From Restaurant to Retail
Pika & Lenny Fejeran, 2014
By Lenny Fejeran
First of all I’m a native of Guam. Both my parents from the southern village of Agat and that’s also where I spent the first 18 years of my life and got my first job in F&B.
I moved to the states and built up my cooking resume immediately starting in Arizona to San Diego, Texas, Sacramento and finally built up most of my restaurant career in downtown LA.
After working and eating through those cities in a span of 10 years. I was finally ready to return home and open my own place.
My wife Pika and I moved back to Guam in 2010 and we started a small breakfast and lunch place called Pika’s Cafe. The popularity of Pika’s allowed us to expand to a location that was 2 1/2 times bigger. Although I created Pika’s cafe mostly for the local’s, the tourist were flowing in so we had to open a second location in Tumon Guam which is the the main tourist area. We called it Little Pika’s.
At Pika’s we served local style breakfast and gourmet style sandwiches. We made our traditional Donne’ Dinanche’ hot pepper paste in house. But as far as hot sauce goes, we only offered imported ones. I just never felt like it went well with all our dishes and would over power the dish pretty much ruining the flavors I intended to create. After all, that’s what being a cook is all about, putting your heart and soul into a dish and presenting the flavors you imagine in your mind.
So, I felt a little insulted sometimes when guests would use imported hot sauce on certain dishes. Of course I would always keep this to myself.
With the success of Pika’s cafe, we created a small fine dining concept called Kitchen Lingo. This time my partner was the head chef. This place also became very popular and very busy pretty much from the start. Chef Lingo’s dishes were at a much higher skill level and execution than the menu I did at Pika’s. It was very difficult to get in due to reservations being booked 3-4 weeks in advanced. Whoever was able to get a seat was in for a culinary adventure. So again being that Guam loves their hot sauce, ofcourse people would still request hot sauce with their food. Chef started making his own hot sauce but would always run out. Just didn’t have the time. So again we’d end up giving imported hot sauces which had either sugar or vinegar and we didn’t like that but we had to do it.
My next restaurant concept was called KÅDU. It was a local style soup concept that was super fast and convenient. All take out. It was meant to service the elderly and families with children who had no time to cook KÅDU after school or work. It was here that I was able to experiment with my dream hot sauce. I not only sold bottles at KÅDU for about a year but also served it at Kitchen Lingo to see what our fine dining guests thought about. The response was pretty much the same. Everyone enjoyed it with their meal.
KÅDU was open for a little over a year before the pandemic hit. Although we shut our doors permanently, one good thing that came from it was the Denanche’ hot pepper drizzle was created, tested and ready to hit the market. So we decided to go full on and make it a business.
So to put it simply, I wanted to create a hot sauce that was unique to Guam and that went well with all the dishes on my three completely different menus. Satisfy the spicy craving while still respecting the chef’s creations. The drizzle did just that.
