Georgia Trend magazine annually announces its Silver Spoon Awards, recognizing Georgia’s Top 10 dining destinations.

As would be expected, the list includes well-known eating places in Atlanta, Athens and Savannah. But the 2012 prestigious list also includes the Little Hawaiian restaurant in Carrollton.

“A Hawaiian restaurant in Carrollton, complete with a tiki bar?” the magazine listing asks. “Chef Tano Phommasith, a Hawaiian native, and wife, Cristi, his manager and hometown girl, make it happen, with Southern friendly sweetness.”

While Georgia Trend magazine called Chef Tano a Hawaiian native, he corrected that part of the listing.

“I was born in Laos in a family with six siblings,” he said. “We moved to Hawaii when I was 9 years old.”

Awards are nothing new to this popular downtown eatery on Rome Street, since it has won several local honors, such as the Times-Georgian’s Readers’ Choice awards. Chef Tano has been recognized many times in American Culinary Federation competition. But it’s a first from a state publication.

“We’re very pleased and blessed to receive this recognition,” Chef Tano said. “We share this honor with our staff as an indication of our big sense of commitment as a team.”

Carrollton Area Convention and Visitors Bureau Executive Director Jonathan Dorsey says the award is well-deserved and exciting for the Carrollton Area.

“It’s rewarding to see such a prestigious statewide publication as Georgia Trend telling the wider world about the staff, service, atmosphere and, most of all, incredible food Carrollton’s Little Hawaiian offers,” Dorsey said. “Tano, Cristi and their staff exemplify the concept of Southern hospitality.

“Little Hawaiian is the latest local dining establishment to receive wide notice from statewide and regional media. The Sunnyside Cafe and its Moonshadow Music Hall have been featured recently in Georgia Music Magazine and Georgia Trend and are named among the top 100 places to eat in Georgia in this year’s official state travel guide,” Dorsey said. “Other restaurants downtown, as well as the entire downtown district, have been featured in Georgia Magazine and other newspapers and magazines with a regional reach.”

Chef Tano’s family was in the restaurant business and he picked up the trade from a very early age.

“My family refused any welfare,” he said. “After a few months in Hawaii, they decided to open a Thai restaurant in Honolulu.”

While Tano was not old enough at the time to be an employee, he noted that it was a family business and everybody helped out.

“I started out cooking and doing a little bit of everything,” he said. “As soon as I turned 15, the legal age there, I branched out on my own and started to explore more of the restaurant business.”

One of his first jobs was with Mick’s Fish Market, a prestigious eating place in Honolulu.

“I began washing dishes there, just to get my foot in the door,” he said. “I worked my way up and was assistant manager when I left in 1988.”

Tano’s first wife was from Chicago, so he relocated there with her and earned a culinary arts degree in 1994.

“I was working as executive chef at Stir Crazy Cafe, a pan Asian restaurant, and was promoted to corporate chef a year later,” he said.

Tano moved to Columbia, S.C., in 1999, where he worked as executive chef in Tronco’s Catering. It was there he met his current wife, Cristi, who was also in the restaurant business.

“She was born at Tanner Medical Center in Carrollton and grew up in Ranburne, Ala.,” he said. “She brought me back home to Carrollton.”

After relocating to Georgia, Tano first worked as executive chef at Classic on Noble in Anniston, Ala.

“We had a dream to own our own restaurant,” he said. “Cristi has about 30 years’ experience in food service.”

So the couple opened Little Hawaiian on Sept. 22, 2003, on Bankhead Highway in Carrollton, near Lake Carroll.

“It was tough at first, trying to run a Hawaiian restaurant in a small town,” he said. “Many people weren’t that familiar with Hawaiian food. We were fortunate to have such a good staff, who believed in us and helped us get the word out.”

Business eventually picked up, and Little Hawaiian outgrew the small building. They moved to their current Rome Street location after Thanksgiving in 2008.

The building they chose was built as a mule barn in 1903, and through the next 100-plus years, housed 29 different businesses, including most recently a workout gym and a restaurant.

“We fell in love with the building,” Tano said. “We decided to go ahead, spend a little money to preserve the building and fit it in with our Hawaiian theme. We kept all the original brick and mortar. I understand the same person who built the depot built this building. They made their bricks onsite.”

While the restaurant has a Hawaiian theme, Chef Tano said they still try to incorporate some hometown, southern recipes on the menu.

“We have Southern vegetables, such as okra and greens, and I’m just intrigued with Southern cooking,” he said. “My wife grew up with it, and I love to cook it. It adds a little extra for our customers.”

He said the style of menu at Little Hawaiian might better be labeled as “fusion,” including Hawaiian, Asian and Southern.”

“We’re very particular about our product selection,” Chef Tano said. “We don’t use any product that contains trans-fats or is partially hydrogenated. We also don’t use MSG and try to cook as healthy as we can. We try to use locally grown produce and meats.”

And, According to Dorsey, being particular is paying off, and the CVB can market Carrollton’s restaurants as a key attraction as a result of the collective effort Chef Tano and other the local restaurant owners put into their product.

“Carrollton has really become a dining destination,” says Dorsey. “Our restaurants’ incredibly diverse menu offerings so conveniently concentrated have created a unique attraction. You can experience the tastes of the world — including Italian, Hawaiian, Irish, Scottish, Latin, Southern American — within a couple of blocks’ walk.

