Q&A with Boarded Up by Chubbies Burgers owner Jeff Nedry

Boarded Up by Chubbies Burgers has been open for about a month now, and Aloha State Daily recently caught up with business owner Jeff Nedry about his latest venture. The biz did an online Q&A — in which they answered questions from the public via social media — but we chimed in and asked a few of our own questions.

How did you choose the name ‘Boarded Up’?

When we couldn’t renew our lease at our old Kaimukī spot, Chubbies literally got "boarded up." The name "Boarded Up" is our playful, rebellious lean into that. It’s a cheeky, edgy way for us to say, "We’re back and here to stay."

How did you find the new location for Boarded Up?

We first heard there might be an opportunity for this space to be revitalized from Chris Kajioka and our friends at Leila, who are now our neighbors next door, at the former Angelo Pietro location. Even though it’s a lot smaller, we really wanted to stay in the Kaimukī neighborhood — a community that has become like family to us. It challenged us to reimagine our brand and launch a new concept, while staying true to our values and quality.

Describe how the menu is the same/different from before.

Our new space presented an exciting challenge: how do we bring the Chubbies spirit into a smaller footprint? We’ve reimagined our offering into a more consolidated menu for Boarded Up and our commitment to quality is just the same. Some ingredients and recipes haven’t changed — we serve the same always-crispy crinkle fries, make the same house pickles, and still use premium vanilla soft serve custard in all our milkshakes, to name a few. You can still expect the same high-quality, never-frozen beef on our fresh, locally baked buns. The experience will feel similar to Chubbies, but Boarded Up is something new. We now have double burgers and lettuce wraps as a standard offering, both things that were previously off-menu requests.

What are some staff favorites on the menu?

When we were testing out the menu, one thing that the staff was really stoked about was our Cali fries — French fries with American cheese and grilled onions, topped with our 1950s sauce and some chopped pickles. This is reminiscent of In-N-Out ‘animal style’ fries. I know that a lot of people were excited to have something like that available to them on island.

What’s your go-to order?

At Boarded Up, I have a few favorites. The burger I’m loving is the Carolina Onion burger; it has our housemade pickles, some thinly sliced white onions that go on the grill — they get cooked but also stay a little raw — and we have a really awesome dijonnaise mustard sauce on there. Those are all new flavors that we’ve never done before.

We had talked for a long time about doing garlic fries, but I wanted to do some awesome garlic fries — not just standard garlic fries. I came up with the idea for spicy garlic fries that have a really good sauce on them. I love fries with sauce. The [Calamansi] green river lemonade is something that I really love, as well.

Will you have a cookies and cream milkshake at this location?

We had Oreo as a milkshake flavor at our previous location. It was actually our bestselling milkshake flavor; however, we wanted to focus on three classic milkshakes — vanilla, chocolate and strawberry. Oreo is a great shake — I love it, too — but we can’t really improve that recipe. For the vanilla, we’re using local Lāʻie vanilla beans. For the chocolate, we have Ghirardelli chocolate powder. The strawberry is now strawberry guava, so there’s a little spin on that; we use 100% fruit purees in that. We wanted to highlight how we can do these three classic flavors the best they can possibly be.

Did you cook as a kid?

This is a great time to give a shout-out to my mom — thank her for always cooking at home when I was growing up. We rarely ate out. I think what that taught me was that cooking was never a scary thing; it was following recipes, following instructions, going to the grocery store. You’re skill building when you’re making your own tweaks to stuff. Cooking was never intimidating to me and being able to help out at home made me feel comfortable and stoked to make more of my own stuff. And that’s what I’m doing now.

What is one piece of advice you would give someone starting out in the food industry?

It’s not about who’s the best; it’s about working as a team and communicating. The restaurant gets busy; working in food is demanding, and it’s never about who’s right or wrong. It’s just about solving problems and, at the end of the day, working with the team that you have, and everyone doing their best.

What are you most proud of?

I’m really proud of the brand that we’ve built. The Chubbies brand has become resonant with the community, so much that people are willing to come out and give our new concept a try. They trust that we know what we’re doing when it comes to burgers, and we’re going to make some good stuff. I was really hoping that we would have a good turnout, and it exceeded my expectations.

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CONTACT
Boarded Up
1108 12th Ave., Honolulu
Boardedupburgers.com
Instagram: @boardedupburgers

Kelli Shiroma Braiotta can be reached at kelli@alohastatedaily.com.