OpenTable reveals hot new restaurants

By Ron Ruggless / nra.com

What are the newest hot seats in dining?

OpenTable Inc., the online reservations system, has released its Diners’ Choice awards, which includes the 10 hottest restaurants to open in the past year, as indicated by its surveys.

The San Francisco-based company’s list of 50 “2011 Hot Spot Winners” was derived from 7 million reviews submitted by users of the service, and 15 of those were restaurants opened since January 2010. Read the rest of this entry

20 YEARS OF HAWAII REGIONAL CUISINE℠ ~

Hawaii Restaurant Association Launches Year-Long Celebration

HRA honors the 12 founders who, collaboratively and individually, put Hawaii on the international culinary map and inspired—and mentored—generations of talented chefs. Read the rest of this entry

RestaurantHI.com Blasts Off!

Hello world! As of this writing, the boys at Storymanager, Inc. are hard at work on a revamp of the HRA’s website. Who’s Storymanager? It’s an Allied Member and partner of the HRA. It’s also the publisher of myalohavibe.com – the FREE place to promote your restaurant and the technology that drives the fancy restaurant previewer on the restaurantHI.com homepage. Storymanager aims to fly the HRA site to a new level in web communications.

Level 1: Re-Brand the Site. Storymanager recommended that the “hawaiirestaurants.org” addresss be changed. Why change? Well, it’s long, hard to remember and worse – there’s a squatter on the .com version. So after an extensive name search, we settled on the name “RestaurantHI.com.” Then, of course a new logo and look are needed to wrap the site.

Level 2: Improve Functionality. There will be lots of cool functionality and promo benefits for members for sure, but the best thing is that the new site features a “Content Management System” that non-technical folks can use to add and edit content… yeah you eggheads – it’s built on a blogging platform which means that the HRA will have finally arrived in the 21st century – only a decade late – which really ain’t that bad. HRA: please enjoy the site and send your comments to help us continually improve it.

Level 3: Organize the Morass of Existing HRA Information… one thing we discovered doing this project is that HRA likes content – when the heck do you guys get the time to do all that? Aren’t you supposed to be cooking or prepping???

OK, so here’s the big commitment: gulp, gulp, gulp…

RestaurantHI.com will officially launch on

9:00am, March 10, 2010

There it is. It’s out there. So all you HRA bloggers, get to work and make this site ship-shape and ready to fly. 9am 3/10/10 sharp. No excuses. If you have any questions on how to goose anything on the site, don’t hesitate to call the Storymanager Boys for help:

• Steve Sue, the Story Guy (808) 220-6449, contact via email
• John LeBlanc, Lead Tech (415) 290-9814, contact via email

Love, aloha and good luck!