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New Empress owner
seeks buyer for restaurant

THE owner of the venerable New Empress Restaurant in the Chinese Cultural Plaza in Chinatown is looking to sell the lease for his 27-year-old eatery.

George Dang Lau is looking to retire, according to real estate broker Ash Tawfik, senior associate at CB Richard Ellis Hawaii Inc.

The 17,000-square-foot, second-floor restaurant is open for lunch and dinner and specializes in banquets for large parties, with 50 to 60 employees.

The $650,000 asking price for the leasehold property gets the new restaurant operator all the furniture, fixtures and equipment through 2011, with options.

Monthly lease rent, common area maintenance fees and real property taxes are roughly $22,000.

Lau won't get to completely retire once a new lessee takes over the restaurant since he also owns Chinatown's landmark Wo Fat building nearby.

Testing, testing

Ewa Beach will soon get a Burger King and a KFC unlike any others. The two stand-alone buildings, in separate locations, will be constructed around steel frames manufactured by Colorado-based EagleSpan Steel Structures Inc.

The company has never built framing for restaurants before. It was recently contracted to create framing for two 85,000-square-foot aircraft hangars, two office buildings and two 12,000-square-foot maintenance areas at the Dulles Jet Center in Washington, D.C.

"This will be the first test on a restaurant," said Steve Johnson, Hawaii and South Pacific general manager for Kazi Foods Inc., the California-based franchisee of the restaurant chains. Kazi owns and operates 28 KFCs and 22 Burger King restaurants in Hawaii.

Hawaii is rarely used for test marketing because our multicultural reaction to, say, a food product, would not necessarily reflect how well something would play in Peoria.

However, Peoria and other markets may see how these buildings will play, since the new restaurants are a test for EagleSpan and MHE International, maker of the concrete that will be applied to the frames.

"If they're successful, they have the opportunity to take it further to KFC and BK corporate," Johnson said.

The buildings are billed as fire-resistant, termite-proof and "more durable than conventional construction," at a lower cost, Johnson said.

Kazi's goal is to have the new Ewa Beach Burger King up and running by the end of April or beginning of May, with a midsummer opening target for KFC.

The company will hire 30 to 35 employees for the Burger King and 25 to 30 for the KFC, a process that may begin in 30 to 45 days, when a sign will be posted at the construction site, Johnson said.