A one-pound chicken katsu plate for $9.99 is the kind of number that makes us open a map. Then we look at where Kāheka Street actually is, and the map does most of the arguing for us. Don Quijote’s Honolulu store is running a Friday plate deal through September, and whether it is worth your afternoon depends almost entirely on whether you have a car. We do not.
What happened
Aloha State Daily reported on September 4 that Don Quijote Kāheka has started selling $9.99 mega-sized chicken katsu plates, every Friday in September, beginning at 3 p.m. and running until sold out. A limited number is made each Friday, and the limit is three plates per customer. Each plate comes with the katsu, rice and a cabbage salad.
Delicatessen department manager Kota Kawahara told the outlet that they do not cut the katsu too thin, that he picked chicken breast because “it’s more healthy and there isn’t too much fat,” and that “each plate is around 1 pound after the chicken is cooked.” It is the first time the Kāheka store has run this deal. Kawahara had done tonkatsu and hamburger steak plates at Marukai Hawaiʻi — the same $9.99 idea, on Wednesdays — and wanted a different entrée here. According to the report, Don Quijote will probably keep the $9.99 price and change the entrée each month.
That is one outlet, and worth saying plainly, because we checked the store’s own website on September 7 and the deal is not on it. Don Quijote Hawaiʻi’s okazuya menu page lets you pick a store, a day of the week, and either “Lunch” or “Dinner (served from 3pm - 7pm)” — but it publishes no prices at all, and the Kāheka lineup we pulled up did not list a katsu item (karaage chicken is on it, which is a different dish). What the official site does confirm is the boring, useful part: the store list gives Kāheka as 801 Kaheka St., open 24 hours, phone 808-973-4800.
What it changes for a Waikiki stay
Two things move: the price and the hour.
Roughly a pound of cooked chicken plus rice and salad for $9.99 is a two-person dinner if you want it to be. Split down the middle, that is about $5 a person before tax — not a number Waikiki produces often. And the 3 p.m. start lands exactly on the hour we care about, because 3 p.m. is when our afternoon begins: cold beer out of the room fridge, something salty, windows open.
Here is how the two $9.99 plates compare. Both lines come from Aloha State Daily, not from either store’s website.
| Don Quijote Kāheka | Marukai Honolulu | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $9.99 | $9.99 |
| Day | Fridays in September (Sept. 4, 11, 18 and 25) | Wednesdays |
| Start | 3 p.m., until sold out | 3 p.m. |
| September entrée | Chicken katsu, ~1 lb cooked, rice, cabbage salad | Hamburger steak |
| How many | ”A limited number”; three per customer | 300 plates each Wednesday |
| Since | September 2026 | August 2026 |
| Address | 801 Kaheka St. No. A7 | 2310 Kamehameha Hwy. |
The catch is geography. Kāheka Street is not in Waikiki. It sits on the mauka side behind Ala Moana Center, in the same pocket of streets where CU Hawaiʻi just opened inside the Pagoda Hotel. With no car, getting there from Waikiki means the Pink Line trolley or TheBus to Ala Moana Center, then a walk across Kapiʻolani Boulevard, then the whole thing again in reverse while carrying a hot plate. Figure an hour and a half of a Friday afternoon, door to door — our estimate, not a published figure.
What we would do — and what we wouldn’t
We would not make a special trip from Waikiki for this. The distance is not the problem — we ride to Ala Moana Center happily enough. “Until sold out” is the problem. A long errand that might simply fail is a different category from a long errand. If we went and the case was empty, we would be standing in a supermarket at 4 p.m., two neighborhoods from our beer.
We would buy one on the way past. If we were already at Ala Moana Center on a Friday afternoon, the walk over is short and one plate is one bag. Two of us, one plate, back to the room, about $5 a person. That is the version that works without a car: fold it into an Ala Moana trip you were already making.
The three-plate limit is somebody else’s problem. A pound of cooked chicken is already more than the two of us finish in one sitting. Whatever is left goes in the refrigerator and comes back the next afternoon through the air-fry setting on the suite microwave, the most useful appliance we have for fried food.
Our usual objection does not apply here. The reason Don Quijote has stayed off our list for years is groceries — hauling a full load back to Waikiki with no car is the exact kind of effort we organize our trips to avoid, which is why our shopping happens at Longs and Waikiki Market a couple of minutes from the room. One plate is not a load. The sold-out risk is what keeps this off the calendar, not the bags.
If you drive, this is a much easier decision. Show up at 3 p.m., buy up to three, and Friday dinner for a family costs about thirty dollars. We would tell anyone with a rental car to go.
We have not eaten this plate — it started on September 4 — and we do not shop at Kāheka these days. Treat the katsu itself as reported rather than field-tested.
Before you plan around this
- Three Fridays are left in September as of September 7: the 11th, the 18th and the 25th.
- Call first. The deal rests on a single news report and is not on the company’s website, so the phone number on the official store list — 808-973-4800 — is the fastest way to find out whether the bento section is making them today.
- No plate count has been published for Kāheka. The report says only “a limited number.” The 300-a-week figure belongs to Marukai on Wednesdays, a different store on a different day; do not plan your arrival time around it.
- October is not announced. The report says the store will “probably” continue with a different entrée each month. Nobody has said what October’s is.
- Prices, hours and specials change. Everything above was checked on September 7, 2026.
Details
Don Quijote (Kāheka / Honolulu) — 801 Kaheka St. No. A7, Honolulu, HI 96814. Open 24 hours; 808-973-4800. The okazuya counter’s dinner service runs 3–7 p.m. according to the official menu page; the reported 3 p.m. katsu start lines up with the opening of that window, though nothing official says when the plates stop.
If the entrée really does rotate every month, the interesting question is not September’s katsu. It is what turns up in the case in October — and whether that one is worth a Friday.
