Miyabi Japanese hibachi hitting the road with a food truck to service the Grand Strand
Miyabi Japanese hibachi grill is hitting the road.
The restaurant business that is based in Myrtle Beach has grown over the past 40 years to include nearly 20 locations, and beginning in July it will add a food truck.
The 30-foot-long refitted limo bus will likely be called Miyabi Junior Bowls & Rolls and will feature shrimp, chicken and steak bowls as well as sushi rolls.
Company partner Bobby Smith expects to receive the truck by July 15 and begin fulfilling bookings by Aug. 1. He wants to spend the last couple weeks of July doing community outreach at charitable events and for disadvantaged youth while charging a minimal amount to benefit the community and work out any kinks with the truck.
It will be used primarily in Horry and Georgetown counties -- as well as Brunswick County if there are no issues with licensing to operate in North Carolina -- and will venture farther upon demand.
In addition to bookings, Smith wants to establish reliable south, central and north Grand Strand locations to park the truck for business a few days a week.
“The food trucks are huge in big cities right now, and even though we’re not really a big city we do have a mass of people, especially in the summer,” Smith said. “So the ability to have maybe two or three food trucks just in this area is definitely possible.”
An app is being created to follow the truck’s whereabouts and its Facebook page will also have a list of destinations.
Miyabi food truck partner Alan Jones posted an announcement on Facebook that the truck would be coming with a video, and Smith said they have received approximately 400 requests since. “It’s been overwhelming. I wasn’t even expecting it to be that good at first,” Smith said.
Building the Miyabi restaurant empire
Smith’s late father-in-law Koichiro Hirao, who arrived in the U.S. from Japan around the age of 20, started his Japanese hibachi grill business more than 40 years ago with a restaurant in Charleston. He eventually moved the headquarters to Myrtle Beach.
The business is now run by Smith, his wife Miki Hiroa-Smith and mother-in-law Mimi.
The Miyabi business now includes six 10,000-square-foot hibachi restaurants and 11 Miyabi Junior Express locations, all in the Carolinas and Georgia. The express restaurants are smaller, have smaller grill tables and focus more on takeout orders.
Three new express locations are in the works. One in a shopping center anchored by Lowes Foods of Carolina Forest off International Drive is expected to open by January.
A new North Myrtle Beach location is targeted for next spring and the third restaurant is being built in Fayetteville, N.C.
Smith said he hopes to eventually turn over ownership of food trucks to longtime employees through licensing agreements, as the family has done with several Miyabi Junior Express locations.
“The food truck industry is growing leaps and bounds and it’s an easy way for people to get their food into markets they might not be able to get into with brick and mortar stores,” Smith said. “For us it’s going to be a great way to put employees that have worked for us into business for themselves and kind of pay them back for their loyalty to us over the years.”
The family’s second food truck is planned for the Charlotte, N.C, area, but “it’ll probably be sometime next year after we get our feet wet with this one and work out all the operational details,” Smith said. “This is going to be like our prototype to figure out the dos and don’ts and get our feet wet with it and then we’ll roll it out into doing some for these guys that work for us.”
This story was originally published June 4, 2021 at 9:23 AM.
