When Eddie Flores Jr. started the local plate lunch business L&L Drive-Inn in 1976, he figured 30 restaurants would make him happy. But in the past seven years, he's had to wildly adjust his measuring stick for success.

With about 165 restaurants and growing, Flores has set a new goal of 1,000 L&Ls.

"Can you believe we open one restaurant every 12 days?" he said.

For his entrepreneurial efforts, Flores is to be honored tomorrow as salesperson of the year by the Honolulu chapter of Sales and Marketing Executives International.

The restaurateur, with L&L co-founder Kwock Yum "Johnson" Kam, opened the first L&L outside Hawai'i in 2000 in California. Known on the Mainland as L&L Hawaiian Barbecue, the chain today has about 50 locations in Southern California — about the same as in Hawai'i.

L&L operates in nine mostly Western states, and this year expects to break into Texas and Alaska.

Over the past few years, Flores has been opening 30 to 35 restaurants annually, and he expects to continue that pace by filling out West Coast opportunities in about two years, then directing major expansion in other states and possibly overseas.

Flores said he didn't consider himself a salesman or marketing executive until he began selling franchises and cooking up promotions such as the low-carbohydrate "Hawaiian Atkins Plate."

Other more recent marketing efforts have been to sell L&L plate lunches as healthy meals with brown rice and green salad, as well as adapting Mainland L&L menus to local tastes, such as offering fish tacos in San Diego, a Texas version of kalua pork and baked beans and cole slaw in other markets.

"I joke I'm not a salesman, but I had to become a salesman," he said. "I also really did a lot selling Hawai'i."

L&L staples on the Mainland continue to be such local favorites as chicken katsu with two scoops of rice and a scoop of macaroni salad. However, the starch component has generated some complaints and was a factor in L&L closing restaurants in Illinois and Michigan.

For the most part, however, L&L is creating a Mainland following for local and Hawaiian food, including kalua pig with cabbage, spam musubi and laulau.

"If you go to New York City and you want to eat laulau, there's nowhere else but us," Flores said.

Reach Andrew Gomes at agomes@honoluluadvertiser.com.