It’s not exactly the end of Kuma Nori, a Burlingame shokudo which unexpectedly shuttered Aug. 25.
The husband-and-wife owned Japanese spot may make a reappearance in another Peninsula city down the line, said co-owner Chad Kaneshiro. And if you don’t want to wait that long for Kuma Nori’s signature katsudon, mentaiko pasta and fried chicken, expect to find it at Diamond Head General Store in San Bruno in a few weeks.
“The Kuma Nori concept was more of a passion project,” Kaneshiro said. “It was always meant to be more of a testing ground, to see how far we could push certain types of Japanese comfort food.”
While Chad and Monica Kaneshiro didn’t plan for Kuma Nori to have a long lifetime (in April, they said they planned to close the 28-seat restaurant when their sublease expired in about two years), they cut the project short just eight months after opening.
“We dove into our numbers and realized that we’re basically barely breaking even,” he said. “During the weekdays, it seems like nobody wants to eat out after 8 p.m. Even during the weekends, we’d get a mad rush right at opening up to about 7, 7:30, and then after 8, it’s just dead. So financially, it just wasn’t sustainable for us.”
Chad and Monica Kaneshiro left Bay Area fine dining to open their first restaurant, Morning Wood, in 2017 at the current location of Diamond Head General Store. The Kaneshiros moved the Asian-fusion brunch spot to San Mateo in 2022 and closed it a year later.
Now, the Kaneshiros are setting their sights on expanding Diamond Head General Store further down the Peninsula. Established in 2021, the San Bruno store sells packaged Hawaiian goods as well as plate lunches, poke bowls, musubi and shave ice.
“Diamond Head is becoming a lot more popular and busy than we envisioned,” Kaneshiro said.
To help with the expansion and to brush up on her pastry skills, Monica Kaneshiro enrolled in pastry school and plans to update the dessert menu at Diamond Head General Store. Once a second location is complete, Chad Kaneshiro said he may look into reviving Kuma Nori.
“I really love the concept (of Kuma Nori), so I’m hoping, in the future, after everything settles, after the process of possibly expanding Diamond Head to the South Bay, I’ll be able to open another Kuma Nori in the future,” he said.
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