Many members know Eric and Scott and have been to their restaurants on island. This piece was found in the San Francisco Chronicle this past Sunday:
By Jeanne Cooper
Huggo’s owner Eric von Platen Luder.
It was a lucky break in permitting.
When it debuted nearly 50 years ago, Huggo’s became the first waterfront restaurant in Kailua-Kona on Hawaii Island, one of the most striking locations on the coast. Now the family-run business covers the waterfront, so to speak, with three more island-style restaurants, a popular catering concern and four vacation cottages.
“We’re always changing and evolving,” says owner Eric von Platen Luder, who gives much of the credit to his husband, Scott Dodd, a fellow Southern Methodist University graduate and former assistant food and beverage director at the Hyatt Regency Maui. “I could never have expanded on my own without his expertise. I’d only worked at one place all my life, and that was Huggo’s.”
A fourth-generation Hawaiian-Chinese and part-German native of the Big Island, von Platen Luder was just 11 when he began busing tables at the family restaurant. His parents, Hugo and Shirley, had opened Huggo’s as a steakhouse in 1969, just before the rules changed on how close buildings could be to the shoreline. In 1981, two years after graduating from college, von Platen Luder started purchasing the business from his parents and had been running it for a decade by the time he met Dodd at a tennis tournament.
The Lava Lava Beach Club, which faces the sunrise at the newly renovated Kaui Shores Hotel on Kaui offers a colorful, easy going, beach vibe
“He just loved the (restaurant) business, and we had an instant commonality in that,” von Platen Luder recalls. “I was totally enthralled with him. We dated between Maui and Kona for a little over a year, and then we made a decision we wanted to move forward with our relationship. He gave up his career, and we started collaborating on our businesses.”
Their first major project: On the Rocks, the casual, open-air restaurant next to Huggo’s that opened in 1998. “We built it to capture the downscale market,” von Platen Luder says, adding that offering nightly live entertainment was also important.
“It’s something that I remember from growing up and going to the Halekulani every year,” he notes, referring to the luxurious Waikiki hotel known for its nightly hula shows. “One of the reasons we built On the Rocks is that if I wanted to sit on the beach and have a drink, or enjoy sunset and hula, I had to go to a hotel. We didn’t have a beach, so we kind of made one ourselves.”
The two also formed Paradise Gourmet Catering, which focuses on corporate meetings on Hawaii Island, and in 2012 branched into lodging with Lava Lava Beach Club, a beachfront restaurant with four luxurious but laid-back rental cottages at Waikoloa Beach Resort.
“The landlords didn’t like the name at all. They thought it was too fun and frivolous,” von Platen Luder says. “But we really felt we didn’t want to be the Four Seasons or compete with the CanoeHouse at the Mauna Lani. We wanted people to stick their toes in the sand or wear bikinis and board shorts to the restaurant — those were things we felt strongly about. … These cottages were so special that we didn’t want them to be stuffy, either. They needed to be bright and beachy and have a surf vibe.”
Three years later, the pair brought the Lava Lava Beach Club concept to the Garden Island, opening their first sunrise-facing restaurant at the newly renovated Kauai Shores Hotel. Afterward, they turned their attention to the original Huggo’s, long since known for its seafood specials, and added hBar, a craft cocktail and small-plates lounge.
More recently, they created an upscale breakfast menu with dishes such as the “eggocado,” an avocado with salsa and eggs baked in a pizza oven; during this week’s World Ironman Championship, they’re testing a quick-service breakfast at On the Rocks using their new $300,000 food truck.
“Scott and myself, we don’t like sitting stagnant,” von Platen Luder says. “We probably challenge our managers and staff more than a lot of people, because we always want to keep things fresh and new.”
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