Restaurant, recycling form unusual match

The Henriques brothers parlayed in one location the unusual combination of a seafood restaurant and a recycling center

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Jean Myers and Naomi Carter kept hearing in their swimming class about Fresh Catch, a new seafood restaurant on Waialae Avenue, and stopped to check it out on Wednesday morning.

"Every day in class they are talking about how ono everything is over here," Carter said.

They were among a handful of prospective customers who stopped by the former Kaimuki Pizza Hut location that day, although it is the one day of the week the restaurant is closed.

"It's beating expectations," owner Reno Henriques said. "I knew I'd do all right, but not this good for the first few weeks."

The restaurant, adorned with everything ocean, is an interesting pairing with RRR Recycling Services Hawaii - his brother Dominic's recycling business, which operates a branch on the site. Both are sons of Robert and Linda Henriques, who own Rolloffs Hawaii Inc., a rubbish business that has operated here for three decades.

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Dominic Henriques was looking to expand his business when he came across the former Pizza Hut location on Waialae Avenue in Kaimuki.

But he didn't need all the space, and rent was expensive.

So he and younger brother Reno Henriques decided to share the location. Reno started seafood restaurant Fresh Catch there this summer, while Dominic opened a branch of his recycling business RRR Recycling Services Hawaii in the back parking lot.

"The state was really looking for a location in this area - Manoa to Aina Haina no permanent redemption center, so we bit the bullet, got the property and he was able to fulfill his dream of having the poke store," said their mother, Linda Henriques. "For us it is all part of our family businesses, right? In order to make it work, the two businesses combined."

The dual location also helps drive customer traffic - recyclers there earn a 5 percent discount coupon at Fresh Catch. The restaurant already sees more than a thousand customers a day, Reno said.

"It's beating expectations," he said. "I knew I'd do all right, but not this good for the first few weeks."

Linda does the books for her sons, each who went to school in Oregon - Dominic to Oregon State in Corvallis for environmental science and Reno to the Western Culinary Institute in Portland for culinary studies - as well as running her own rubbish business, Rolloffs Hawaii Inc., with her husband, Robert.

"We started from a husband and wife two-truck operation," she said. "Me working at the hotel because we couldn't afford medical for our family and paying ourselves. We could only pay one employee. It's been a long haul."

Robert started Rolloffs Hawaii - named after the large bins often found at hotels and apartment complexes - in 1978, following in the footsteps of his father, who started a commercial rubbish company on Oahu more than 40 years ago. Rolloffs now has a fleet of more than 50 trucks and a couple of acres on Sand Island. Altogether, the family employs more than 130 people.

"The boys - they grew up in it, their cribs were next to my desk, so they've all worked at it," said Linda, who now has three grandchildren. Her youngest son, Bobby Henriques, who studied music on the mainland, works at RRR. "They are very hard-working boys. They are lucky. They were raised that way."

With the start of Hawaii's bottle bill in 2005, Dominic founded RRR, which now has five trucks and more than 20 locations islandwide and handles curbside recycling for Mililani and Hawaii Kai.

RRR partners with Times and Foodland supermarkets among others to offer mobile redemption center trucks equipped with reverse vending machines - a concept Dominic created using old service trucks from Coca-Cola Co.

RRR also has recycled more than 2 million containers totaling $100,000 for isle schools.

"We offer schools a twice-a-month pickup for free and then we pay them back their nickels - their HI-5 - per container," Dominic said.

When opening Fresh Catch, the family helped turn it from a red-roofed pizza joint into a sort of faux fisherman's shack complete with picnic tables. Outside, two signs for RRR and Fresh Catch stand side by side, and instead of grass, the parking lot is bordered by crushed green and blue glass.

"We didn't even think twice. We didn't think, 'We don't know anything about food,' " Linda said. "What is one of the challenges - Mom does all the bookkeeping so Mom knows everything? But it's all working toward the same goals."