Caterer will bring hibachi grill, onion volcano right to your garage

Sometimes you go to a restaurant for the food. But sometimes, like with a teppanyaki restaurant, you also go for the experience.

The community table, the show and the flames are all things that you can't take in a to-go box or order from GrubHub.

But when COVID-19 hit, community tables became problematic. Rick Melendez of Aurora was the head teppanyaki chef at JuRin in South Elgin when the pandemic forced cutbacks and he found himself on his couch.

After a month of waiting around and trying to figure out what to do, Melendez had an idea: If you can't bring the people to the hibachi experience, bring the hibachi experience to the people.

"I didn't know anything about catering, so I started talking to my friends who I used to work with about it," Melendez said.

They all encouraged him to wait for JuRin to bring him back, or at least wait another year to launch the catering idea.

But "there is no next year," he said. "This (the pandemic) is going to go long and they're not going to call me back. I'm gonna do it."

Those three friends are now his partners.

Melendez started brainstorming and Googling and looking at social media. He couldn't find any similar catering companies around. In April, he came across a teppanyaki restaurant that had closed in Glendale Heights. A doctor who had bought the building with plans to convert it to medical offices told him he could have anything he wanted for $100 each.

He walked out with five hibachi grills that would have cost him $3,000 apiece new. He found a welder who could modify them with sturdy wheels to make them mobile, plus modular table attachments to recreate the restaurant experience.

By May, Mr. Hibachi Catering was born. Melendez built a website with help from a former co-worker, started a social media presence and did a trial run in a friend's backyard - to make sure the whole setup would work and to take pictures for prospective clients.

It worked.

Mr. Hibachi Catering started taking reservations for the summer, using the deposit money to buy supplies. Its first booking was in June. Mr. Hibachi Catering brings the grills, tents, tables, chairs and servingware. Everyone wears masks and follows COVID protocols. Guests have to supply their own drinks and place their order ahead of time on the www.mrhibachicatering.com.

"Our first day was rough," Melendez said, explaining everything took longer than expected to set up. And it was windy, a problem he didn't have to worry about when making flames shoot out of an onion volcano inside a restaurant.

"I was afraid I was going to set the tablecloth on fire," he said.

But nothing caught fire, and the guests were more than happy with the experience.

"After the dinner, the homeowner told us it was better than the restaurants in the area, that we were really going to take off," Melendez said.

And the company has. Mr. Hibachi Catering has done more than 100 catering gigs since then, including a job for Grammy- and Oscar-winner Jennifer Hudson in her outdoor kitchen in Burr Ridge on New Year's Eve.

Even winter couldn't stop it.

Knowing Mr. Hibachi Catering couldn't set up tents in backyards blanketed in snow, Melendez found a safe way to operate in garages.

"We keep the garage door open partway to let in fresh air and to vent the grill, and we use a couple of heaters facing each other to fight the cold," he said.

So far, people have been willing to wear an extra layer or gloves to get the experience. Sometimes they watch the show and take the food indoors. The company has been booked every weekend since December and up until March, he said.

Thinking it would be slower in the winter, Melendez had set his sights on some sort of brick-and-mortar setup so he wouldn't lose his employees in the lean months.

He opened Mr. Hibachi Express in the Dream Hall food hall in Elgin in late October, and shortly after opened Mr. Hibachi Sushi there as well.

Eventually, Melendez plans to open a restaurant where he can get back to doing teppanyaki the way he learned.

"The full experience, the hibachi, the fire, the egg, the volcano, that's the whole hibachi deal," he said.

"That's what people miss and why we're doing so good."