---

Kailua kitchen manager
and wife take over
Cisco’s restaurant

A longtime Kailua restaurant and bar quietly changed ownership the first of the year. Cisco's Cantina veteran kitchen manager Bill Cutler and his wife, jewelry designer JoAnna Hernandez, are putting their mark on the 20-year-old eatery purchased from Greg Blotsky and Martha Harding for an undisclosed price.

The Windward side of Oahu has plenty of sports, karaoke and meat-market-type bars, Cutler said, but his vision is for a more "reserved, family kind of restaurant."

Not that the bar is going away or anything. The restaurant's tequila selection has grown since Cutler took over.

Cisco's founders were looking to retire and "could have sold it very easily, just for anyone to come in and make it whatever they wanted, but they wanted it to stay Cisco's," Hernandez said.

"Bill had been with them on and off for almost 15 years," she said. "He was the best person to turn this over to."

Hernandez has tweaked the decor by drawing on her life growing up around her family's Mexican restaurants in California. A new ice maker replaced the old one that Cutler said "sounded like a jet engine."

Other changes are projected to cost $30,000, Cutler said. The old, tiled and heavy tables will be replaced. Scavengers may find them free for the taking outside the restaurant at unannounced times. The grungy carpeting also will be replaced.

The radio music, chatter and commercials for competitors' restaurants have been replaced by CD music. Live music is also planned, "something where Kailua has a little more options as to going somewhere after hours," Hernandez said. That will require a new type of liquor license.

The couple that met when he was a line cook and she was a waitress at the old Bueno Nalo in Waimanalo have another project for the eatery: revamping the menu.