Kura Sushi USA, Inc.

has also been included in the EAK resubmitted to the SEC. Before we begin our formal remarks, I need to remind everyone that part of our discussion today will include forward-looking statements as defined under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and therefore you should not put undue reliance on them. These statements are also subject to numerous risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from what we expect. We refer all of you to our SEC filings for a more detailed discussion of the risks that could impact our future operating results and financial condition. Also during today's call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe can be useful in evaluating our performance. The presentation of this additional information should not be considered in isolation, nor is a substitute for results prepared in accordance with GAAP, and the reconciliations to comparable GAAP measures are available in our earnings release.

With that out of the way, I would like to turn the call over to Jimmy.

Thanks, Ben, and thank you to everyone for joining us today. I'm very pleased to report the ongoing strength of our business as we progress through a record fiscal year. This will go into greater detail later, but for those of you who saw our earnings release, I'm sure you noticed that we have announced further raises in guidance. It was unprecedented for us when we announced our guidance raise so early in the year with our first quarter call and being able to follow the next quarter with raises for each of our guidance items, demonstrates our incredible confidence in the business. We've opened 10 restaurants to date, putting us well on track for our new unit guidance of 13 to 14 openings this fiscal year. We leveraged G&A year-over-year by 190 basis points and grew adjusted EBITDA dollars by 23%. We've introduced big new projects and our operations teams have more than risen to the challenge of implementing them. I'm extremely proud of everyone's efforts and wanted to begin the call by acknowledging all of our team members and thanking them for creating so much great news that I get to share today. Total sales for the fiscal second quarter were $57.3 million, representing comparable sales growth of 3%. A traffic growth of 5.9% is a meaningful acceleration over the prior quarter's traffic growth of 3.3%. We are very pleased to have achieved these results in spite of the severe weather that impacted the entire industry. During our fiscal second quarter, Black Box's restaurant industry traffic index was negative 3.5%, a spread of 940 basis points. Compared to the casual dining industry, our traffic outperformance was 1,180 basis points. It's clear that our guests love Kula as much as we love them. As a reminder, 7% of the pricing fell off during the first week of December, which we offset with only 1% in January for current effective pricing of 3%. We mentioned price mix tailwinds in January, and we are very pleased to see that this continued through the quarter. This really has been a special quarter for Kula, and I'm glad that we provide the kind of guest experience that keeps guests coming back to us. During the second quarter, commodity costs continued to be right where we want them at, 29.6% of sales. Labor as a percentage of sales was 32.8% as compared to 31.5% in the prior year quarter. In addition to meaningfully higher pre-opening labor costs due to accelerated openings, we experienced the same severe weather that impacted the rest of the restaurant industry. We are confident that this increase in labor costs is not structural in nature and expect the same seasonal leveraging of labor that we've always seen. As I previously mentioned, we are aggressively executing on one of our key strategic pillars to drive overall corporate profitability, evaluating G&A. We were able to bring G&A costs down to 14.3% as a percentage of sales, as compared to last year's 16.2%. And as a result, we now expect to achieve even greater G&A leverage for the year, which Jeff will discuss later. Our support center team has done a great job in managing incremental headcount, and we expect further tailwinds in future years as we infill markets and benefit from efficiencies in regional restaurant management. In the fiscal second quarter, we opened five new restaurants, Kansas City, Missouri, Skokie, Illinois, Columbus, Ohio, and Uless and Webster in Texas. Subsequent to quarter end, we opened one more restaurant in Orlando, Florida. We also have five units currently under construction. In the fiscal year to date alone, we've opened as many restaurants as we did during the first six years of Kurasushi's operation in the US. I'm incredibly proud of what our brand has become and for us to have established our footprint as a truly national brand with restaurants in 17 states today. We are also pleased with the performance of our new rewards program. Rewards members are now responsible for approximately a third of our sales as compared to less than a quarter with our prior program. Our recent analysis on average Rewards members spend 10% more per ticket, even after factoring in discounts, and visit 1.3 times per month. For the last several calls, I've hinted at an IP collaboration that I was extremely excited about, and it's my pleasure to finally be able to share that. Our next IP partner is Dragon Ball. I think this might be our first non-American property that everybody on Discord is already familiar with. We believe Dragon Ball is the most exciting partnership we've ever had, and I'm truly looking forward to seeing the results. I have a lot of great news to share regarding our tech pipeline as well. We have completed our first in-restaurant test of our robotic dishwasher in Japan. and RD results have confirmed our expectations on how meaningful they will be for our operations. While we don't have a timeline for state-side implementation, I'm very pleased with our forward momentum. The table-side mobile ordering function implementation is going smoothly as well, and I'm happy to be able to announce a new feature for table-side mobile ordering that we are developing in parallel, the ability for guests to unbicker upon prices through side menu purchases rather than just through sushi plates. One more thing on the tech front. We have a completely new battle-tested technology from KuroJapan that we are currently getting certified for the U.S. We call it the sushi slider. It puts our rice balls directly onto our sushi plates and then takes them to each line employee via conveyor belt. During peak hours, we can have two to three employees spending half of their shift placing rice bowls onto sushi plates and handing them to the next person on the make line. So the operational upside here is obvious. Our expectation is that we'll be able to bring the sushi slider set aside for testing this summer and that we'll actually be able to retrofit some of our existing restaurants to accommodate it. As you can see, we made a lot of progress in this last quarter. Lastly, I'm pleased to announce that we were able to secure a very favorable deal with DoorDash, prompting our exclusive partnership and rapid rollout of the program. With these deal terms, we are able to keep our menu prices the same as in-store dining, and we expect DoorDash sales to be beneficial to margins. We are very pleased with our partnership with DoorDash so far, and I'm looking forward to providing quantitative color in future calls. I would like to again thank all of our team members at our restaurants and our support center. Every department can point to a remarkable achievement this quarter. Whether we are looking at the 10 restaurants that we've already opened, the incredible traffic auto performance of our restaurants, You have leveraged over 190 base points, our IP collaboration pipeline, and the success of new rewards program, the progress in technology, or the successful and rapid rollout of DoorLash. It's been an amazing quarter. Thank you, everyone. Jeff, now I'll turn it over to you to discuss our financial results and liquidity.