TheBuzz
TheBuzz
CRAIG T. KOJIMA / CKOJIMA@STARBULLETIN.COM
Paul Masuoka puts up his injured foot in front of his restaurant, Masu's Massive Plate Lunch, on Liliha Street. After Masuoka had to shut down the restaurant this summer to deal with his injuries, business associates and friends helped him reopen.
Massive portions For some 30 years Paul Masuoka has provided huge portions of food and his own brand of aloha to patrons of Masu's Massive Plate Lunch.
of aloha for
plate-lunch king
The business was closed for more than a month this summer due to Masuoka's medical problems, and he now finds himself on the receiving end of aloha as he tries to get back on his feet -- literally and figuratively.
"When you're self-employed, you cannot collect unemployment," he said. "The only thing I could collect is (temporary disability insurance) and the bills just keep coming."
His recurring problem with leg ulcers became severe enough in June that his doctor wanted to admit him to the hospital immediately.
With a business to run and an ailing elderly mother to care for he pushed the doctor to wait so he could make arrangements. Just before his own urgent medical need, 89-year-old Yoshiko Masuoka fell and broke her hip, setting off a cascade of additional medical problems; his brother stepped in to help.
Until the fall Yoshiko had helped to run Masu's at 1808 Liliha St., but she is now in a care home.
"It was actually her and I doing all the main work so it was just impossible. We just had to close," he said. The restaurant shut its doors June 11.
Paul was mended enough to reopen July 29.
"I am really blessed because the first thing (the landlords) said was 'take care of your feet first,'" Masuoka said. "It wasn't that they were just going to forget about the rent, I still have to repay it." The family who owns the building voted unanimously to allow Masuoka a deferral plan.
Other creditors and vendors have also shown billing-mercy to the long-time businessman.
"Everybody bent over backwards," said Masuoka, grateful for the support.
A daughter of one of the landlords drove him to the hospital, said Masuoka, unable to drive there himself. "This is like Hawaii 50 years ago," he said.
While hospitalized, he considered scaling back the restaurant's hours but rejected the idea out of concern for his business relationships.
"I think this kind of relationship is hard to find nowadays when the bottom line is all money, yeah? But that's another reason why I just gotta really plug away because I can't let them down," Masuoka said.
Over the decades his business has seen ups and downs.
It started as Livingston Food Service, a catering business on Waimanu Street in the early 1970s. But "a catering business doesn't get hired for big parties every day," he said, so he set up a small plate lunch counter.
"For some reason the plate lunch side took off, and we couldn't handle both so we dropped catering," he said. The new business was named simply, "Masu's Plate Lunch."
"After that we moved to Kamaile Street where the superblock is now and after the Japanese bought the superblock we ended up here on Liliha Street," Masuoka said.
At its peak in the late 1980s Masu's employed 10 people.
KAIM-FM (95.5) morning man Dave Lancaster remembers those days; Masuoka credits him for adding the word "Massive" to the company name.
Lancaster and the late James Grant Benton were on-air partners at KCCN-AM 1420 where an advertising sales rep convinced a skeptical Masuoka to buy a small commercial schedule. Lancaster and Benton would eat the restaurant's daily special on the air and talk it up.
"A few times a week the sales guy would come back with daily specials, stuff like sirloin steak with lobster tails," Lancaster said. "It was kind of outrageous what you would get for the price."
The portions were huge, the plates were heavy and the word massive was bandied about liberally until the name "Masu's Massive Plate Lunch" became the constant reference.
"The place started getting packed out and the regulars got mad," Lancaster said, because it was no longer their little secret.
Lancaster told of a customer at the old Kamaile Street location wheeling out a handtruck stacked with boxes, each filled with that day's special.
He asked about it and was told that then-Lt. Governor Ben Cayetano had bought lunch for his whole staff.
Since then, business slowed due to the Gulf War, Hawaii's economic downturn and increased competition from mainland-based quick-service restaurants.
Without his mother the staff is down to three people, including Masuoka.
Fellow businessman Sam Curtis, owner of Showers of Blessing Christian Bookstore in Mililani, has begun an effort to round up volunteer restaurant help for his friend.
Masuoka said: "Funny, but being human you concentrate on the pain and the suffering and you focus on all the bad things, but if you turn it around and you think, 'OK, you've still got this, you've still got that,' the scale just tips. I'm really blessed."
Erika Engle is a reporter with the Star-Bulletin.
Call 529-4302, fax 529-4750 or write to Erika Engle,
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., No. 7-210,
Honolulu, HI 96813. She can also be reached
at: eengle@starbulletin.com
