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Kady Pascual

Hawaiʻi Scene on Social

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Never turn your back to the ocean!"}]

ItsAlyssaBlake

<title>Hawai‘i Scene on Social: Surf report</title>

Today’s social media find comes from @ItsAlyssaBlake, who broke one of the beach safety rules.

Hawai‘i Scene on Social: Surf report

Never turn your back to the ocean!  Make sure you follow @ItsAlyssaBlake on Instagram!

Kelli Shiroma Braiotta Headshot

Kelli Shiroma Braiotta

Business & Tourism

Food & Dining

, is not, in fact, a specialty pickle shop. The business, located next door to the husband-and-wife team’s ice cream shop, 

, just celebrated its grand opening on Saturday.

“‘Little Pickle’ is actually a nickname for our 7-year-old son,” Kyle explains. “We call our five-year-old son ‘cornichon,’ so he’s the mini version of little pickle.”

While the biz does sell pickles — “We love pickles, and we serve local pickles from Ho Farms,” 

— its primary specialty is gourmet hot dogs.

[{"type":"text","text":"These aren’t your typical Costco food court hot dogs, Kyle notes."}]

“They’re all-beef, pasture-raised hot dogs with no hormones and no antibiotics,” he says. “Nowadays, a lot of people are health conscious and don’t want to put ultra-processed meats in their body. This (what we’re serving) is a super high-quality hot dog; we hunted down the perfect bun, as well.

“It took us months,” Kyle adds. “It’s so hard to find buns that don’t have preservatives. We found a local baker who could do them, and they were perfect. It was a journey to get there.”

The journey began before the couple got the space next to their ice cream shop. While they do love hot dogs, Kyle and Josephine say they were trying to come up with a savory concept that was both affordable and family friendly.

“We love food, but we love community more than food,” Kyle says. “We wanted to do something amazing next door to our ice cream shop, to keep building community and invite more people in. This spot opened up — it was supposed to be a bakery, but the couple that was doing it had to pull out for personal reasons — and it became available. It was open for a while; we decided to go for it.”

He says that if they didn’t settle on hot dogs, the space could have been a pizza, hamburger, dumplings or sandwich shop.

“We want to make places and experiences for the neighborhood,” Josephine says. “We always consider ourselves a family party that the whole neighborhood is invited to. I guess that can be manifested and expressed in many ways.

“It’s expensive to eat out in Kailua — you can’t really grab and go for anything less than $30 — and we were like, ‘What can we do?’” she adds. “There aren’t a lot of hot dogs on the Island. We really challenged ourselves to find a relatively healthy hot dog with no nitrates.”

The couple officially got the space last December, but say the build out and sourcing for their products took longer than expected.

Little Pickle’s opening menu features six specialty hot dogs ($12 each); flavors will rotate every month or two, according to Kyle. Customers can choose from Chicago, Seattle, nori, chili cheese, tropickle and L.A. Dirty dogs.

“They’re all kind of different and unique; they all have sweet and savory flavors,” Kyle says. “Jo is from L.A., so for her, the L.A. Dirty Dog is kind of like a homecoming. The chili cheese dog is my favorite — just savory and delicious; you put cheese and onions on top of that, I won’t say ‘no.’”

The business’s Chicago dog features an all-beef, premium hot dog with yellow mustard, sweet relish, chopped white onions, tomato wedges, pickled sport peppers, poppy seeds, celery salt and a dill pickle spear. Meanwhile, the Seattle dog features a schmear of whipped cream cheese, housemade yellow onion jam, a sliced jalapeno and Sriracha zig zag.

“We didn’t even know what a Seattle dog was, initially,” Kyle says. “Somebody came in and was like, ‘You should do a Seattle dog.’ We looked it up; apparently, it’s a whole thing to put cream cheese and jalapenos. The nori dog is for people who love kewpie mayo; it has Japanese flavors.”

For customers who want something unique, Kyle recommends the tropickle dog, which comes with lilikoʻi mustard and pineapple-mango salsa. Josephine says the biz will eventually offer a vegan and vegetarian option.

He says the flavors will keep rotating — with the exception of the Chicago dog and chili cheese dog, which will likely stay on the menu — to give customers new options to try. He says they also want to do chef partnerships and collaborate with different chefs to create a specialty hog dog.

“We’ll create something really special (with them),” he says. “We’re also going to have fun and maybe do meatball sandwiches, oysters on the half shell and fun things that we rotate in to keep it exciting.”

Besides its gourmet hot dogs, Little Pickle also offers side dishes — ranging from kale yuzu salad ($9) to chili cheese fritos ($8) — and drinks.

“We make our own agua frescas ($5),” Josephine says. “We do a liliko

i iced tea and yuzu lemonade. We do a pickled Coke ($6), which features salty, dill pickle brine. Since we have the ice cream shop next door, we’ll have root beer floats (with Please Come Again’s vanilla ice cream) as well.”

