Misako Kamata, Misako-san to family and friends, has been successfully running Kinpachi Restaurant in Garapan for over three decades.
Work for Misako-san at Kinpachi starts at 12 noon. She goes around checking on things and seeing to it that everything runs smoothly. As a hands-on restaurateur, she is everywhere, attending to all the details and seeing to diners when the staffers have their hands full.
She sticks around until midnight, going out sometimes to attend to business matters but mostly, she is on-call. Maintaining a good working relationship with staffers is one secret of business success, she said.
“When your staffers are satisfied and are at ease with you, they will do their best at work,” Misako-san said. As proof, most of the staffers have been with Kinpachi from 10 to 30 years.
Misako-san shares another secret that has kept the restaurant’s diners coming back through all the years.
“There is always room for improvements. When I see that customers leave a certain dish unfinished or almost untouched on the table, I check with the chef what is wrong because no one would leave good food on the table uneaten. Then from there we would find out what’s wrong and make necessary improvements,” Misako-san said.
She first came to Saipan as a young girl in the early 1980s, when only a few buildings were scattered around Garapan on dusty streets. When her father, Yoshio Kamata, opened Kinpachi Restaurant in 1980, he already had plans of training Misako-san in the industry.
As a young girl, Misako-san learned the operations of a restaurant and she spent her teenage years inside the then crudely built building with wooden planks outside serving as a bridge to stop the flow of water from the streets.
Misako-san said she values the assistance of her mother Reiko who is always around to help and supervise in the kitchen.
“My mother always checks on the food that comes out of the kitchen, seeing that the food tastes as good as it should in a mouthwatering presentation,” Misako-san said.
She said Kinpachi has had its share of good and bad times, but they are still holding on.
“Like other restaurants on island, we are affected by the economic crisis. It is not easy to combat this economy to keep the business afloat every day, but we try our best to experiment with new things to please our customers,” she said.
Kinpachi Restaurant has served authentic Japanese food to over half a million customers in three decades, and plans to be here for more years.
Kinpachi can accommodate up to a hundred clients from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m. every day. For reservations/inquiries, call 234-6900.
