but she wanted to cook. She was on the cutting edge, every day was a different menu, so I saw a lot of different cuisines and a lot of great produce fresh from the farms. She was way ahead of her time. She got me excited about food and cooking, the different cheeses and herbs. I’d never seen this kind of cooking.”
The world of cheeses, by the way, so enamors Kodama that he and his wife, the former Lori Yokoyama, a Maryknoll grad he met on Maui where she was working in commercial property management, are naming all their children after various fromage. Brie is 3, Chev (Chevre abbreviated) 1. A third child is due in August. “If it’s a girl, maybe Cashel Bleu. If it’s a boy, we’re not sure.” (Gorgonzola? Pepperjack?)
In Aspen, Kodama further expanded his horizons working at a sushi bar, slapping rice and raw fish.
“There’s been no formal culinary education,” he says. “It was always on the job.”
But he and Aspen friends, in the long breaks between ski and summer peak seasons, would travel. “And we always ate at the great restaurants, the who’s who chefs,” he recalls. “Then I’d go home and try to duplicate what I ate.”
SO IT was that Kodama returned to Hawaii in 1991 with lots of ideas and one big dream.
“I came home and wanted to open a restaurant,” he says. “And I noticed there were only a few sushi bars around town. People made sushi at home, they didn’t go out for it.”
He checked Oahu and Kauai, but decided Maui offered the best opportunity, and with four partners opened Five Palms in Kihei.
“With so many partners,” he says, “the freedom was limited, so I looked for something on my own.”
Folks at the Kapalua Resort knew his food, and soon offered a deal to open Sansei Seafood Restaurant and Sushi Bar in The Shops adjacent to the Kapalua Bay Hotel. That was in 1996.
Nine years later, he has his “six and a half” restaurants and, when the operation is stabilized, is poised to expand further.
“I never thought or dreamed of this” he says, shaking his head, smiling still.
“I always wanted to have a restaurant, going back to my days at Horatio’s. Just one. I never imagined two, three, or the cookbook. I never dreamed of doing that. For me, it’s wow.”
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