Hawaii Steakhouses | SteakMap

The Best Steakhouses in Hawaii

Hawaii has 17 steakhouses across 5 towns — Honolulu holds 11, with the rest on Maui at Kihei, Wailea, Lahaina and one in Kailua. Nearly every one is a hotel or resort room, which is what you would expect of a state where the dining economy runs on visitors.

What you would not expect is that Hawaii had working cowboys before the American West did.

The Hawaii Ten

1. Hy’s Steak House (Honolulu) — the Waikiki institution, dark panelling and a kiawe-wood broiler behind glass. Kiawe is Hawaiian mesquite, and it is the reason this room tastes different from a mainland steakhouse.
2. The Signature Prime Steak & Seafood (Honolulu) — on the 36th floor of the Ala Moana Hotel, with the best view of any dining room in the state.
3. Wolfgang’s Steakhouse (Waikiki) — dry-aged porterhouse from the New York group founded by a former Peter Luger head waiter. A second room on Maui.
4. StripSteak Waikiki (Honolulu) — Michael Mina’s room at the International Market Place, the most contemporary cooking on this list.
5. Aloha Steak House (Honolulu) — Waikiki, with The Butcher & Bar as its more casual sibling.
6. Sonz Steakhouse (Lahaina) — Maui’s long-running special-occasion room.
7. Duo Steak & Seafood (Kihei) — at the Four Seasons Wailea, and the most polished service in the islands.
8. The Cutlery (Honolulu) — small, modern and the local pick rather than the visitor one.
9. Upstairs at Pier 38 (Honolulu) — over the fishing harbour, which tells you the seafood is not an afterthought.
10. Gaslamp (Kailua) — the windward side’s entry, away from the Waikiki crowd.

Hawaiian cowboys came first

In 1788 Captain George Vancouver landed five cows in Hawaii as a gift to King Kamehameha. Nobody ate them — the king placed a kapu on them — and over the next twenty years those five animals multiplied into thousands of wild cattle roaming the slopes of Mauna Kea and doing a great deal of damage.

So in 1832 King Kamehameha III sent for help, and three Mexican vaqueros arrived to teach Hawaiians how to work cattle from horseback. Hawaiians turned the word espanol into paniolo, and it still means cowboy today.

That is the part worth sitting with. Paniolo were roping cattle in the 1830s — a generation before the Civil War, and decades before the great Texas cattle drives that created the American cowboy of the popular imagination. Dodge City did not become a railhead until the 1870s.

Parker Ranch, founded at Waimea on the Big Island in 1847 by John Palmer Parker, still runs roughly 130,000 acres on the slopes of Mauna Kea and is one of the oldest and largest cattle ranches in the United States — predating many famous mainland operations by more than thirty years.

Most of the beef on the menus above still arrives by ship from the mainland, because island production cannot meet resort demand. But the ranching tradition here is older than the one it imports from.

The national chains

Hawaii carries a heavy resort-market presence: Ruth’s Chris runs three rooms in the islands — Honolulu, Waikiki and Wailea — alongside Morton’s and Empire Steak House.

Browse by city: Honolulu and Kihei.