View this email in your browser What Happened to Ono's, and What It Says About Us Written by Chris Jay with editorial guidance by Sara Hebert



Thanks to Pat Viser, Judy Williams and Thomas Young for tipping the author. When our Powerball numbers hit, you three are going to have it made in the shade. Four guys with a dream, photographed in Sione Maumalanga's (far right) driveway in Shreveport, Louisiana in 2016. What obligation do we have to the chefs, line cooks, servers and dishwashers whose labor nourishes us? Does their health and happiness matter to us? If we knew that they were suffering, or being exploited, would we extend a hand?



Or would we look away?



When I heard the news that Ono’s Hawaiian Grill would be shuttering only 10 months after opening, I was devastated. I am devastated. I dread the gossipy conversations that I know will be forthcoming. But, mostly, my heart breaks for Ono’s co-owner Sione Maumalanga and his family. Tip the author $5? I write for a living, including a blog that I write for the Shreveport-Bossier Convention and Tourist Bureau, www.20x49.com . My two most-read blog posts, in 10 years of writing 20x49, are a post about the Ono’s food truck debuting at Shreveport Farmers’ Market in 2016 and a post about the opening of Ono’s Hawaiian Grill in 2019.



Hanging around the food truck during its frequent appearances at Great Raft Brewing, I saw Sione and his friends charm one customer after another. I say “friends” because that’s what they were. Sione brought many of his childhood friends – who I understood to be escaping challenging life circumstances in Hawaii – to Shreveport to help build his dream.



We never discussed those challenging life circumstances in any depth, but I inferred that he meant the insane gang violence and rampant methamphetamine use that plagues many of the Hawaiian Islands. The original group of three or four guys who surrounded Sione in the food truck days weren’t his staff; they were his boys.



Sione and I became friends. When I said that I’d never even heard of saimin (Hawaii’s underappreciated version of ramen), he invited Sara and me over to his house and cooked up a big batch. His enthusiasm and raw talent for cooking, and the fierce pride that he exhibits in his Polynesian heritage, were inspiring to me. If this guy was going to be a part of our restaurant scene’s future, I thought, there was reason for optimism. At some point, Sione excitedly told me that my blog posts attracted the attention of a potential investor in a brick-and-mortar location. I was so proud. Now, looking back on that conversation, I feel sick to my stomach.



The first time that I stepped into Ono’s Hawaiian Grill, dread and regret washed over me. Why would anyone build a 400-seat, 10,000-square-foot restaurant in Shreveport? Or in any city in 2020? Why would anyone spend millions of dollars – including a rumored $1.2 million for a sprawling kitchen – to renovate a building in an industry with razor-thin profit margins?

Over the past few days, several former Ono’s staffers have contacted me. They all told me the same things.



“This is what a pimp does,” a former cook told me. “The pimp has the money, and the confidence, and the person being pimped gets so caught up in it that they don’t stop to think: ‘Why did this person approach me in the first place?’”



“He got talked into opening a 400-seat restaurant, which nobody in this town should ever do, and he got in too deep with it,” a former chef told me.



On my first visit to the restaurant, I ordered a beer and a chicken katsu plate. My server ducked into the kitchen and returned with my plate of fried chicken in less time than it took for the bartender to pour my beer. That’s not how fried chicken works. Sartin Law Firm is a proud sponsor of Stuffed & Busted. Kahuku garlic shrimp, once an unforgettable dish that consisted of plump, sweet tiger shrimp encrusted in enough garlic to revive a corpse, was now a bland, room-temperature platter of fried shrimp with a sprinkling of diced garlic. The food truck’s fantastic SPAM musubi, an iconic Hawaiian dish that was originally created by Japanese internment camp prisoners during WWII, had been transformed into something resembling a day-old boudin ball: deep-fried, leaden pucks of greasy gloom.



What the hell?

