For the Love of Mom

One couple’s passion leads to bread-making. A young cook discovers life lessons in his grandmother’s restaurant. In this three-part series, Hawaii’s kitchens turn out stories of faith, sacrifice and enduring love across the islands and generations.

His mom worked too hard serving coffee behind someone else's lunch counter, so Eddie Flores bought her one of her own. But even that remarkable gift--which would launch L&L Hawaiian Barbecue into a national plate-lunch empire--doesn't begin to tell the real story.

Margaret Lum had enough unrealized dreams in her family even before her first children were born. She lost her mother to cholera when she was 5. Her father failed at his attempts to open his own restaurant. Sent from her Big Island home to be raised by an aunt in China, Margaret was trapped there by World War II. By the time she married musician Eduardo Flores, loss had instilled in her a fierce determination, and she held their growing family together through Eduardo’s stints in Hong Kong, Macao and Vietnam.

When the family emigrated to America there was only enough money for Margaret, Eduardo and their four youngest to resettle in Hawaii. But she knew her oldest children had her drive.

Sixteen-year-old Eddie and his sister Josephine, 18, were sent to live with relatives in California until they could earn enough to repay them for the air fare from Hawaii, and then enough to pay their own way back.

“You have to understand Ed,” says Josephine. "When we were kids in Hong Kong, the rest of us would buy candy with our allowance and eat it all up. Except for Ed--he would wait until we had no money, then sell us Lifesavers on credit."

“In San Francisco we lived with different uncles. He would catch the bus two and a half hours to see me. When I had a kidney problem, he took every last penny he had and told me to go home to Hawaii. I said no, but that was the kind of person he was.”

By the time Eddie rejoined the family, he had supported himself through high school by working janitorial and stock boy jobs. He put himself through the University of Hawaii by charging $1.25 for admission to soccer movies he showed at Kuykendall Hall. By the time he was 25 he had his own real estate company. And by the time he was 28, he had the $22,000 to buy his mom the tiny L&L Drive-Inn at the end of the old Liliha Street trolley stop in Honolulu, a block from where the family was living in a dilapidated two-bedroom house.

“Ed see me working so hard, serving coffee at Lyn’s Delicatessen at Ala Moana Center,” says Margaret, now 79. “He look for some small business for me. I said no need! But he know I don’t have money.”

Eddie saw it differently. “For a Chinese immigrant it’s always a dream to own a restaurant,” he says. “I had just made money in my real estate investments, so being a good son, I bought my mother a restaurant.”

If his intent was to ease her life, it backfired. Margaret, who spoke little English and had no actual experience cooking in a restaurant, suddenly found herself working 80-hour weeks on her feet, grappling with unfamiliar plate-lunch specialties like kalua pig and Hawaiian-style curry and trying to master purchasing, cooking, management and finances. “Business not bad. I’m happy,” Margaret recalls. “But my legs all sore. Even now, my legs sore.”

Three years later varicose veins brought an end to her restaurant career, but Eddie had achieved more than he realized: Margaret would never go back to serving coffee, and his filial gift would turn into the recipe that launched the humble L&L into a national plate-lunch phenomenon. Today Eddie, 61, runs L&L Hawaiian Barbecue as president and CEO, while Johnson Kam, a longtime friend who bought Margaret’s share of the original restaurant, is chairman.

The formula for expansion is simple: look for cities with concentrations of Hawaii transplants, secure locations in strip malls, train managers in plate lunches and the aloha spirit, and tailor menus to local tastes. “We started with a basic menu of hamburger steaks, curry, stew, hamburgers. As we expanded, L&L was the first with mini plates and we introduced barbecue chicken, short ribs, chicken katsu, Spam musubi,” Eddie says. “But it’s really a shotgun approach: if somebody says we want to open here, I say let’s go for it.”

At last count L&L Hawaiian Barbecue had 185 franchises stretching as far away as New York City, all offering two scoops rice, macaroni salad and a local-style entrée. Lately Eddie has been talking about taking the operation full circle, back to his roots in Asia.

Margaret couldn’t care less. “I don’t want to worry too much,” she says. “I have good children. As long as Ed do OK, I’m OK.