CU Hawaiʻi, the Korean convenience store chain, now has four stores on Oʻahu, and the newest one sits inside the Pagoda Hotel on Rycroft Street. That address is the whole story for us. It is a walk from Ala Moana Center and it is not in Waikiki, so whether this is worth planning around depends almost entirely on whether you rent a car. We do not. We have also never set foot in a CU store, so treat everything below as reported rather than field-tested.
What happened
Aloha State Daily reported on September 1 that CU Hawaiʻi opened at the Pagoda Hotel on August 31, in a 648-square-foot retail space running 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily. According to that report the space holds “fresh grab-and-go items, customizable beverages, a ramen bar with various Korean instant ramen offerings, travel and wellness necessities, and a range of Korean and local products.”
Read that list one more time. Those are categories, not a menu. No published source we could find says what is actually in the hot case on a given afternoon.
The hotel is promoting it as well. Pagoda Hotel’s own site tells guests to “Stop by the @nicetocuhawaii convenience store for those last-minute essentials, snacks, drinks, and more,” and gives the hotel address as 1525 Rycroft Street. General manager Chue Yang told Aloha State Daily the store offers “so much more than a traditional hotel convenience store,” and framed it as a reason for people in the surrounding neighborhood to come to the Pagoda — so this is not a guests-only lobby shop.
The same report puts the chain at “more than 18,500 stores across South Korea and more than 730 stores globally,” with the Hawaiʻi master franchise held by CU Hawaiʻi LLC. It also lists the run-up: Bishop Street downtown in November 2025, Kāhala in February 2026, Kapahulu in June 2026, and now the Pagoda. The hotel itself is described there as 199 rooms and 12 stories, built in 1964 and currently managed by Highgate. Two more tenants are named for the same property: Rainbow Drive-In targeted for fall 2026, Paris Baguette slated for 2027.
What it changes for a Waikiki stay
We could not find the four stores’ hours in one place anywhere, so here they are. These are the hours CU’s own website published when we checked on September 5, 2026:
| Store | Hours (official site, checked Sept 5, 2026) |
|---|---|
| Downtown Honolulu | Mon–Fri 6am–11pm; Sat 7am–11pm; Sun 7am–10pm |
| Kāhala | Daily 6am–10pm |
| Kapahulu | Daily 7am–11pm |
| Pagoda Hotel | Daily 6am–11pm |
The Pagoda store is the only one of the four that opens at 6 and closes at 11 every single day. If what you want out of a convenience store is that it is open when everything else is shut, that is the one to remember.
Two things CU does not publish, and both matter more than they should: street addresses and prices. The site gives a neighborhood name and a set of hours per store, and stops. The new one is easy enough — Aloha State Daily places it at the Pagoda, and the hotel publishes its own number. The Kapahulu store is the awkward one. It is the location closest to Waikiki by name, and Kapahulu Avenue runs a long way, so the neighborhood label alone will not tell you whether it is a short walk from Kuhio Avenue or a good deal farther inland. Get the address before you commit to walking.
On foot, the Pagoda is an Ala Moana-side building, not a Waikiki one. The hotel’s location page tells guests they “can walk to Ala Moana Center, local restaurants and cafés, neighborhood shops and Ala Moana Beach Park.” That is the map as seen from the store, and Waikiki is not on it.
What we would do
We do not rent a car, so our week is Waikiki on foot plus Ala Moana Center on the Pink Line trolley. The Pagoda sits just past the far edge of that. We would not make a trip for it.
What we would do is fold it into a day we were already spending at Ala Moana Center — walk over on the way back, buy one or two salty things for the room, and be back before the drinking starts. Not beer and not wine. We buy those close to where we are staying in Waikiki, because carrying bottles any real distance is effort, and we are against effort.
The ramen bar is the headline of every write-up, and it is the part we would skip. We both like ramen. It simply does not fit the way we drink. Our afternoon starts around two or three and stretches for hours, and ramen is a dish that demands to be eaten the minute it is done. Drop it into the middle of a slow beer and one of the two loses. That is a scheduling problem, not a quality one.
The long hours cut the same way. Eleven at night is theoretical for us; we are reliably asleep. Six in the morning is closer to real, but our mornings are coffee made in the room and fruit bought the day before, so we are not walking toward Ala Moana at dawn either. If you drive, or you are staying at the Pagoda, or you simply keep normal hours, that 6-to-11 window is the best of the four stores and it is not close.
Where a store like this does fit our week is the same gap we wrote about when 7-Eleven Hawaii put a Japanese-style egg salad sandwich in the cooler: the small salty thing you want before the first cold beer, at the hour when a full plate lunch is far too much food. Korean grab-and-go is built for exactly that slot. When we want the full-size version instead, we walk to Me BBQ on Kuhio Avenue and carry a plate back to the room.
Before you plan around this
- We have not been inside a CU Hawaiʻi store. Everything here comes from the announcement, the company’s site and the hotel’s site, checked September 5, 2026.
- Hours on a store that opened at the end of August are the most likely thing on this page to change. Re-check them on CU’s site before you build an evening around an 11 p.m. close.
- The 648-square-foot figure, the opening date, the store counts and the general manager’s quote all come from Aloha State Daily’s report. None of them appear on CU’s own website.
- There is no published menu and no published price list. If one specific item is the reason you are walking over, ask before you go.
- Rainbow Drive-In in fall 2026 and Paris Baguette in 2027 are targets for the same property, not opening dates.
Next time we are at Ala Moana Center with an hour to spare, we will walk over and look at the case. That is the entire plan.