It was plain to see: this was not Sione’s vision. This was not even his food. This was not Sione’s restaurant.



While the word did get out that the food quality had suffered in the transition from food truck to brick-and-mortar restaurant, no one seemed too interested in questioning what forces had wrought that transformation. In some of the many conversations that I had with the local food crowd, I detected a sort of sporting joy as self-described “foodies” panned the restaurant. Even other young restaurateurs, including some friends of Sione’s, took to Facebook to bemoan the shitty service they’d received or gripe about the quality of the frosé. At the same time, you know, what did I do?



I looked away. There were a lot of other restaurants opening at the time. There were, especially, lots of exciting, international restaurants cropping up. Lots of places for me to blog about. An order of SPAM musubi from the Ono's food truck. A few weeks from now, another new restaurant will open in Shreveport. It will be called Pepito’s, and is a Tex-Mex joint that will occupy the former home of Ono’s Hawaiian Grill, directly across the street from what I believe to be one of the finest Mexican restaurants in the United States.

“I will be surprised if the business remains closed for more than a week,” a former employee told me, referring to the unusually fast roll-out of a new restaurant to occupy the space. Just like the chicken katsu that I ordered on my first visit to Ono’s, the restaurant replacing Ono’s seems to have been prepared in a strangely brief amount of time. Two people with whom I spoke told me that preparations for the new restaurant have actually been underway since October, which would mean that Ono’s was granted a six-month opportunity to become successful.



Do me a favor and Google “How long before restaurants turn a profit.”

Doesn’t it all lead you to wonder if the plan was ever for Ono’s Hawaiian Grill to succeed? The Three180 podcast is a proud sponsor of Stuffed & Busted. Hawaii itself would surely sympathize. The Hawaiian Kingdom thrived in isolation for more than 500 years, until European colonizers arrived in the late 18th Century. Americans, and plantations, came next. Smallpox spread like wildfire, nearly eradicating the native population. With the Kingdom on its knees, Americans inside of the kingdom government rewrote the constitution, stripped King Kalākaua of all power, and made it impossible for native Hawaiians to vote in Hawaii. When Queen Liliuokalani attempted to restore royal power over the Kingdom, American businessmen held her captive inside of her own home with support from the U.S. military. Word has it that Sione will be returning to the food truck life soon. I haven’t spoken to Sione about this, but I hope he knows how much I admire his resolve to fight.



The first time that I ever spoke to Sione, he was eager and brimming with pride. I could hear the joy in his voice as he anticipated showcasing the cuisine of his beloved home.

“I’m gonna cook what I grew up eating,” Sione told me in 2016. “I was born in O’ahu and I grew up in Tahiti. I grew up eating island food, and that’s what I’m planning to represent.”

To any young, aspiring restaurateurs who may read this: Please be careful. Never cede control of your dreams. If your talent attracts the attention of the media – people like me – that will likely lead to contacts from others who want to be involved in your business. Be mindful that there are individuals and organizations out there who make their living by siphoning away the hardwon resources of fledgling entrepreneurs.



To my fellow food lovers: Maybe we’ll find ourselves in line together at Sione’s new food truck sometime soon, waiting on a plate of those transcendent Kahuku garlic shrimp or an order of SPAM musubi that’s never seen a deep fryer. Maybe you’ll look up from your phone and proclaim how excited you are that Sione is back in the food truck business, how Ono’s was always so much better as a food truck, anyway. And God, that restaurant was so large. I’ll smile and nod, because I’m tired of trying to explain.



But, if I worked up the energy, I’d take issue with your statement that Ono’s was “better as a food truck.” In my opinion, Ono’s has only ever existed as a food truck. Ono’s Hawaiian Grill was a MacGuffin, an empty shell in a shell game, a Maltese Falcon that was never any more real than the scentless flowers on a plastic lei. Maccentric is a proud sponsor of Stuffed & Busted. Tip the Author $5? Sign Up for This Newsletter