Hawaii group buys Suehiro Restaurant & Catering, a two-story 210-seat restaurant at 1824 S. King St., will close Dec. 29 and reopen early next year with a new name, Gyotaku, and new owners, REI Food Service LLC.
Suehiro Restaurant,
plans name change
The eatery will close Dec. 29 and
reopen next year as GyotakuBy Russ Lynch
rlynch@starbulletin.com"The plan is to convert it to the Gyotaku format," similar to the first restaurant of that name at Waimalu that his group has owned since July, said Tom Jones, REI president.
Suehiro has a substantial takeout bento business and that will continue much as it is now, with the addition of some different bentos now being sold at Waimalu, he said.
"We will change it over to our main menu format in the restaurant," Jones said. He said the existing Gyotaku near Pearl City has a lot of customers from East Oahu who will enjoy the shorter drive to go to a Gyotaku in town.
"We think it will make a nice complement to our Pearl City restaurant," Jones said.
Toru Yamada, president of Yamada Restaurant Hawaii #2 Inc., owners of Suehiro since 1988, said he and his partners decided to refocus their efforts and concentrate on their main business, commercial real estate investments.
Deciding to sell the restaurant business was "the toughest decision the company has ever made," Yamada said. His group's main concern was for the employees, who number 30-40 depending on the level of business, but Jones and his group undertook to encourage all employees to apply for work at the new Gyotaku and that helped, Yamada said.
"We were definitely concerned about our employees," he said
He said he is glad the business is passing to professional restaurant operators.
Jones said the buyers "will make every effort to hire as many as we can" of the existing employees. He said the deal is expected to be completed in the first week in January.
Neither side would disclose the terms of the transaction. Suehiro has been open since the 1970s and was owned by Kaneda family until Yamada took it over. Yamada said Suehiro gift certificates will be honored by the new owners until they expire.
Other Suehiro cards and privileges will not be honored after Dec. 29, he said.
Yamada's group owns real estate on Oahu and Maui and in California and Nevada.
One of its operations is Hy-Pac Self-Storage on Nimitz Highway.
REI was formed by top executives of Kyotaru Hawaii, which had operated the Columbia Inn restaurants since 1986.
The officers are Jones, president; Nobutaka "Tony" Sato, vice president; William Okimoto, executive chef and Shinichi Tsutsui, treasurer.
They took over what had been the Columbia Inn Waimalu, since renamed Kyotaru, earlier this year and renamed it Gyotaku, after the Japanese art of making prints from fish.