The hottest chef in Hawaii did not go to a pedigreed culinary school. He did not study under a famous chef. Although he did operate a bulldozer and other heavy equipment at construction sites. And for the first 15 years of his restaurant career, he was a bartender and nightclub manager.

In fact, until D.K. Kodama hit it big with the first Sansei Seafood Restaurant and Sushi Bar at Kapalua, Maui, in 1996, he was best known as the guy who played third base on the Aiea High baseball team that won two state championships with future UH pitching legend Derek Tatsuno.

In those days he was known as David Kodama. Today, asked what D.K. stands for, he quips “Don’t know.”

Keeping with the this-is-not-your-typical-high-strung-chef script, Kodama, 47, shows up for his MidWeek cover shoot in shorts and sandals.

“That’s how I’ve always cooked,” he says with a shrug and what seems an ever-present grin.

Turns out, promotional materials for his restaurants urge diners to dress casually and bring a smile — just like the boss.

Kodama is ready for another Super Bowl

This unexpected combination of internationally renowned food and flavors — the Bon Appetits and Conde Nast Travelers of the world have lavished several awards, and a Google search of D.K. Kodama nets 12 pages of listings, all of them raves — and casual island family ambiance — his parents work as greeters, and some of Mom’s dishes are on the menu at Sansei — is proving very successful.

So successful that these days he wears shorts and sandals as he shuttles between his “six and a half” restaurants on Oahu and Maui, four of which have opened just since last August.

And on Saturday night in Jacksonville, Kodama will be wearing shorts and sandals as Honolulu’s representative at Taste of the Super Bowl for the third year in a row.

He’s so hot, D.K. could stand for “Dude’s killing.”

FOR the record, here’s a listing of Kodama’s eateries: Sansei Seafood Restaurant and Sushi Bar and D.K. Steak House at the Marriott Waikiki Beach Resort & Spa (former Hawaiian Regent Hotel); Hiroshi’s and Vino at Restaurant Row (this Vino is the half restaurant); Sansei Seafood Restaurant and Sushi Bar at The Shops at Kapalua on Maui; Vino at Kapalua’s Bay Golf Course; and Sansei Seafood Restaurant and Sushi Bar at Kihei, Maui
Sansei are serious sushi and sashimi houses, what Kodama calls “Japanese-based Pacific Rim cuisine.”

Vino, in partnership with Chuck Furuya, Hawaii’s only master sommelier, feature great wines and “Italian-based Pacific Rim cuisine” in the form of tapas, small-plate dishes.

Hiroshi’s, in partnership with Furuya and Hiroshi Fukui, formerly of L’Uraku, serves “Japanese-fusion” and shares space with Vino in the former Sansei (Black Orchid, World Cafe, etc.).

“When we started on Maui, I woke up, did the books, went upstairs and set up the sushi bar in the kitchen, and during that time I’d be ordering. Then I worked the line and afterward closed up and bagged the money. Then I did the same thing the next day. It was like that nonstop for three years. It was gruelling, but it was mine, my first restaurant alone. I was in control of everything. It was exciting to see the restaurant grow, and we were having fun in the kitchen. I kind of miss it.

D.K. Kodama in the Hiroshi's Kitchen with executive chef Hiroshi Fukui

“If you have one restaurant, you spend 100 percent of your time there. Two restaurants, 50-50. As you grow, you spend less time there, but the way you control it, and I hate to say it, is with numbers —you look at the numbers and you visit each restaurant periodically, and you go to every quarterly meeting for every restaurant, every annual budget meeting, and you’re always in constant contact with your chefs and general managers. And you have a lot of friends telling you how the restaurants are doing. The main thing is you need great people working with you.

“I miss cooking, the focus on one restaurant … Maybe that’s why you see people who have a lot of restaurants, they sell them and open one restaurant and do what they really want to do.”

Still, life is good outside the kitchen.
“I like cooking,” he says, “but I love eating.”

HE WAS supposed to be a civil engineer, like his father Tamateru, who for years helped run Ralph Inouye’s engineering company.
“When I was young, people would ask what are you going to be? My dad was an engineer, so I said, I guess an engineer.”
He attended UH-Manoa and studied engineering, “but I didn’t finish. I got the restaurant bug.”

The third of five brothers (who would be followed by a sister), Kodama worked summers, even Christmas and spring breaks, at his dad’s construction sites.

“We were laborers, at first doing ground work with shovels and picks. Then we graduated to actually operating heavy equipment.”

But there was also time for baseball. “I played baseball all my life, and so did my brothers,” he says. “If we had a few more brothers, we could’ve had our own team. I played the same era as Derek Tatsuno. We won states a couple of times, went to the Mainland a lot. It was fun, that was a great team. I made a lot of friends I’m still friends with today. It was good.”
 
THE RESTAURANT bug bit when he was in college and went to work at the old Horatio’s.

D.K. and Lori with Chev and Brie

“First busboy, then waiter, finally to bartender,” he says. “Ever since Horatio’s I knew I wanted to run my own restaurant. I’d worked construction sites and didn’t want to do that — I liked dealing with people going out to dinner. I liked the party atmosphere, it’s very social.

“Some friends from Horatio’s were opening a restaurant in Seattle in 1979, and they said why don’t you come up and manage for us. OK, I’m there. Bartending took me all over, three years in Seattle, then to Aspen managing bars and nightclubs for 10 years.

