Meet Leianna Landon, co-owner of Pac Island Grill in Federal Way, WA along with her husband David. Leianna and David decided to open their own Hawaiian restaurant after David spent 15 years in the restaurant industry. Now, Pac Island Grill has become known for its Luau-inspired barbecue in a comfortable, relaxing, and family friendly atmosphere. Visit Pac Island Grill to savor the flavor of their award-winning slow smoked kalua pork, signature fire-grilled barbecue Loli-Loli Chicken or island style favorites like pork lau-lau, ahi poke and crispy coconut prawns.
Get to know more about Pac Island Grill in this week’s Business Spotlight Q&A.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
As a business owner, what’s the strangest or craziest idea you’ve ever tried? We started out as a restaurant and then we ventured into catering, which [is what] my husband. did for a living. . . . We started up catering and then from catering we started doing festivals. That was a fun thing for us to do because we also did the firework show here in Celebration Park. And then from that we started doing other festivals for other communities, so we enjoy doing that. But we haven’t done it for about a year and a half since COVID. We’re excited to maybe get back to it.
What’s your favorite part about the community your business is in? In Federal Way, small businesses are what make up the community. We all support each other. It’s pretty much everyone. It’s a small community but everybody supports everybody as far as community festivals and the like. And the customers that we get in here always support smaller businesses.
What’s something your customers may not know about you or your business? I mean, a lot of people who go see Federal Way or live a Federal Way still don’t know we’re here. Then they’re surprised when they stumble onto us because they think the food is so great and they’ve never heard of the restaurant before. The people that come in, we consider a family too. Our regular customers, we call them ohana. Then the people that work for us, generally in the kitchen, have been with us for a long time and we just consider everybody family and it’s a nice atmosphere for people to come in and recognize that.