Restaurant week is coming to Honolulu in November, and the first thing we did with the list was look at the clock, not the prices. Most of what’s on offer is a dinner course. We start drinking at 2 in the afternoon and we’re not the 8 pm reservation people, so our real question was which of these menus you can actually order while the sun is up. Short answer: a few, and the event site doesn’t make it easy to tell which.
What happened
HONOLULU Magazine announced on Oct. 15 what it calls the first-ever HONOLULU Restaurant Week, presented by First Hawaiian Bank and Mastercard. It runs Saturday, Nov. 7 through Sunday, Nov. 15, 2026, with participating restaurants offering “prix fixe menus for lunch or dinner at special Restaurant Week prices.” The announcement says no tickets or passes are required — you just book the restaurant. A portion of proceeds goes to the Hawai‘i Restaurant Association Educational Foundation, which the event’s beneficiaries page describes as a nonprofit that trains high school students for restaurant and hospitality careers.
Worth knowing: the announcement is the magazine’s own branded content, and the event site carries the magazine’s copyright too. So the menus below come from the organizer’s own pages, which is the right place to read them.
When we checked on Oct. 16, 2026, the full restaurant list had 28 restaurants. The site’s own counter tags 16 of them as Waikiki, and sorts the whole list by course: 6 breakfast, 14 lunch, 18 dinner, and 7 “pau hana” (Hawaii’s word for after-work drinks).
This is a different event from the Flavors of Waikīkī week that ran in October, which we sorted the same way back in September.
What it changes for a Waikiki stay
If your trip overlaps Nov. 7–15, you get a fixed-price menu at a lot of places you can walk to from a Waikiki hotel. The catch is in the fine print of each listing: some prices are per person, some are for two, and the listings that spell it out say tax and gratuity are extra. Here is how the Waikiki listings we read compare (prices from each restaurant’s event page, checked Oct. 16, 2026):
| Restaurant (event site label) | Listed course | Price on the event page |
|---|---|---|
| Monkeypod Kitchen | Breakfast | $25 |
| Earls Kitchen + Bar | Lunch | $35 |
| Heavenly Island Lifestyle | Breakfast through dinner, incl. pau hana | $40 per person |
| Taormina Sicilian Cuisine | Lunch / dinner | $48 lunch, $68 dinner |
| The Butcher Bar | Lunch, dinner, pau hana | $70 per person |
| Ruth’s Chris | Dinner | $75 or $85 |
| Nori Bar (tagged “Honolulu,” but the address is on Kūhiō Ave.) | Lunch, dinner, pau hana | $85 |
| ZIGU | Dinner, pau hana | $99 for two |
| Botanico | Lunch, dinner, pau hana | $150 for two |
| Aloha Steak House | Dinner | $160 for two |
Two things jumped out. First, a “for two” price reads cheaper than it is next to a “per person” one: The Butcher Bar at $70 per person is $140 for two before tax and tip, while ZIGU’s $99 covers two people. Second, the “pau hana” label never says what hours it means. None of the listings we read gives a time window, and none says whether the prix fixe is served during the restaurant’s own happy hour.
A small one for Ruth’s Chris fans: the listing’s name covers “Honolulu & Waikiki,” but the address it gives is Waterfront Plaza at 500 Ala Moana Blvd., not the Waikiki Beach Walk location. We’d ask which one serves the menu when booking.
We also checked whether the Mastercard sponsorship means a card perk. Neither the announcement nor the restaurant pages we read mention a card requirement or a card discount, as of Oct. 16.
What we would do — and what we’d skip
We’d start with Heavenly Island Lifestyle on Seaside Avenue. Its restaurant-week menu is $40 per person for three courses, and the mains include a garlic shrimp plate, a loco moco, and beer-battered fish and chips. Heavenly’s own site lists happy hour from 2 to 4 pm and dinner from 4 pm, which is exactly our part of the day. We’ve had lunch there before (a vegetable-and-bean loco moco that was more filling than it sounds). The third course is dessert, which we don’t usually order; we’d each pick the lightest-sounding one and call it fruit. What we don’t know is whether the $40 set is served at 2 pm or only at certain meals, so we’d ask when booking.
Second, Earls on Kalākaua: $35 for a starter, a main and a dessert at lunch, with Baja fish tacos and a Nashville crispy chicken sandwich among the mains. The listing doesn’t say what time lunch ends, and that decides whether it fits a 2 pm start.
Third, Taormina on Lewers Street, lunch at $48. The page mentions a beef carpaccio, a Roman-style carbonara and, at lunch only, a mentaiko pasta. We had a course dinner there years ago and remember the carbonara (a truffle version that night, so not the same dish). Lunch is the version we’d book now.
What we’d skip: the dinner-only steak courses. That’s not a knock on the deals. The Aloha Steak House set is $160 for two and Ruth’s Chris has a filet-and-lobster plate at $85, and if a nice dinner out is your plan for the week, those are clear, easy-to-compare prices. By that hour we are usually in the room with a cold beer and the windows open. ZIGU is the one dinner we’d think about, because its $99 menu for two is built to share. But its site lists opening time as 4 pm daily, so it’s an early dinner, not an afternoon one.
Before you plan around this
- The list may still change. As of Oct. 16, 2026, the event site’s front page says “Restaurant sign ups opening soon,” and new names or menus could appear before Nov. 7. Re-check the all-restaurants page the week before you go.
- Prices are as listed on the event pages on Oct. 16, 2026; assume tax and tip on top unless a listing says otherwise. The Butcher Bar’s listing says no sharing or substitutions; other listings may have rules of their own, so read each page.
- Hours for the restaurant-week menus aren’t posted. The 2–4 pm and 4 pm times above come from the restaurants’ own sites, not from the event. Confirm with the restaurant when you reserve.
- The magazine describes these as dine-in deals. We didn’t see a takeout version on any listing we read.
Details
- Dates: Nov. 7–15, 2026 (Saturday to Sunday)
- How it works: reserve with each restaurant; no tickets or passes
- Event site: hnlrestaurantweek.com
If one of these ends up on our November calendar, it’ll be the one with a 2 pm table.