“But after a while you get tired of that, the games, the drinking, and I missed Hawaii. So I started catering with this one lady, Julie Murad-Weiss, whose family used to own the Tropicana in Vegas — a socialite, but she wanted to cook. She was on the cutting edge, every day was a different menu, so I saw a lot of different cuisines and a lot of great produce fresh from the farms. She was way ahead of her time. She got me excited about food and cooking, the different cheeses and herbs. I’d never seen this kind of cooking.”
The world of cheeses, by the way, so enamors Kodama that he and his wife, the former Lori Yokoyama, a Maryknoll grad he met on Maui where she was working in commercial property management, are naming all their children after various fromage. Brie is 3, Chev (Chevre abbreviated) 1. A third child is due in August. “If it’s a girl, maybe Cashel Bleu. If it’s a boy, we’re not sure.” (Gorgonzola? Pepperjack?)

In Aspen, Kodama further expanded his horizons working at a sushi bar, slapping rice and raw fish.

“There’s been no formal culinary education,” he says. “It was always on the job.”

But he and Aspen friends, in the long breaks between ski and summer peak seasons, would travel. “And we always ate at the great restaurants, the who’s who chefs,” he recalls. “Then I’d go home and try to duplicate what I ate.”
 
SO IT was that Kodama returned to Hawaii in 1991 with lots of ideas and one big dream.

“I came home and wanted to open a restaurant,” he says. “And I noticed there were only a few sushi bars around town. People made sushi at home, they didn’t go out for it.”

He checked Oahu and Kauai, but decided Maui offered the best opportunity, and with four partners opened Five Palms in Kihei.

“With so many partners,” he says, “the freedom was limited, so I looked for something on my own.”

Folks at the Kapalua Resort knew his food, and soon offered a deal to open Sansei Seafood Restaurant and Sushi Bar in The Shops adjacent to the Kapalua Bay Hotel. That was in 1996.

Nine years later, he has his “six and a half” restaurants and, when the operation is stabilized, is poised to expand further.

“I never thought or dreamed of this” he says, shaking his head, smiling still.
“I always wanted to have a restaurant, going back to my days at Horatio’s. Just one. I never imagined two, three, or the cookbook. I never dreamed of doing that. For me, it’s wow.”

The book is D.K.’s Sushi Chronicles From Hawaii.

He signs copies “Eat it raw!”
 
AT THE Taste of the Super Bowl — where chefs representing every NFL city prepare a signature dish (Honolulu is in as host of the Pro Bowl) and upwards of 3,000 patrons shell out $600 each to sample the fare — Kodama will be doing “a Dungeness crab ramen in truffle butter broth with fresh herbs. Oh, this is good.”

How he came up with the recipe is instructive of the creative process: “I go home late one night, oh, what is there to eat? My wife loves dried ramen noodles, so get ramen. Look in the freezer, there’s some truffle butter. Go outside and pick some herbs, throw those in, and then whatever’s in refrigerator. So we elevate it here to fresh ramen. Elevate it again to add Dungeness crab. And it’s one of the best dishes we have.

“This is our third Taste of the Super Bowl, and it’s a lot of fun. We donate the food and time — the NFL picks up hotel and air — but it’s a good cause.”
 
IF THERE is a more tradition-bound food than sushi, our tastebuds have not yet met it.

But that is the medium Kodama used to make a name for himself and launch a mini chain of restaurants, but doing it with very untraditional ingredients and influences.

Such as Mango and Crab Salad Handroll with Thai Vinaigrette, Asparagus Hosomaki or Scallop and Foie Gras Nigiri.

“When I came home, Hawaii Regional Cuisine had just started,” Kodama says.

“Today, so many great chefs around the islands are using the same philosophy as the original Hawaii Regional Cuisine guys — Roy, Alan, Sam, those guys. We try to use our own way of doing it. I don’t know of anybody doing what we do — we’re Japanese-based Pacific Rim. Sushi, tempura. We’re a sushi bar, and that’s what we do. Nobody else does sushi.”

Though he blends different tastes, Kodama says his secret is “mixing (elements), but not too complex. Keep it simple, keep the flavors simple, not having 20 different flavors in one plate. Of course different layers, but things that are matched.

“And I like wow dishes. You go into a restaurant, and a lot of times it’s hit or miss. Sometimes, wow, it’s a great dish. Sometimes it’s, huh, just OK. Or this is bad. Even a good restaurant can be like that. I want all of my dishes to be consistent wow dishes. That’s what we’re trying to do. Using fresh seafood, fresh produce, whatever we can get the best of. That’s the base, get the best products you can.”

Though best known for his sushi, Kodama is quickly earning a reputation for great steaks at D.K. Steak House in Waikiki, which features Oahu’s only “dry-aging” room, in which all fluids are drained from the meat and aged in controlled temperature and humidity.

“We researched it, which was the best part,” he says. “We ate at all the best steak houses here. Then we went to Las Vegas, checked out Prime, Smith & Wollensky, so many there. Then we went to Houston for the Super Bowl last year, there are some great steak houses there — it’s Texas. Then to New York twice last year and we ate at all the great steak houses — Peter Lugar, the No. 1 steak house in America. They do dry-aged beef. It was good, and we thought we could do as well.

“Dry-aging, we discovered, is the best way to get the best flavor and the most tender meat. And all the juices have been dried out, so a 22-ounce steak is 22 ounces of meat. It has a nutty taste, the flavor is amazing. People who come in for the rib-eye, they’re like wow.”
 
THE REAL wow here is that Kodama has achieved this success — for which cooking at his third Super Bowl is a fitting exclamation point — by taking a path you’d never recommend to a young person with dreams of owning a restaurant.

But he proves, reassuringly, that good food and good taste do not necessarily require a diploma from the chef. A love of good food and the willingness to work hard and never give up on a dream matter just as much.