Pretty soon, he recalled, "I was gravitating more toward the kitchen than I was toward my drafting table."

Today, Brown is corporate executive chef for the E & O Trading Co. restaurant chain, which opens its first Hawai'i outlet Saturday at Ward Centre (in the former A Pacific Cafe location) and plans a Lahaina Cannery Mall location later this year. He's in Hawai'i for a few weeks to help Honolulu executive chef Alan Watari and general manager Sean "Keoni" Craig, both Islanders, open the new restaurant.

Brown's mom is from Kaua'i and his dad was a Navy man; his wife is Honolulu-born Kathleen Omura Brown, who danced with the Honolulu City Ballet. The Browns live in San Francisco, where Kathleen works with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.

Brown has worked with name chefs — Alain Sailhac at Le Cirque, Rene Verdon at La Trianon and Jeremiah Tower at Stars. But he says it was his Island-boy tastes that guided him in creating the menu for Betelnut, the blockbuster San Francisco restaurant where he had his first leading chef position and one of the earliest Western restaurants to bring Southeast Asian cooking out of the mom-and-pop shadows. Within three months of its opening in 1995, the casual-chic restaurant had garnered a James Beard Foundation Best New Restaurant nomination. It was voted Hottest New Restaurant by readers of the San Francisco Chronicle, and Brown was profiled on the then-fledgling TV Food Network.

That same familiarity with Island flavors has helped in working with E & O, which specializes in a concept similar to the one he devised for Betelnut. They call it a "Southeast Asian grill" — small plates, very fresh ingredients and recipes based on the street foods and fast foods of Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Myanmar (Burma), Malaysia and also a little bit of Korea, China and Japan.

Brown's career has been a journey unplanned and often providential.

When he gave up art in the late '70s, he found it tough to break into cooking, so he enrolled at Kapi'olani Community College, going to school full-time while also holding down full-time lowest-of-the-low kitchen jobs at Zippy's and T.G.I. Friday's. He worked four years as a line cook at the Sheraton Princess Kaiulani before his dream came true: He was awarded a full scholarship to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., by the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union.

"I know a lot of local kids don't want to go there because it's so far away and it's so cold," he said, but he urges would-be chefs to buy a good coat and go. The intense, two-year Culinary Institute of America program is life-changing, he says — "not that it makes you a chef. They tell you that right off: that it takes a lot more than schooling to make you a chef. But they just open your eyes to every aspect of the hospitality industry."

Today, Brown treasures the "little grease-stained notebooks" he started in school. He tells young cooks that it takes 10 years of repetition and memorization and practice just to become a good cook. To be a chef is something else entirely, compounded not just of knowledge and skill but also creativity and good business sense.

"I still have a hard time calling myself a chef because there's still so much more to learn," he said.

When it was time for an internship, Brown made a list: First, Lutece, where a young Alan Wong was sous chef. But when he went into New York to pound on doors, he found Lutece closed for vacation. Next up was Le Cote Basque, but they wouldn't give him an appointment. Disappointed but wiser, he decided to bypass the application process at his third prospect, Le Cirque, then located in the Mayfair Hotel and in its heyday under chef Alain Sailhac. He found the kitchen door in the back alley, located a cook, asked where the chef's office was and walked right in.

"What do you want?" Alain Sailhac demanded.

"I want to work for you, chef," Brown boldly responded.

Sailhac protested that they spoke only French in the kitchen. Brown persisted, saying he could get by with the French culinary terms he'd learned in school. He begged and Sailhac agreed to consider him.

Back at school, Brown learned that the local Marriott was paying $9 an hour — a fortune! — and he was ready to sign up until the phone rang. It was Sailhac offering $250 a week. Brown gulped and took the job, working from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. six days a week. "It probably came out to 35 cents an hour," he recalled, ruefully. But he got to cook for the likes of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger — "I never saw them, there was just the (order) ticket, but it was impressive enough for me" — and learned a lot.

After graduation Brown returned to Hawai'i with the idea of opening a restaurant. But that didn't pan out out and, in those days, he said, "there was only hotel food, no Roy's or Alan's yet."

So he headed for San Francisco and there found a mentor in former Kennedy White House chef Rene Verdon at the now-defunct Le Trianon. "He is the greatest ever ... so knowledgeable and giving. And so unpretentious — when it would get busy, he would roll up his sleeves and start washing the dishes. I decided I wanted to be like that." Verdon remains a friend and adviser.

In the 25 years between Le Trianon and E & O, Brown hop-scotched. He worked at Jeremiah Tower's Stars, where he found an it's-all-about-celebrity atmosphere he didn't like. Betelnut, which the Real Restaurants chain hired him to open in 1995, established his reputation. He helped create an innovative gourmet takeout operation for Bryan's Quality Meats, a California grocer. He did a stint with a trendy San Francisco caterer, which taught him a lot about feeding a lot of people at once without losing quality.

Then, on an extended European vacation, he fell in love with Basque food and returned to San Francisco to open his own restaurant, Basque, in the SOMA district in 1999.

The restaurant received critical acclaim and initially boomed, but then came the dot-com crash, followed by 9/11. "It was like, where did everybody go?" Brown recalled, ruefully.

The crash was a lucky thing for the management team of E & O Trading Co., including founder Chris Hemmeter Jr., son of the late developer well known in the Islands. They hired Brown to revamp the menu at the flagship San Francisco restaurant, which had begun life as a brewpub and morphed into an Asian small-plates restaurant.

San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer praised Brown's hiring as a "coup." In a recent review of the new Larkspur E & O, in Marin County, Bauer lauded the kalbi, misoyaki salmon and lemongrass chicken, and particularly Brown's signature Burmese ginger salad.

Brown particularly enjoys opening new restaurants, when he is in teacher mode.