Profiles of Lanai residents who are coping with the economic challenges of the hotel renovations:

Chef cooks for construction crews

Luis Molina, a chef at The Lodge at Koele, doesn’t typically make fried chicken and pastrami sandwiches for his diners. But that’s what he’s making a lot of with a staff of about a dozen cooks preparing meals for construction workers while the Lodge and its sister hotel on Lanai are closed.

Molina and his crew made breakfast, lunch and dinner for about 400 construction workers on a recent day plus another 300 meals for Four Seasons employees still doing jobs while the two hotels are closed — 1,500 meals total for one day.

Dinners of fried chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy, biscuit and vegetables on a recent day were packaged in plate lunch containers and stacked into hot boxes labeled with the names of various contracting firms.

Making the same meals over and over isn’t too exciting, but maintaining a paycheck while the hotel is closed was a welcome twist on how the hotel industry usually operates.

“I have a job,” Molina said. “I can’t complain. I’m just grateful. Somebody else could say, ‘Come back in a year and reapply.’ ”

Cockatoos and competitive croquet

Bruno Amby might have the oddest job on Lanai, along with an equally unusual sports talent.

Amby, who once picked pineapples on the island and later worked in the engineering department at the Manele Bay Hotel, was tapped last year to care for exotic birds that the island’s billionaire owner, Larry Ellison, plans to house in the lobby of the re-done oceanfront hotel when it opens in February.

Three birds — an Amazon parrot and two cockatoos — had a brief stint in the hotel before it closed in June, and will be joined by three more from the Humane Society in San Mateo, Calif., where Oracle Corp., the software firm founded by Ellison, is located.

“The guests really like to mingle with the birds,” Amby said as one of the birds, Hauoli, chirped, “Want a banana.”

Outside The Lodge at Koele, where the birds are kept, the 58-year-old Amby trains for competitive matches of croquet, the English sport where players use mallets to hit balls through hoops on a lawn.

The Lodge was built in 1990 with croquet courts, and Amby, who moved to Lanai in 1969 at age 12, picked up the sport and competes in national tournaments. He also teaches hotel guests how to play.