Maui for first-time visitors

Best restaurants

Maui's restaurants do not perform for the guidebook. The best of them sit on highway shoulders, in paniolo towns and in strip-mall corners along South Kihei Road, and they cook for the people who live upcountry and drive down. Twelve places follow, sorted by what a resident might tell you if you asked over a beer: a Mexican room in Makawao that has outlasted three decades of turnover, a coastal Italian kitchen that opens twice a day, a Wailea pizza operation that stays hot until midnight, a plantation general store turned dining room, a working ranch that also feeds you, a Kihei Thai bistro with two clean services, an upcountry steakhouse open five nights, a breakfast counter that runs from 05:00, a South Kihei pizza shack, a Vietnamese room that goes to 22:00, an East-shore shrimp truck, and a regional chain that Hawai'i grew up on. Addresses and hours are cited from OpenStreetMap; the opinions are the editor's.