Look out for Nico Chaize if you ever find yourself at the Honolulu Fish Auction around 5 a.m. The chef and owner of Nico’s at Pier 38 in Honolulu, is there daily to stock his refrigerator with the 200 pounds of fish he needs to serve between 700 and 800 daily customers who come to Nico’s for a takeout breakfast or lunch.
There are no frills here: Meals are served in polystyrene containers and are consumed at plastic tables beneath an awning outside his café. When tables are full, diners seek shade beneath trees that line the pier, gazing out at the commercial vessels as they munch on fish and chips or Nico’s most popular lunch dish, furikaki pan-seared ahi tuna. Breakfast favorites include fish and eggs, and the fish omelet.
Most of those diners are businessmen out for a quick lunch, fishermen and dockworkers who love that the location is a net’s toss from their workplace, and increasingly, a handful of tourists who’ve heard about Nico’s and leave the well-beaten tourist track to check it out.
When Pier 38 opened seven years ago, Chaize procured a space for a small kitchen with a take-out window. The 35-year-old French chef from Lyon had dropped out of business school to work in the restaurant industry, starting out as a dishwasher and later, after moving to Los Angeles in 1999, working his way up to chef in a French café. He arrived in Oahu in 2001 and opened Nico’s at Pier 38 three years later.
“It started as a small project and now it’s like a monster,” he says as he looks at the lineup of customers patiently waiting to place their orders on a hot Friday afternoon.
Click here to read the rest of the feature on Nico’s, which appeared in the August issue of SeaFood Business magazine.
