Alan Wong marks 20 years at his flagship restaurant

Asked what he’d say to someone hoping to open a restaurant in today’s market, chef Alan Wong had these responses: "Don’t do it. Another one is, ‘Why, what for?’ The pidgin one is, ‘You shua, you shua?’"

But Wong himself is quite shua — or rather, sure — that he did the right thing 20 years ago in opening his first restaurant, Alan Wong’s on King Street.

If he had it to do all over again, and despite the changes in the industry, Wong said, he’d open the same type of restaurant in the same place.

In the years since his debut — on tax day in 1995 — Wong has won the ultimate accolade for chefs (the James Beard Award, in 1996), and his restaurant has become the favorite of a president (Barack Obama).

Yet at an anniversary party April 15, Wong reserved most of his formal words for a much more humble restaurant operation: Zippy’s.

The King Street restaurant opened in a building that had been planned as the accounting headquarters for the Zippy’s Restaurants chain. Francis Higa, co-founder of Zippy’s with his brother Charles, was Wong’s sole investor and a close adviser.

The location was a distance from Wai­kiki and downtown, and it had no view, counterintuitive to Wong, who built his reputation at the oceanfront Mauna Lani Bay Hotel & Bungalows on the Big Island. But Higa was shua. And he turned out to be right.

"I will forever be grateful to Francis, Charley Higa and all the Zippy’s family," Wong said at his party. "If it wasn’t for them, I would never have gotten my start."