HILO >> It was a case of right town, right time that made a 79-year-old hotel the launching point for a restaurant chain headed for expansion to all the state’s major islands.

Hula Hulas, named for Hilo’s enduring connection to the Merrie Monarch Festival, opened in November in the Grand Naniloa Hotel, the first of five restaurants planned over the next five years.

In a few months the Grand Restaurant Group, based in San Diego, plans to announce its timetable for an opening in Waikiki, followed by Maui, Kauai and Kona.

Most of the restaurants will likely go into hotels, and all will share the Hula Hulas name and the basic menu developed in Hilo, said Gary Marrow, head of marketing for the project.

So — Hilo?

“When the opportunity came about, we thought, ‘Why not?’” said Boyd Kerr, president and chief operating officer of the Grand group, in a phone interview from San Diego.

The space was available, a roomy 8,000 square feet with sweeping views of Hilo Bay. The labor force was primed, to the point that there were 360 applicants for 80 positions. And Grand, which has four restaurants and a catering company in the San Diego area, was ready to expand, Kerr said.

The Naniloa had just undergone a $30 million renovation and was looking to fill a former spa site that had been vacant since the 1980s.

Marrow, charged with finding someone to take on that space as a restaurant, met in February 2016 with the Grand group’s owners in San Diego. “That was a Friday. They came the next Tuesday, brought their whole team out.”

And the deal was done. In November 2017, Hula Hulas was serving diners.

Kerr said part of the attraction of opening in Hilo is that the town has few options for a nice dinner out. “Everybody needs a place to go. There’s just not a lot to choose from.”

Marrow describes Hula Hulas as “slippah chic.” It’s a sleek open-air space with subtle tropical accents, right off the pool, with room for more than 250.

The menu was put in the hands of chef Amy DiBiase, a native of Maine and a 16-year veteran of the Grand group, who arrived in Hilo last July. DiBiase will be staying until April, handing off to a permanent chef, Erik Lobner from Urge Gastropub and Whiskey Bank in Oceanside, Calif.

DiBiase said she studied up on Hawaiian culture, local ingredients and the ethnic cuisines of the islands. She met with Big Island farmers, discovering new foods in what she recalls now as “sensory overload.”

The Hula Hulas menu is a reflection of knowledge accumulated: tilapia wrapped in ti leaves with sliced Molokai sweet potatoes and smoked chili butter, thick-cut breadfruit fries, shiitake mushrooms made into fried balls of arancini with a sticky mango sauce, deviled eggs flavored with Chinese hot mustard and topped with a chicken katsu ball, and a vegan entree of roasted kabocha with coconut rice.

Among surprises, DiBiase said, was the popularity of pork with diners. It’s on the menu in kalua pork eggs Benedict for breakfast, a pulled-pork sandwich for lunch, pineapple-chili-glazed pork belly for dinner. “In San Diego they’re into it, but here it’s like, ‘Oh my god, we’re going to run out.’”

Another surprise: Whole fish sells — smaller varieties such as menpachi for one; 3-pounders such as opakapaka for two. “I’ve done whole fish in other restaurants, but some people can’t handle the fish looking at them, or they’ll say, ‘Can you take off the tail and the head?’”

But whole fish, served here with black bean sauce over coconut rice, is connecting with local customers, which is critical to the restaurant’s success, DiBiase said.

“It has to be supported by locals,” she said. “It cannot be the typical hotel restaurant that’s mainly there to take care of the hotel guests. You want people to come here every week. You want locals — when they don’t want to cook, they come here.”

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