About Hawaiʻi Eats

Who makes Hawaiʻi Eats, and how

Hawaiʻi Eats is an independent app and website by Nicholas Soderstrom: a free guide to 3,898 restaurants on Hawaii's islands, with 60 hand-checked picks for plate lunch and drive-ins, poke, saimin, shave ice, malasadas and bakeries, Hawaiian food and okazuya, musubi, loco moco and Lahaina's reopened places, plus 6 James Beard honorees. No account, no ads, no tracking.

Who makes it

Nicholas Soderstrom makes the Hawaiʻi Eats app and this site. Hawaiʻi Eats is not affiliated with, endorsed by or operated by the State of Hawaii, the Hawaii State Department of Health, the Hawaii Statewide GIS Program, any county or county liquor commission, the Hawaiʻi Tourism Authority, the U.S. Geological Survey, the James Beard Foundation, Apple, or any restaurant, university or chain.

How the lists are built

The Hawaii guides are hand-checked: each place was checked in October 2026 against a 2025 or 2026 source (the place's own website or menu, or local news), with the address checked. Founding years mean the year it opened at this address. The Aug 8, 2023 fire destroyed most of Lahaina, so a Lahaina place is listed only when a 2025 or 2026 source shows it open. Research records facts only, with a source for every place: no review text and no ratings from anyone. Places the research finds closed come off the lists. A guide gets its own page here once it has 4 places; until then it's in the app and the web search.

Honors are James Beard Foundation awards, nominees, semifinalists and America's Classics, checked by hand against the Foundation's announcements.

The rest of the 3,898 places come from Overture Maps' open place data. High-confidence map listings are kept; single listings are marked Listing only. Tested against Denver's full list of food licenses (the same map data, in Colorado), high-confidence listings matched a licensed business 76% of the time. Website links are checked, and any that no longer belong to the place are left out.

The Hawaii State Department of Health inspects every food business on every island and posts a green, yellow or red placard, but publishes results one search at a time, not in bulk, so Hawaiʻi Eats has no inspection results and gives no grade of its own; each place links DOH's food safety page (how to look up a Hawaii restaurant inspection). Ratings, reviews, hours and photos in the app are Apple Maps' own, shown live in Apple's place card; Hawaiʻi Eats doesn't store or rank by them.

Updates

This build's restaurant data is from October 21, 2026, from Overture Maps release 2026-09-23.1; the hand checks were done in October 2026. The data is rebuilt when the research or the open data changes, and corrections go into the next update. Places open and close, so check before you go.

Sources and licenses

  • Overture Maps Foundation (overturemaps.org): restaurant listings and websites, release 2026-09-23.1, filtered and reformatted for Hawaiʻi Eats. Data from Meta, Microsoft, DAC and BrightQuery, available under the Community Data License Agreement – Permissive 2.0. Data from Foursquare, © Foursquare Labs, Inc., available under the Apache License 2.0; see the notice below. Data from AllThePlaces, available under CC0 1.0.
  • Hawaii Statewide GIS Program (planning.hawaii.gov/gis): island coastlines (from U.S. Geological Survey line graphs) and 2020 Census places and county lines, public domain, used to put each place on its island and in its town. The State does not endorse Hawaiʻi Eats.
  • U.S. Geological Survey, Geographic Names Information System (public domain): the official spelling of each town, with the ʻokina and kahakō, as approved by the Hawaii Board on Geographic Names.
  • Hawaii State Department of Health: its food permit lists from 2011 (statewide) and 2013 (Oʻahu), published on the State's open data portal, used only to note that a place has history here, never as proof it's open. Permit holders' names and phone numbers are never shown.
  • County liquor commissions: Hawaii's four counties issue liquor licenses and none publishes a list Hawaiʻi Eats can read, so no place shows a license or whether it serves alcohol.
  • U.S. Census Bureau Geocoder (public domain): puts researched addresses on the map.
  • Hawaii State Department of Health, Food Safety Branch: what its placards mean (Hawaii Administrative Rules §11-50-9), and a link to its own page, not a copy of its results.
  • Honors: James Beard Foundation awards, nominees, semifinalists and America's Classics are reported as facts. James Beard Foundation and James Beard Award are trademarks of the James Beard Foundation. Other names belong to their owners.
  • Maps: island outlines from the Hawaii Statewide GIS Program (above). In the app, maps, place cards and directions are by Apple Maps.

Foursquare notice

Foursquare OS Places Notice © 2026 Foursquare Labs, Inc. All rights reserved. The Foursquare OS Places dataset (the “Data”) is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the “License”). You may not use, modify, or distribute the Data except in compliance with the License. As set forth more fully in the License, if you use, modify, or distribute the Data, you must: – provide recipients with a copy of the License. – if applicable, include prominent notices to the extent you’ve changed the Data. – preserve attribution to Foursquare, including preserving the full content of this NOTICE.txt file. To ensure appropriate attribution to Foursquare, we recommend the following: – if using/distributing the Data in flat file form as-is or after making changes/modifications: include this NOTICE.txt file, which may be modified to include an additional notice of your changes/modifications, if any. – if using/distributing the Data in API form as-is or after making changes/modifications: include a copy of the content from this NOTICE.txt file prominently in your developer documentation for such API, which may be modified to include an additional notice of your changes/modifications, if any. You may obtain a copy of the License at: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0. Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, the Data distributed under the License is distributed on an “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License. We also encourage you to join our Placemaker community where you can contribute and provide suggestions to improve the accuracy of the Data for future releases for yourself and others. Notice of changes: Hawaiʻi Eats filtered the Data to eating and drinking places in Hawaii, removed duplicates and closed, adult or unverifiable listings, and reformatted it for this app (2026).

Contact

Corrections, a missing or closed place, or anything else: nick@eatsranked.com. See also the privacy policy and terms of use.