L&L Hawaiian Barbecue - Greenbrier, Chesapeake, VA

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Our Story

Hawaii’s quintessential plate lunch of meat, macaroni salad and two scoops of white rice originated in the late 1800s as the midday meal for wage laborers on Hawaii’s pineapple and sugar plantations, with immigrants from Japan, China, the Philippines, Korea and Portugal adding their food traditions. Hence, you’ll find katsu, char siu, adobo, Korean fried chicken and Portuguese sausage on the menu, in addition to native Hawaiian dishes like Kalua pork.

In 1976, Eddie Flores bought a small building that formerly housed a retail outlet for L&L Dairy on Honolulu's Liliha Street. He kept the L&L part of the name and remodeled the building as a small walk-up restaurant for his mother to operate. This business was the first location of the growing L&L Drive-Inn chain that specialized in the plate lunch. After this single building business became a success, Johnson Kam joined Flores in the expanding the business to other locations within the state of Hawaii. To help in the expansion, Flores and Kam began to offer franchises, mostly to successful employees, in 1988. By 1997, there were 30 locations through Hawaii. When Johnson Kam and Eddie Flores Jr. introduced L&L to the U.S. mainland in 1999, they knew that most Californians were unfamiliar with the plate lunch. So they repackaged it as L&L Hawaiian Barbecue. This Honolulu-based restaurant chain serves affordable island comfort food at more than 200 locations from California to Florida, all of which are independently owned, mostly by immigrants. (Panda Express, in contrast, owns all of its outlets.) L&L also has two locations in Japan, with Flores open to more Asian expansion. Now that you know the story behind L&L Hawaiian Barbecue, we are fortunate to have the opportunity to open one of Eddie Flores Jr’s restaurants here in Hampton Roads.

Aloha and Mahalo!