Times Are Changing For These Three Popular Restaurants in Honolulu

Vintage Cave Honolulu on sushi break, Soul de Cuba closes and Hank’s Haute Dogs set to move.

July 20, 2015

Robbie Dingeman,

ONE OF THE PRIVATE DINING ROOMS AT VINTAGE CAVE

One of Honolulu’s more eclectic restaurants is shifting again, a downtown eatery closed and a Kaka‘ako favorite is moving.

The manager at Vintage Cave Honolulu says the high-end restaurant, built by a Japanese billionaire in the basement of Shirokiya, has stopped serving the French-inspired cuisine it has been known for and is temporarily serving only sushi.

Manager Miho Sato says the restaurant is undergoing renovations to the main dining room through at least the end of August. She says the restaurant has not announced who the chef will be when the restaurant re-opens its main dining area.

The restaurant has attracted a mix of the famous and the curious for its $295-a-person prix fixe tasting menu and its creative cuisine, especially under founding chef Chris Kajioka, who left and is planning to open his own place later this year. President Barack Obama and his wife dined at Vintage Cave during their last annual holiday visit.

Across town, and at a decidedly lower price point, downtown favorite Soul de Cuba closed July 2.

Owner Jesus Puerto recorded a voicemail thanking customers: “We greatly appreciate your patronage and loyalty over the past nine years.”

Puerto urged them to follow the restaurant’s Facebook page for news of when and where the restaurant will reopen. The eatery was best known for cubano sandwiches, black-bean chili and Cuban cuisine across from Hawai‘i Theatre.

Meanwhile, in Kaka‘ako, chef-turned-hot-dog-entrepreneur Hank Adaniya announced that Hank’s Haute Dogs will close Aug. 14 as planned renovations/construction continue.

Adaniya opened the small storefront on Coral Street in 2007, just as Kaka‘ako development was starting. “When I came to Kaka‘ako, there was not much around, and look around now, cranes everywhere,” Adaniya says.

“We’ve had a lot of good years in this shop with plenty of fond memories, so it’s sad to be moving out,” he says.

He expects to be moving into a new building next door later this summer, but says the specific date has not been finalized.

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