Cooking without a net

The problem with the floor was that there wasn’t one. The concrete should have been poured a couple of weeks earlier, but instead, here was a ragged, dusty maw dug out 3 feet below ground level. Poking up like periscopes from the rubbish were 17 aluminum ventilation ducts, staggered 5 to 8 feet apart. If you stuck your head in the door, you might reasonably conclude that the space had been overtaken by a doomsday cult with a serious plan for riding out the apocalypse. If you were then told that this site on Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles was going to be a restaurant, and that the restaurant was to open in a scant 19 days, you might offer to fetch a jar of kava kava for Kunae “Chaco” Kim, the woman overseeing the project.

“I just heard last night from the contractors,” Kim had told me in late April. “They said they would try to finish construction during the first week in June. I told them,’That’s not acceptable.’ ” Kim, who was born in Japan to Korean parents, is 43 but looks in her mid-30s. Her demeanor is an unrippled pool of serenity. But if you hear a rare note of exasperation in her voice, or words such as “not acceptable,” it’s safe to assume somebody’s gotten on her fighting side.

Does she wish she’d never heard the word “restaurant”?

“No,” she laughs. “But I wish I had a different contractor.”

As it turned out, a couple of weeks later, she would.

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THE RESTAURANT BUSINESS IS NOT FOR THOSE WITH WEAK stomachs. The failure rate is high, and the logistical hurdles in getting a restaurant up and running demand the unflappability of a Zen master, or several visits to the psych ward. Matters of location choice, contractors, fire codes, city permits and endless inspections must be handled. Any glitch along the way can set the opening date back by weeks. So maybe restaurants do have something in common with doomsday cults: a grand opening can be as hard to predict as the end of the world.

Kim is no stranger to the restaurant business. Her father owned a yakiniku (meat grilling) restaurant in Japan, and although she’s a dissertation shy of a PhD in anthropology from UCLA, she always seemed to gravitate toward the business. For her master’s degree, she made a “participant observation” study of La Toque restaurant. Marriage and motherhood eventually lured her away from academia, and in 1996, with her soon-to-be ex-husband, she opened a traditional Japanese eatery called Chaco, at 340 N. Camden Drive in Beverly Hills. She stayed with it for six years, enduring the last two as a single mom/restaurateur. “I had no life,” she says. Finally, enough was enough, and she sold her interest in the restaurant (now called Sai) to a partner.

Kim joined the Los Angeles subsidiary of Venture Link USA, a Tokyo-based company that helps Japanese businesses come to America and American businesses go to Japan. The job would provide a challenge, and it would not keep her on the move 18 hours a day.

Or so she thought.

As it happened, Venture Link USA had begun to focus increasingly on franchise operations, and most of them were restaurants. One of them is Gyu-kaku (meaning “bull horn” and pronounced “Goo-ka-ku”), a chain of Korean-style barbecue restaurants that has enjoyed sizzling success in Japan. Started five years ago by a young Japanese entrepreneur named Thomas Nishiyama, it has mushroomed into 300 locations, and it is expanding at the rate of 10 to 20 per month.

Korean barbecue is a self-cooking affair. Meat, chicken, fish and vegetables are brought to your yakiniku table, and you grill them to suit your tastes. “The Japanese just love these kinds of restaurants,” says Kim. “But most of them are mom-and-pop operations. They’re really small, really expensive, and they’re all sort of dingy and stark and the service is very bad. They just kind of throw the food at you as they go by your table.”

Nishiyama, a former real estate developer, saw opportunity in the gap between these restaurants’ popularity and their professionalism. “One night after Thomas had an awful experience in one, he came away thinking, ‘Why does it have to be this way?’ ” Kim says. “He believed he could create a Korean-style restaurant that would combine the great food with reasonable prices, good service, and also make it a really enjoyable experience.”

After his success in Japan, Nishiyama began pondering expansion to America. About a year ago, he contacted Venture Link USA, and they soon formed VR Partners Inc. The goal is to franchise Gyu-kaku throughout the United States. But the company first wants to test the market by opening eight or so of its own Gyu-kaku restaurants in urban areas. Kim was cast as director of business development, which meant that she’d head the eatery’s foray into the U.S.

So much for a normal workday.

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THE FIRST CHALLENGE WAS TO DETERMINE whether Gyu-kaku was likely to appeal to American diners. To that end, four Japanese Gyu-kaku businessmen were dispatched just over a year ago to eat their way through Los Angeles, guided by Kim. “Our purpose was twofold,” Kim says. “First, we wanted to see what kind of restaurants were popular and trendy, so we’d consider any type of food. The other part was to see how Korean barbecue was doing in Los Angeles.”

The team had 10 days: two restaurants a night, sometimes three, and no leaving the table until you’d cleaned your plate.

One night the group went to a trendy Japanese place that offered a grazing menu. Ten courses later, they visited a Korean tofu restaurant where the food came in mountainous quantities. The evening ended at Matsuhisa in Beverly Hills, where the food kept coming, and Kim, who stands at a petite 5-foot-2, began to feel as if she were going to explode like the Hindenburg.

