WAIPOULI — As if Ba Le, the island’s only restaurant serving Vietnamese food, needed even more business, the fertile mind of owner Luong “Leon” Lam has come up with yet another attraction. Operational within the next few days will be
WAIPOULI — As if Ba Le, the island’s only restaurant serving Vietnamese food, needed even more business, the fertile mind of owner Luong “Leon” Lam has come up with yet another attraction.
Operational within the next few days will be a video menu system that will include a desktop-sized monitor to entice window-shoppers, and a four-foot-by-five-foot screen inside the Kauai Village eatery here, to allow customers to order from the screen instead of traditional paper menus.
Traditional paper menus, though, are still available.
The idea is in keeping with Lam’s feeling that, if he is going to spend between nine and 15 hours a day in the restaurant, he better do everything he can to make his work fun.
“Besides business, you have to have fun,” he said. “I work hard, but I don’t feel tired,” inspired by positive comments, repeat business and referral customers from both residents and visitors, he added.
The “live” menu will be more interesting, unique, and fun, said Lam, who took pictures of the menu items and satisfied customers with a digital camera, and put together the powerpoint slide show highlighting the most popular menu items, along with testimonials from happy customers.
From the “world’s smallest office (but it works),” really a corner of the restaurant separated from the dining tables by a curtain, Lam demonstrated his latest creation, the video menu, before its public unveiling.
He took over 800 pictures to come up with the 30 in the presentation.
Establishment of the island’s sole Vietnamese restaurant happened after Kauai customers at Ba Le on Oahu asked Lam’s younger brother, franchise-holder and 2002 national Small Business Person of the Year Thanh Lam, to consider opening a Ba Le on Kauai.
After being contacted by his brother, Luong “Leon” Lam brought his family to Kauai on vacation, and also to study the island for establishment of Ba Le. The family enjoyed the ocean and rivers, and soon the Kauai Village lease was signed.
After starting Ba Le as a single bakery and restaurant in Honolulu’s Chinatown 19 years ago, Thanh Lam now oversees 25 Ba Le establishments on four islands: 20 on Oahu, two each on Maui and the Big Island, and the latest one, opened in November, at Kauai Village.
Each location has its own clientele and customized menu, and since the Kauai crowd wasn’t buying many of the French sandwiches popular at other locations, Luong “Leon” Lam cut back on the sandwich offerings here.
“Ba Le” means “Paris” in Vietnamese, and although the Ba Le logo includes the Eiffel Tower, the Kauai Ba Le outlet, as mentioned earlier, has only a few sandwich offerings.
When Lam opened the Kauai Ba Le, he had four “important factors” in mind: high-quality, delectable food; cleanliness; good customer service; and affordable prices.
It seems he has hit his mark on all four, as the food and value (nothing on the lunch or dinner menu is over $12.95) keep people coming back, and the service and cleanliness are ensured by Lam’s perpetual presence.
He takes the time to talk to the customers when he can, and has regular customers who travel from as far away as Hanalei, Princeville, Poipu and Waimea to enjoy the food.
A high-technology professional in a former trade, Lam doesn’t cook, but hand-picked the restaurant’s menu items from the best of some 200 Vietnamese restaurants in the San Jose, Calif. area his wife and son still call home, as well as from Hawaii Vietnamese restaurants.
After studying English and American literature at a university in his native Vietnam, Lam, who also has backgrounds in computers and electronics, became manager of a California-based, high-technology company where some $5 million in worldwide inventory of digital-camera photo chips was under his control.
Now Lam, 49, lives in Kapaa, and is having fun running his own successful restaurant.
The central dish is pho, Vietnamese beef-broth noodles slightly thinner than saimin noodles. Ba Le offers the noodles under shrimp, steak, chicken and vegetables.
Fresh Vietnamese basil is flown in regularly from Oahu, where it is grown. The menu is also full of healthful dishes, he said.
Long-rice-noodle dishes, rice plates, beef offerings, bread, and desserts including smoothie-like drinks with various additives including taro, tapioca, honeydew, mango and others, round out the offerings.
The restaurant is open seven days a week from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Please call 823-6060 for more information.
Business Editor Paul C. Curtis can be reached at mailto:pcurtis@pulitzer.net or 245-3681 (ext. 224).
