Hawaiian food is flourishing... in Utah?
Le succès d’une chaîne de restaurants hawaiienne dans l’Utah.
Véritable melting-pot culturel, les Etats-Unis ont une tradition culinaire qui mêle des influences diverses et qui, à l’instar de la cuisine française, est très régionale. Chaque région a ses propres spécialités culinaires et produits fétiches. Mais, depuis plusieurs années, grâce aux frères Mack, la cuisine hawaiienne a su s’imposer là où on ne l’attendait pas. Retour sur une success story.
SALT LAKE CITY — The restaurant Mo’ Bettahs is a ballad to beach life. Surfing movies play on TV screens in a continuous loop. Paddles and surfboards that have all touched Hawaiian waters adorn the walls. Reggae music by the Hawaiian band Natural Vibrations pulses through the speakers. It’s nearly enough to make you forget you’re in a dry, landlocked city where the sights include snow-capped mountains and the occasional blizzard.
2. That this restaurant exists at all is improbable. The brothers Kalani and Kimo Mack, who hail from Kaneohe on the coast of Oahu, opened the Hawaiian-style fast-casual place in 2008, in the depths of the Great Recession, with no experience, no business plan and only the money they had saved from driving buses in Honolulu. A decade later, Mo’ Bettahs has six perennially packed locations in Utah, an aggressive plan to expand to other states and a loyal customer base that dotes on the restaurant’s specialties.
SUCCESSFUL WITH MORMONS
3. A large measure of that success, though, derives not from any particular dish, but from the very specific appeal the restaurant holds for Utah’s dominant religious group: Mormons. As the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Utah is home to 2 million Mormons, the largest number in any state. And the Mormon Church has long had strong ties to Polynesian island groups like Hawaii, Tonga and Samoa.
4. That Pacific region was one of the church’s first overseas destinations, in the 1840s, for its missions — an essential Mormon tradition in which young members spend 1 1/2 to 2 years in a single place to try converting locals to the
faith. As a result, Mormons number in the hundreds of thousands in Polynesia, which has six Mormon temples and several churchsponsored schools.
UNEXPECTED SUCCESS STORY
5. The Mack brothers, Kimo, 48, and Kalani, 49, never considered any of this when they moved to Salt Lake City and set out to open Mo’ Bettahs, even though both are lifelong members of the Mormon Church. Growing up in Hawaii, they were beach bums who barely graduated from high school, and eventually became city bus drivers. Kalani moved to Salt Lake City in 1998 because his wife’s family was from there, as was his father; Kimo followed in 2008 to escape the high cost of living in Honolulu.
6. With no other job prospects, the brothers brainstormed and wrote down 10 ideas for businesses they could start together — including a tent company, and creating kiosks for loading songs onto an iPod. They settled on option No. 3: opening a restaurant. They had no clue about the logistics of running a restaurant, but no doubt that it would center on their favorite food, the Hawaiian plate lunch — a multicultural meal of meat, rice and macaroni salad, a staple of 19th-century sugarplantation workers who came to Hawaii from countries like Japan and China. The name, Mo’ Bettahs, is Hawaiian Pidgin, a Creole language from the plantations.
INSPIRATION FROM HOME
7. The Macks’ main source of culinary education was Zippy’s — the popular Hawaii-based fast-casual chain where they worked making plate lunches for two years — as well as their mother, an avid home cook who “fried everything,” Kimo recalled. The brothers worked tirelessly to ensure that their new restaurant looked and felt like their island home.
8. But when Mo’ Bettahs opened in the summer of 2008, with the economic downturn in full swing, the brothers were making only $500 a day in sales. “I remember so vividly telling Kimo, ‘How long do you think we can go until we have to pull the plug and cut our losses?'” Kalani said.
USING SOCIAL MEDIA
9. Around the same time, Facebook was gaining traction, and Kalani’s 15-year-old daughter, Malia, had just created a profile for herself. “I quickly realized, holy smokes, you can reach a lot of people through this,” he said. So Kalani made a profile for Mo’ Bettahs, and soon noticed that there were many Facebook groups for Mormons who had served missions in Polynesia. He started promoting the restaurant through those channels.
10. Mo’ Bettahs was suddenly mobbed with former missionaries eager to give their families and friends a taste of the place where they had spent their most formative years. Mormons, the Macks quickly realized, were their greatest marketing tool. “Mormons are all about supporting their neighbors, and seeing their community succeed,” Kimo said.
BECOMING A NATIONAL BRAND
11. Mo’ Bettahs has opened five more locations in Utah, and the brothers say they are one opening away from making $1 million in sales each month. “I’m an island boy who didn’t go to school, so that’s like, whoa!” Kimo said. In 2017, the Macks entered into a partnership with the Utah restaurant development company Four Foods Group to standardize their business operations and grow the brand nationally.
12. Andrew and Shauna Smith, the group’s founders, said they were impressed by the economics of the restaurant. There are also not many Hawaiian restaurants in Utah to compete with Mo’ Bettahs. The plan is to open six more Utah locations starting this summer, with a branch in Idaho — which also has a large Mormon population — to follow next year. After that, Mo’ Bettahs plans to expand to states like Nevada and Missouri, in cities where housing costs are low and incomes are high. 11. they are one opening away from... il ne leur reste plus qu'un restaurant à ouvrir pour... / to enter into ici, entamer, se lancer dans / to standardize (US) = standardise (UK) uniformiser, normaliser / brand marque; ici, entreprise. 12. economics ici, rentabilité / to compete with concurrencer / branch antenne; ici, restaurant / income revenu.