While the business will start by opening from noon to 8 p.m. Wednesdays to Sundays, Josephine says the shop’s goal is to eventually open from 8 a.m.

“We’ll start serving breakfast sandwiches,” she says. “Then, as soon as we can, we’ll open more days. We’ll probably always be closed on Mondays.”

“We just wanted to have fun (with this new concept); accessibility, quality and affordability are important to us,” Kyle adds. “We just want to give people a high-quality option that doesn’t break the bank; something they can pick up on the way home from the beach.”

Open 12 to 8 p.m. Wednesdays to Sundays, closed Mondays and Tuesdays

Parking available in the surrounding municipal lots 

Little Pickle owners 100226

<title>Little Pickle is a new specialty hot dog shop in Kailua</title>

Located next to Please Come Again Ice Cream, Little Pickle celebrated its grand opening this past Saturday. The biz specializes in all-beef, pasture-raised hot dogs made with no hormones, nitrates or antibiotics. Choose from a rotating selection of flavors, ranging from the Chicago dog and chili cheese dog to the Japanese-inspired nori dog.

Little Pickle is a new specialty hot dog shop in Kailua

De Soto 2025

DeSoto Brown

Hawai‘i History

Columnists

You can barely see it today, but once Kaka‘ako was largely composed of numerous individual homes. Constructed of wood starting around 1910-1915, and surrounded by yards with abundant trees, these houses were the signature of the district. Nobody was rich in Kakaako and this low-income population was, not surprisingly, prone to unsupervised children and a problem with crime. But this would start to change after the end of World War II in 1945 when the varied businesses already present would begin to gradually take over from residents as their property leases ended. Land owners sought the higher rents they could receive from commercial tenants, and Kakaako shifted mostly to this use.

Back when Kaka‘ako was home to thousands of people, necessary services and amenities were provided for them. Two examples of these were the Pohukaina Elementary School and its one-time playground /park, and the Kewalo Theater. The school is gone, the park remains, and the theater still exists although no films have been shown there for very close to 70 years.

By 1912, enough children resided in Kaka‘ako to justify the construction of a school there, leading to the completion of a two-story concrete building for the new Pohukaina School in January 1913. Over decades, other structures also came to occupy the grounds, but as the number of students in the area dropped the Department of Education pivoted to accommodating handicapped children at the school by 1967. Eventually, these were shifted to Waialae Elementary and Kaimukī Intermediate and Pohukaina at this location closed in 1980. By January 1987 only 14 school-aged kids were determined to currently be living in Kaka‘ako.

Debates about the Pohukaina site took place after its closure. As plans for the massive redevelopment of Kakaako were projected in the 1980s and ‘90s, some argued that a new school would be needed for new residents, but not surprisingly, a highrise condo today occupies part of the property.

An important historic figure in Kaka‘ako’s history was Mrs. Margaret Waldron, an Irish-Hawaiian woman who labored tirelessly for decades as a social worker in what was then a notoriously tough district.

Known to all by the affectionate nickname of “Mother Waldron” she began her time in Kaka‘ako as a teacher at Pohukaina School for 18 years before becoming the Director of Recreation at a neighborhood park. Her devotion to combating gangs and crime, particularly when it touched children, and serving as a positive and helpful influence was honored in June 1930 with the naming of the Pohukaina School’s playground as Mother Waldron Park. There she continued her instructional work, speaking of how she would be teaching girls the skills of sewing and cooking in a small structure in this new park. 

Her life came to an end in May 1936 but the following year, improvements and new structures in Mother Waldron Playground would be dedicated in September 1937. These cost $50,000 (or $1,162,417 in 2026 dollars) in government funding and the labor was provided through the federal government’s Works Progress Agency (WPA), an anti-Depression body that constructed innumerable public improvements all over the USA. These are still in place today; most immediately recognizable is the low zig-zag cement block wall on the ‘ewa side of the site.

In 1976 the Hawai‘i Community Redevelopment Agency was created to make over Kaka‘ako, and in 1981 its first plans for this project were presented. A foundational part of this government body’s goal was to improve the district’s infrastructure and in 1988 this led to the widening of both Pohukaina and Cooke Streets by 10 feet along with a major realignment of the latter. Along with condemnations and the clearing of former structures on its Waikīkī side, Mother Waldron Park approximately doubled in size.

The removal of Coral Street along the park’s other boundary added even more land to it in 1992. This was a wise move for the recreational needs of the increasing number of condo residents around it who would come in the future.

Kaka‘ako’s population in 1937 was significant enough to warrant the construction of the Kewalo Theater at the corner of Cooke and Queen Streets. Newspaper publicity for this event stated that the neighborhood was then “one of the largest and most densely populated sections in Honolulu.”

Consolidated Amusement, the biggest cinema chain in the Hawaiian Islands at that time, spent $75,000 ($1,743,626 in today's dollars) to open the latest of what it called “Neighborhood Playhouses” which served residential areas. Programs changed every day, which was true of all of Consolidated’s small theaters then, and admission was 25c for adults and only 10c for children ten years old and under.

