Honolulu for foodies

Best restaurants

Honolulu eats the way a port city eats — on a plate that has been passed between islands, empires, and plantation shifts for longer than the state has existed. The dozen rooms below are not a best-of. They are the working spine of a downtown-to-Ala-Moana eating stretch: a ramen bar on South Beretania, a dim sum room on North Beretania, a tasting-menu Hawaiian kitchen on Kapiolani Boulevard, a saimin counter out on Nimitz Highway, and a cluster of small owner-run kitchens threaded through the Keeaumoku and Auahi blocks. Cuisines cross the map — Japanese, Chinese, Italian, Peruvian, Cajun, Middle Eastern, Hawaiian — because that is what Honolulu's dining room actually looks like on a Tuesday night, not what a visitor guide flattens it into. They are chosen for the reader who has three or four dinners in town and wants each one to do a different job: a bowl of noodles at the counter, a lacquered pork platter, a considered kitchen with a wine list, a beach-day breakfast. Every address, phone number, and service hour below is drawn from the mapped record; the opinions between them are ours.