Side Street Inn’s Colin Nishida: All I Ever Wanted Was a Bar
How Colin Nishida, against his will, became the hottest restaurateur in town.
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COLIN NISHIDA LEANS OVER THE FRIED RICE STATION IN HIS NEW, 15,000-SQUARE-FOOT KITCHEN AT SIDE STREET INN ON DA STRIP.PHOTO: OLIVIER KONING |
Wednesday, 3:30 p.m. The new Side Street Inn on Da Strip is already open, the wood interior glowing in the late afternoon sunlight. A few tables are filled with golfers from the Ala Wai Course next door. At the bar, a covey of businessmen are huddled in a meeting that will soon turn to drinks and pūpū.
It’s the quiet before the storm. The restaurant is sold out for the night. In fact, it’s booked solid for the next five nights, through Sunday. Walk-ins will be told they can stand at the bar, have a table in half an hour, maybe.
Owner Colin Nishida is back in the gleaming, new, 1,500-square-foot kitchen, watching over a 60-quart aluminum stockpot. It’s full of pork ribs simmering in broth, garlic, ginger, vinegar, peppercorns. There are more ribs piled in pans on the counter, 150 pounds’ worth in all. Sauced and grilled to order, artfully piled and garnished with watercress, the 150 pounds may last till the weekend. Maybe.
Next to him, a cook is notching the edges of Side Street’s fabled pork chops, so they won’t curl up on the grill. “All he does is pork chops,” says Nishida. “This whole grill is just for chops, at least 300 pounds a week.”
At another station, a young goateed chef, who’s worked under Thomas Keller in Vegas, cuts a 20-pound ‘ahi fillet, in from the fish auction this morning, into sashimi blocks and poke. Then he goes and gets another fillet. He’ll be slicing sashimi and seasoning fresh batches of poke all night.
The kitchen is larger than that of many hotels. There are three stoves, two grills, several wok stations, rice cookers, ovens, convection ovens, steamers. By 6 p.m., there will be 15 people working back here. Gallons of chopped bacon, lup cheong, Portuguese sausage, fish cake, kim chee and vegetables are arrayed at the fried-rice station. Someone else is prepping near- industrial quantities of chicken, which should last the night. Maybe.
SIDE STREET INN LEGENDS: THE FRIED RICE AND THE PORK CHOPS.
PHOTO: OLIVIER KONING
“Yeah, it looks like a lot of food,” says Nishida. “But people bring their whole families to eat here. It’s not like the old Side Street. People come to eat dinner.”
“You never wanted a dinner house,” I say.
He shakes his head, a little sadly. “All I ever wanted was a bar. You know, a place I could drink with my friends, without getting a tab.”
He got a bar—it just turned out to be more successful than he or anyone else imagined. He was strictly a bartender once, in the ’80s, at the Ala Moana Hotel.
“I thought he was a big success then,” recalls TV producer/personality Emme Tomimbang. “I used to meet my friends at Mahina Lounge. There he was, a Kalihi boy, wen’ Farrington, wearing a tux to work.”
Nishida was a Kalihi boy only during school hours. He grew up in Moanalua before it had a high school. He went to Damien, departing because he and the Catholic school had different opinions about regimentation, finishing at Farrington. After school and on weekends, he worked at a lunch counter called C’s.
NISHIDA AND SIDE STREET MANAGER ALBERT TSURU GRACE THE ORIGINAL SIDE STREET BAR IN THE EARLY '90S.
PHOTO: COURTESY MEL NISHIDA
“They gave me a coffee can, a putty knife and showed me what a grease trap was,” he recalls. “That was my introduction to the restaurant business.”
Tending bar at the Ala Moana was a step up from cleaning grease traps, but Nishida wasn’t satisfied. “It was a no-brainer, just follow the rules, do the same thing every night.”
One job wasn’t enough, anyway. Nights off, he’d tend bar for a friend at Oasis. To fill his days, Nishida, and his business partner, Robert Takemoto, began Take’s Restaurant, a plate-lunch place on an obscure side street near Ala Moana.
In ’92, when space opened up in the building, they decided to “take a shot at it,” turning Take’s into a bar. Since they’d been telling everyone they were located on a side street, that became the name.
COLIN NISHIDA AND THEN GIRLFRIEND, NOW WIFE MELISSA, CELEBRATING THE ORIGINAL SIDE STREET'S EXPANSION IN 2004.
PHOTO: COURTESY MEL NISHIDA
The original Side Street was, in fact, just a small bar, with only five items on the menu, including noodles, fried rice and a Spam-and-egg sandwich. “I like Spam-and-egg sandwiches,” says Nishida. “Grill it up, quarter it, put it on a plate with some chips, you’re good to go.”