Of course, all this variety and attention to detail requires a great deal of product coming into Little Hawaiian.

According to Chef Tano, the restaurant buys about 350 pounds of fish each week and about 160 pounds of shrimp. The menu also features beef, chicken, lamb, duck and occasionally wild game, such as elk, which was bought for a wedding reception.

Catering is a big part of Little Hawaiian’s business. Last Friday, it provided food for the wine tasting at the old Carrollton train depot.

“We do weddings from 40 to 500 people and corporate events, feeding up to 2,000,” he said. “We cater to a lot of local companies, such at Tanner Health System, Southwire Company and Decostar.”

He said Little Hawaiian has tripled its business since moving to its new location about four years ago.

Little Hawaiian is open Monday through Friday for lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and dinner from 5-9 p.m. It is open for dinner only on Saturday, from 5-10 p.m. and Sunday for lunch only from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. The restaurant employs more than 50 people.

The Little Hawaiian phone number is 770-838-1220 and the website is www.littlehawaiianrestaurant.com.

The Carrollton Main Street Program has won the annual 2012 “Award of Excellence in Downtown Development,” the highest Georgia award a downtown program can win.

The award was presented Aug. 22 at the annual Georgia Downtown Conference in LaGrange, which brought together more than 200 Georgia downtown professionals to develop strategies for bettering their downtown business districts. The Georgia Downtown Association and the Office of Downtown Development of the Georgia Department of Community Affairs, presented the awards.

The Award of Excellence is presented to the one city each year that has shown the greatest improvement in overall downtown redevelopment statistics. The Georgia Downtown Awards were established to recognize individuals, downtown programs and businesses that have demonstrated unique efforts in making a difference in their downtowns.

The award categories are based on the 4-Point Approach of downtown revitalization, as developed by the National Trust’s Main Street Center, and focus on organization, promotion, design and economic development.

“This award is the highest honor that we can receive as a main street program,” said Jessica Reynolds, Carrollton Main Street director. “I’m so proud of how much our downtown has evolved over the years and how much it is still growing. It’s refreshing to see that our downtown matters as much to our city, our county and our citizens as much as it does to us.”

The Carrollton Main Street Program has been part of the community for more than 27 years, Reynolds said, and it’s invested in preserving downtown’s history and heritage.

The program has been the recipient of five conference awards in the past four years. These have included awards for Most Creative Marketing Piece in 2009, Best Retail Booster in 2009 and 2010 and Best Design Improvement Program in 2011.

The program also set a new record by being one of the only cities to have been the recipient of the annual Award of Excellence in Downtown Development twice in a 10-year period. It was the recipient of the same award in 2003, soon after the completion of the city’s Cultural Arts Center.

Reynolds said with the addition of the new amphitheater, new justice center and the newly renovated train depot, which is due to open this fall, “we’re just now seeing the beginning of what Downtown Carrollton truly has to offer.”

This year’s opening of The Amp at Adamson Square, the city’s new $1.1 million, 700-seat downtown amphitheater, was one of the major factors in winning the award, Reynolds said.

“The role it has played in downtown development has been significant,” she said. “It’s just really added a new dimension in what the downtown has to offer.”

Shortly after the ribbon cutting ceremony for The Amp, the facility was the centerpoint of the 27th annual Mayfest festival on May 5.

“When I started here four years ago, Mayfest had 80 vendors and about 4,000 people attending,” Reynolds said. “This year, we had 170 vendors and an estimated crowd of 10,000. We’ve come so far in a short period of time.”

The Amp also hosted a series of free concerts this summer, highlighted by a performance of the country-gospel group, Diamond Rio, and a series of Thursday night family movies.

The city of Carrollton also contributed to downtown’s success by passing a new alcoholic beverage ordinance, which allows carrying of open drinks outside in the downtown area. The new law makes it possible for amphitheater patrons to purchase drinks from nearby businesses and drink them at amphitheater shows.

Reynolds also believes that keeping the county’s court activities in the downtown area was another contribution to winning the award. She noted that many counties, when faced with building a new courthouse, go outside the downtown area.

“We’re fortunate to be able to keep our courthouse in the downtown area,” she said. “The foresight of our county leaders to keep it downtown was monumental.”

Likewise, she said the decision by West Georgia Technical College to locate its administrative offices downtown was helpful. Another factor in the program’s winning the award was its downtown sign project.

“We won an award last year for the signs and markers,” Reynolds said. “We have 13 new historic downtown signs and eight new directional signs in downtown.”

The program has encouraged downtown shopping by establishing an active membership plan and discount incentives to get people into the stores.

The Main Street program changes over the past year were more than physical, there were also additions in the virtual world.

Reynolds said rebuilding of the Main Street Carrollton website and the addition of iPhone and Android apps were very important factors in improving the program’s presence.

“A lot of downtown programs struggle to keep up with technology and stay relevant with social media,” she said. “We’ve been very fortunate to have a progressive board that sees the value in these new technologies.”

Reynolds said, more than anything, the award was made possible by community involvement and people coming out to support their local businesses, many which have been started during a time of economic downturn.

“It takes a whole community to save a downtown,” she said. “I don’t think any person, entity or organization can do it by themselves. It takes an effort by everyone to be successful.”

More information on Carrollton Main Street is available on its website at www.carrolltonmainstreet.com.