CEO at Da Kitchen Cafe - the Maui plate-lunch room with portions large enough to require a photo for scale and a comeback story that refused to stay closed.
Walk into Da Kitchen in Kahului on a Tuesday at 11:47 and the line is already curling past the door. Loco moco for the man in the high-vis vest. Two musubi, one mochiko chicken plate, an iced tea sweating onto a paper napkin. The kitchen behind the counter sounds like a drum kit being tuned. This is the room Shayla Spencer is listed as steering, and it has been making noise since 1998.
Da Kitchen is the kind of restaurant most cities pretend to have and very few actually do. Local. Cult-followed. Cash-quick. Famous because the food is the kind of food you describe to friends in increasingly large hand gestures. The Kahului location at 425 Koloa Street is the spine of the operation. Kihei is the room people DM you about. Oahu was the expansion. The story keeps growing because the plates keep arriving heavier than physics suggests they should.
The current chapter is the interesting one. After a closure in 2020, Da Kitchen reopened from a 1,000-square-foot room in Kihei, taking over Piko Cafe's dinner rush before reclaiming the lease outright. That isn't a recovery; that's a re-entry. The brand survived the part of the pandemic where most independent restaurants did not. The brand also survived its own celebrity - the cameos on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, Man v. Food, and Bizarre Foods, which sent travelers to Maui clutching screenshots of plate lunches the size of small luggage.
Spencer's footprint inside that story is a CEO listing - a quiet line on an org chart for a restaurant that has never been quiet. Hawaiian food restaurants tend to run on three things: family loyalty, line discipline, and a respect for the plate that keeps it from drifting into theme-park parody. Da Kitchen has kept all three. The chicken is still mochiko. The mac salad is still suspicious of mayonnaise math. The Spam musubi is still arranged on the counter like a small army.
The interesting thing about leading a place like this is what you do not do. You do not corporatize the menu. You do not put a QR code on a wall that used to hold a hand-written specials board. You do not let the cooks become a brand strategy. The job is custodial in the best sense - keeping a room that locals already love feeling like the room they already love, while making the math work in a state where rent is unforgiving and labor pools are tight.
The Kahului base address is not glamorous. Koloa Street is a working address - light industrial, food-service supply, the kind of block where the trucks know where to park. That's the right block for a kitchen that serves the people who keep an island running, not the people photographing it from a rental jeep. Da Kitchen has been a tourist destination because it has refused to behave like one.
Spencer's team is sized for that ambition. Industry registries put the headcount at 820 - a figure that puts Da Kitchen in conversation with the larger hospitality operators across the state. Revenue clears the $4 million mark. Those are not small-business numbers anywhere, and they are not small numbers in Hawaii, where the cost stack on every plate is heavier than the plate.
What the data file does not say, the restaurant says for itself. The reviews are a wall of regulars. The Yelp page reads like a community bulletin board. The Facebook page is run by people who answer in island time, in a voice that doesn't bother to perform island time. Da Kitchen sells food. The brand happens around the edges.
That, frankly, is the whole pitch. Spencer is the latest name on a long counter. The counter has not moved. The plates still arrive heavy.
If you have never eaten at Da Kitchen, the menu reads like a checklist of every food argument worth having in Hawaii. If you have eaten there, you already know the order. Spencer's job is to keep both of those readers happy, which is harder than it sounds.
Guy Fieri filmed here for Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. Adam Richman filmed here for Man v. Food. Andrew Zimmern filmed here for Bizarre Foods. None of them made the restaurant. They confirmed it.
Independent restaurants in Hawaii absorb a cost stack most mainland operators never see: shipped ingredients, scarce real estate, scarce labor, and a customer base that can taste a shortcut from the parking lot. Spencer's seat at Da Kitchen sits on top of that pile. The numbers behind the listing tell part of the story; the line at lunchtime tells the rest.
The menu existed before the title did. The job is not to reinvent loco moco - it is to make sure the version that hits the counter today tastes like the version that built the line.
820 people on the payroll. Two islands. A cost stack that punishes hesitation. The CEO seat is the seat that has to keep the plates feasible without making them smaller.
A brand built on word of mouth runs on the assumption that the next plate is as good as the last. Spencer's name sits on top of that assumption.
Da Kitchen's portions are routinely photographed next to faces for scale. The phrase "I'll have leftovers" is not optional.
The 2021 return started in a 1,000-square-foot Kihei kitchen shared with Piko Cafe. They served dinner. Then they served everything.
Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. Man v. Food. Bizarre Foods. A complete set of the food-television trifecta, earned on the strength of the line.