The legendary pork chops were an add-on. “We used to get pork chops at the store, cook ’em up for our own lunch,” says Nishida. “Then one of the regulars said, ‘How come you nevah make ’em for us?’”
Nishida liked fooling around in Side Street’s tiny kitchen, coming up with new menu items. “A vendor would bring in kalbi and I’d try to make something. If I didn’t like it, I’d dump it and start over,” says Nishida. “Then I’d finally get it right and have to think, ‘What was it I put in it that time?’”
“Colin’s not a trained chef, but he’s got that passion for cooking that great chefs have,” says Roy Yamaguchi. “Colin knows what he likes, and, even better, he knows what his guests like.”
As Yamaguchi points out, there are more than 100 ways to prepare kalbi. “Colin will capture the kalbi taste that’s perfect for Hawai‘i people, and appealing for Asian visitors and for people from the Mainland.”
At any rate, “Colin’s food was great,” Alan Wong testifies.
It may have been the food, Nishida’s tendency to buy his friends a drink, or, as Nishida himself insists, that Side Street was so obscure, “nobody’s wife knew where they were.” Somehow the little bar turned into a late-night hangout for Nishida’s friends, and people who became his friends, including many of the top chefs in business.
“I think Alan Wong met Roy Yamaguchi for the first time at Side Street,” recalls Dean Okimoto, of Nalo Farms. “I went there because that’s where my ‘Iolani classmates used to drink, but I loved the feel of it, a hole in the wall, so homey. Then I met everyone there, including many of the chefs who became my customers.”
“My friends used to hang at the ‘Ewa end of the bar,” recalls Russell Siu. “I don’t even remember going there to eat, though Colin and I ended up going to Vegas and eating lots of places together.”
“Side Street was the perfect way to end the night,” says Wong. “Of course, we were all younger then.”
“The table where the chefs sat got infamous,” says Nishida. “We used to drink until 2 a.m. and feel tortured at work the next day.”
As word got out, though, Side Street’s days as a secret hangout were numbered.
NISHIDA DESIGNED THE NEW SIDE STREET HIMSELF, DOWN TO THE FURNITURE.
PHOTO: OLIVIER KONING
The media blast that blew open Side Street’s doors came in 1998, when Emme Tomimbang loaded a limo full of chefs and took them—with a camera crew—to their favorite local hangouts, in an episode of Emme’s Island Moments called “Local Grinds on the Town.”
“I didn’t want to do that show,” says Nishida. “I didn’t want Side Street to be a restaurant. But Alan Wong asked me, so I did.”
As Nishida points out, all the other small restaurants featured in the segment have closed, partly because they simply couldn’t handle the increase in business.
“We were already busy, and we got more busier,” he recalls. “Because Alan Wong ordered pork chops, everybody had to have pork chops. They’d get real snappy about it if it took a while.” For few months, Nishida even put in a two-drink minimum. “I wanted to remind people: This is a bar, you’re supposed to relax, have a drink, talk to your friends.”
What happened next was simple, according to Wong. “Colin evolved. He became a better cook and a better business person.”
“He’s a workaholic anyway,” says Russell Siu. “He just goes all out.”
“I always thought I was a workaholic,” says Nishida’s wife, Mel. “But Colin made me feel really lazy.”
Mel—short for Melissa—met Colin at Oasis right as he was about to open Side Street. She was tending bar at a place called Randy’s near Kāhala Mall, and Nishida started showing up when she was on duty. “One night, he said, You know the trouble with this bar? No chicks here. I said, What about me and the waitress? He said, ‘No, no,’ and took out a package of marshmallow chicks and put it on the bar. That’s when I decided I kinda liked the guy.”
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When Mel talked to her twin sister, she realized that she’d known Nishida in his Damien days. “Back then he was such a punk. I told my sister, ‘I can’t believe I’m going out with him.’ And my sister said, ‘I can’t believe it either.’”
Going out they were, and Nishida had prevailed upon Mel to come help him handle the bar at Side Street. “We finally got married,” says Colin. “It only took 18 years.”
During those 18 years, Side Street doubled its size and increased its work force, which had started with five people, by a factor of 10.
Cheryl DeAngelo, who is now a partner, with her husband, chef Fred DeAngelo, in their North Shore restaurant Ola, came to work as a Side Street bartender in 1995, and became Nishida’s catering manager after four years.
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“Colin led by example,” she says. “He could do anything. If the kitchen was slamming, he’d get in there and cook. If the bar got backed up, he’d come out and handle a 15-drink order faster than any of us.”
Nishida was strict but generous to his employees, she says. “If there was a baby luau or a funeral, he was there, with the food.” On the other hand, he was blunt.
