Copper Hana

Copper Hana sushi restaurant opened 19 March 2016

Copper Hana restaurant abruptly closed without notifying or paying employees 19 July 2018.

2016-04-25 The Easterner : New sushi bar Copper Hana has potential but service lacks

By Erin Rebar, Contributing Writer

April 25, 2016

One’s first impression of Copper Hana, Cheney’s new sushi restaurant, is overwhelmingly positive. It is located conveniently on First Street next to The Basement in the heart of downtown Cheney.

The restaurant is small and clean; the glossy wood floors meet with walls colored halfway up in copper panels the texture of an aluminum roof slab and the rest of the way in a matte gray paint. Brightly-colored paintings of fish and sea creatures line the right-hand wall. To the left, a bar topped with hammered copper wraps around an open kitchen.

“It was really good,” said Mary Ormsby, an EWU senior who has eaten at Copper Hana three times so far. “There’s nothing really like that in Cheney. It’s not super authentic and they are really new, so they are still working out some kinks, but it’s good. The sushi’s good.”

While the sushi may be good, Copper Hana’s customer service is lacking. “Service is pretty slow,” said Ormsby. “So if you are pressed for time I wouldn’t go there.” According to Ormsby, she had to wait between 30 and 45 minutes before receiving her meal.

Ormsby’s experience seems to be held across the board. Five out of eight reviews on Copper Hana’s Facebook page echoed Ormsby’s sentiment, and while the majority of the reviews were positive, almost all seemed to mention “kinks” that needed to be worked out. One reviewer in particular mentioned that she did not even receive acknowledgement from a server for at least 15 minutes.

Copper Hana’s general manager, Kenta Nishimori, was honest about the problems the restaurant needs to work out. “Cheney is a very small town,” said Nishimori. “So it’s hard to find good waitresses because no one really knows what sushi is or what Japanese food is, so it’s kind of hard to train somebody that’s been used to serving pizzas and tacos. Memorizing everything is hard for them. It’s also been hard to get to customers because we are understaffed.”

According to Nishimori, Copper Hana has been packed during the evening. “I didn’t expect it to be this busy. Some people are waiting 30 or 40 minutes,” he said. With a staff of approximately 10 people, Copper Hana is struggling to keep up with the traffic.

The new restaurant has been open for about a month and Nishimori has been handling everything from fixing the sushi to managing the staff. He has been making sushi since he was 15, an art he learned at a Japanese restaurant in Coeur d’Alene after he moved to America from Japan.

Nishimori has a lot of experience at sushi restaurants, helping to open several in the Pacific Northwest. When a friend approached him about helping to open a restaurant in Cheney, Nishimori was the perfect man for the job.

“I got talked into coming here,” said Nishimori. “I came and helped open this place. [I’ve done] menus and hiring … I’ve done everything.”

Copper Hana gets most of its fish from Seattle and Los Angeles, as well as from Japan. “A lot of [the fish] is not sustainable,” said Nishimori. “Sustainable [fish] is really expensive. There’s one place in Seattle that does sustainable [fish], but that’s the only place that I know that has sustainable sushi.”

The food served at Copper Hana is mostly Japanese, though several dishes do have some Hawaiian influence. According to Nishimori, they try to keep the food as authentic as possible. “We use short grain rice from Japan,” he said. “Everyone else in Spokane uses medium grain Calrose, so what separates us is that we try to keep it more on the Japanese side of things.”

Clipped from: http://easterneronline.com/37464/news/new-sushi-bar-copper-hana-has-potential-but-service-lacks/