Kim’s digestive enzymes, however, only got a three-week break. She then flew to Japan to learn how Gyu-kaku restaurants worked from the bottom up. This meant more eating: Gyu-kaku for dinner and, frequently, Gyu-kaku for a second dinner. Kim’s waistband began to tighten again, but the next phase of her education would give her the opportunity to work off the excess.

One of the chain’s built-in economies is to employ one full-time manager. The rest of the staff are young, mostly college-age part-timers. This may sound like a recipe for bad service, but Kim says an incentive and motivational program has employees in Japan all but doing back flips to make customers happy. Kim herself donned the mostly black uniform. “I wasn’t really expected to do anything except watch, but it got so busy that suddenly I was working and taking orders from these college kids. And they’re saying, ‘Miss Kim! Could you make these drinks!’ I’d say, ‘I don’t know how! How?’ And they would say, ‘Just make it!’ After a few nights around these hot grills, I lost a pound or two.”

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LAST JULY, AFTER KIM’S RETURN to Los Angeles, Venture Link USA formed a 50-50 partnership with Nishiyama. The group immediately began scouting for locations between 1,500 and 2,000 square feet, the most coveted size in the restaurant business. (Gyu-kaku will seat 61.) Targeting the area from West Los Angeles to Santa Monica, the partners found their size and price range to be in short supply. “Rents were outrageous. It seemed everybody was going into the restaurant business last year,” Kim says.

After doing reconnaissance on 20 spaces, the pool was narrowed to a first choice and three alternates. Kim began negotiating in early August. “We knew which one we wanted, but to cover ourselves we continued negotiating with the others.”

The preferred site, 10925 W. Pico Blvd., had housed a restaurant and had a preexisting beer and wine license. (Under an exception in liquor law, a Korean spirit distilled from potatoes, known as shochu, also could be served. The restaurant will offer cocktails made from it.)

As negotiations continued, the chain’s architect flew in from Japan for a site inspection, and he began drawing up plans before the deal was closed. At the same time, Kim had to walk a fine line in negotiations-- appearing eager to close the deal while also slowing it down to save money because, essentially, the later they signed an agreement, the later the rent would start. “I was nit-picking every aspect of the lease contract,” she says.

The contract finally was signed in September, and the opening was set for February. The architect completed a prototype for the restaurant’s design before returning to Japan. The goal was to create a decor that incorporated traditional Japanese and American styles. In Japan, Kim says, the restaurants are of antique wood, with walls festooned with rice paper mats.

All seemed set to go, but the first devil proved to be in the ducts--the ventilation ducts for the “magic roasters” over which diners would grill their feasts. The choice was between a subterranean system that would suck steam and smoke from beneath the tables, and the more common overhead ducts. Knowing Californians’ aversion to smoke, VR Partners chose the underground system, which also is less visually obstructive.

But this required lowering the floor by digging it out. “We didn’t know it at the time, but this had never been done in the city of Los Angeles,” Kim says. “Even the planning commission people were unfamiliar with it, so they wanted to be very cautious.”

The opening date was pushed to March.

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A PAPER CHASE FOR MULTIPLE CITY permits consumed the autumn months, but in early January the contractor began digging out the floor. Inevitably, problems arose. “The landlord got very upset because they were almost encroaching on the foundation of the building,” Kim says. “He was just going crazy, and he asked us to stop any further work until that was taken care of. There went another three or four weeks.”

Opening night was rescheduled for April. In addition, the city nixed the proposal to use rice paper mats for the walls. It was a fire hazard, officials said. The “magic roasters” also were a dilemma, becoming such a magnet for fire code challenges that in March the company hired a fire code specialist to head off future surprises.

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KIM, MEANWHILE, HAD BEEN hunting for companies to process meat, seafood, chicken and vegetables, which would be sliced and diced to the restaurant’s specifications. But this proved difficult because of the small volume. So the company decided that everything but the beef would be readied on the premises.

In November, Kim finally found two companies willing to supply the beef. The home office wanted final approval, however, so a succession of samples was shipped to Japan--where they were allowed to languish, defrosting in customs. The final decision didn’t come until April, but that was OK because the still-yawning pit had pushed back the opening date--to May 16.

It was a problem, though, for Kenji Kubota, a Los Angeles resident who had been brought aboard as Gyu-kaku’s full-time manager. He had begun hiring staff in February. When opening night got bounced to May, most of the waiting employees scattered.

Across the Pacific, Gyu-kaku management was in overdrive handling the surging expansion there. In addition to weekly teleconferences with company officials in Japan, Kim was frequently awakened in the middle of the night. “They were working all these strange hours and they’d lose track of time,” she says.

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IT’S MAY. I CHECK IN WITH KIM for a progress report. “We have a new contractor,” she says with a sigh that is half relief and half exhaustion. “We spent all of last week working on that change, including a midnight TV conference with Japan. I couldn’t sleep very much. I lost two pounds last week, but I’ve managed to put construction back on the right track. Kenji’s started hiring staff, and a couple of people are coming here next week to teach us how to cut the food, and there’s a team from Japan coming to teach us to cook.”

And opening day?

“June 11. And I’m sure we’re going to make it this time.”

Would you ever want to open another restaurant?

“Yes,” she laughs. “Millions of them!”