“If you came in hungover, he’d say, “What the hell did you do last night? You look like s—t.”
She marveled at how he would treat people. “He was generous with everyone, made sure no one was hungry. Remember that big fundraiser when Chai [chef Chai Chaowasaree] was in trouble [with federal immigration officials]? Colin put that together in less than two weeks. He did every charity event. Plus, you know how he is, jeans and rubber slippers, he acted exactly the same way to everyone, whether it was a CEO of a big company or the guy who washed dishes.”
DeAngelo was scared to tell him she was leaving after eight years for a better job. “All he said was, ‘I’m happy. You’re making something of yourself.’”
Nishida had made something of himself as well. He had Side Street humming, a menu of 68 items, and growing recognition as a chef (Russell Siu: “His steamed moi is a perfectly thought-out dish”). Not to mention an ever-expanding circle of friends.
In 2007, Anthony Bourdain came to film for his Travel Channel show No Reservations. It was supposed to be just Bourdain and a few chefs. Nishida ended up inviting 200 people, including nearly every chef in town, from Wong and Siu to Hiroshi Fukui, Elmer Guzman, Nico Chaize and Don Murphy.
“Everyone kept calling me, saying they wanted to come,” says Nishida, and he said yes to everyone, even me. He declared an open bar and kept the poke, pork chops, Parker Ranch rib-eye and fried rice flowing out of the kitchen.
As Bourdain poured himself into an SUV at the end of the evening, I asked if everywhere he went they threw him a party. “Not like this one, brother,” he said. “Not like this one.”
In addition, from 1999 until this year, Nishida also had a downtown plate-lunch place called Fort Street Grill, which served as his catering kitchen. I’d see him in the kitchen at 7 a.m., prepping, and then, if I could stay up that late, I’d see him at midnight, ordering up a round of vodka shots for his friends at Side Street.
He seemed indestructible.
His stomach was bothering him, however. It took a long time—almost too long—for the doctors to figure out it was a particularly nasty case of diverticulitis. He’d done a bout or two in the hospital, but, by September 2009, he was in intensive care at Queen’s in an induced coma. “We weren’t sure he was going to make it,” says Mel.
On his birthday, Oct. 27, with Nishida still unresponsive, Mel threw him a birthday party at Side Street, packing the room, even inviting Colin’s doctors and nurses.
The next day, Colin started to get better. Says Mel, “I told his nurses, the prayers worked.”
By November, he was out of the hospital, under strict orders to limit work. “I knew he wouldn’t listen,” says Mel.
Eight months later, he opened the $1.5 million Side Street on Da Strip, having designed the entire kitchen and restaurant himself, down to the furniture.
“You gotta be happy for the man,” says Wong. “He comes back from his deathbed and opens a restaurant. Who does that?”
The new Side Street opened in July, with a big party, for which Nishida made much of the food himself. Several hundred friends showed up to celebrate, including a whole panoply of chefs, every one of which said, “Have you seen the kitchen? It’s incredible.”
Cheryl DeAngelo and most of the original bartenders, now women with families, attended as well. “They’re all still friends of ours,” says Mel. “The joke is that they were all skinny when they started and left chunky, from eating the food.”
Nishida’s hoping that, with the dinner crowd now coming to the Kapahulu location, the original Side Street will go back to what he intended, a bar.
“I doubt it,” says Mel. “I know that’s what Colin wants, but it will never happen. It hasn’t even slowed down there.”
In hopes it will go full circle, Nishida has opened the old Side Street at lunch—“for plate lunches, just like it was Take’s in the old days.”
Flash forward: Saturday night, 6:30 p.m., the new Side Street, a third larger than the original, is two deep along the bar, the tables filled with large parties, including many families with children. There’s a line of hopefuls at the door.
Nishida, who has been there all day, is still working.
“I thought you were supposed to go home early, limit your hours,” I say.
“Yeah, yeah,” he says. “I should.”
Two hours later, he’s still in the restaurant. “Mel’s called me three times, so I guess it’s time to go home.” He tries to slip out a side door, but along the way he has to stop at every table and talk to people he knows.
“Colin has a restaurant where all his friends want to come. He’s cooking for his friends,” says Roy Yamaguchi. “I don’t think you can be a bigger success than that.”
Side Street on Da Strip, 614 Kapahulu Ave., (808) 739-3939, daily 3 p.m. to 12 a.m., $5 valet parking, major credit cards, sidestreetinn.com.
Side Street Inn, 1225 Hopaka St., (808) 591-0253, plate lunches, Monday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., open daily 2 p.m. to 2 a.m., $5 valet parking, major credit cards, sidestreetinn.com.
John Heckathorn has been writing award-winning restaurant reviews for HONOLULU Magazine since 1984.