Less than 20 years later, the Kewalo Theater was closed due to dwindling audiences as Kaka‘ako lost residents displaced by commercial tenants. Consolidated retained ownership of the empty structure for years and used it for storage, and surprisingly it still exists today. Currently occupying what had been the theater’s auditorium is the Lonohana Chocolate Company, and visitors who take a tour to see the variety of machinery which processes raw cocoa beans into tasty treats can also see remnants of the Kewalo’s 1930s interior decor still present on the walls and ceiling.

Kaka‘ako’s future growth will continue to displace the small industrial businesses that the area has been known for over the past decades, just as these displaced residents and private homes starting after World War II. As this process continues, we’ll see the diversity of Kaka‘ako today — as messy as it sometimes is — disappear as increasingly sterile new towers continue their takeover.

1 Ahui SP 31143 16x9

<title>Changing Kakaako: Once a residential neighborhood</title>

More than a century ago, the modern development of Kaka‘ako started as modest, wooden single-family homes. Over time, these were displaced businesses. ASD historian DeSoto Brown takes down these streets of Kaka‘ako as they looked then, and now.

Changing Kakaako: Once a residential neighborhood

Higa headshot white shirt square

Sterling Higa

For five weeks this summer, the largest naval exercise in the world is anchored off our islands. Thirty-one nations sent forty gray hulls, five submarines, and aircraft that cross our sky from June into July. The drill has a storyline, and the storyline involves an enemy fleet. The Navy is too polite to say whose, but everyone watching knows it is China.

It is a strange thing to watch a wargame from your own lānai, stranger still to do it while the shelves are full and the children have soccer practice. But RIMPAC poses a question that has nothing to do with the Navy. What do you trust to keep you safe?

A generation ago, a clever man thought he had the answer. The Soviet Union was folding and the Cold War was ending. Francis Fukuyama wrote that liberal democracy had become the final form of human government. The argument was over. The West had won, and the rest was paperwork.

The headlines have not cooperated since then. Iran is run by clerics who believe history bends their way. After American and Israeli bombs fell this spring, they closed the Strait of Hormuz.

In Venezuela, a long experiment in socialism had already emptied the shelves. Two earthquakes forty seconds apart killed close to a thousand people, and the digging is not done.

China keeps spending, patient and sure of itself, buying ports and roads from Africa to the South China Sea. And in Washington, the government that supposedly won the argument at the end of history can barely pass a budget.

Each of these countries has made a wager. Tehran trusts its missiles, Caracas trusted its strongman, Beijing trusts its ships, and we trust ours. Every government asks for a single arrangement of power to last forever.

From the middle of the Pacific, all the news can feel like someone else’s weather. Prices have climbed here too — gas, eggs, the usual. But the stations still pump and the warehouse stores still stack the pallets high. Ours is a rich country, with land and oil to spare. We are heirs to ordered liberty and markets freer than most, though never quite as free as their champions liked to claim.

A man may enjoy fine weather, but he gets into trouble when he begins to believe he arranged it.

This December marks 85 years since the bombing of Pearl Harbor. One morning, a great many certainties vanished, and Hawaiʻi was plunged into a World War. We are not the quiet edge of the map. We are the middle of it — the center of somebody else’s plan.

The families on base do not need a columnist to tell them this. They read it in the deployment calendar. They know something the rest of us can easily forget at Costco: Our safety has always leaned on somebody’s fleet.

Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lᴏʀᴅ our God. The fleet in our harbor is a great strength, but a poor god. We shouldn’t ask it to be one because it cannot do the job.

This is bad news for two kinds of people. It is bad news for the man who reads the headlines, buys a bunker, and decides that because nothing lasts, nothing is worth building. And it is bad news for his cheerful cousin. He mistakes American power for the kingdom of God and salutes the flag as though it were an altar. The God who rules the Strait of Hormuz and controls the fault lines under Caracas also governs the loading dock at Costco.

So build the things that survive war. Not the bunker, but the congregation, the friendship with a neighbor across the fence, the school for your children’s children. Build the small, local groups that can catch a falling family before the federal government has heard them fall. That is not retreat. It is a readiness that does not depend on chariots.

The ships will be at sea tomorrow, training in the same water that smoked in 1941. The clever man was wrong, though not in the way the frightened expect. History is not finished, and it is not finished because it is going somewhere — toward an end already chosen, by Someone who is not nervous. So we watch the gray hulls with thanks and without fear.

Destroyers in Pearl Harbor i Stock 2022

<title>RIMPAC 2026: Hawaiʻi, China, and the Question Underneath</title>

The children have soccer practice while, a few miles offshore, 31 nations rehearse a war. ASD opinion columnist Sterling Higa on what Hawaiʻi trusts to keep it safe.

Hawai‘i Scene on Social: Surf report

Kady Pascual

Social Media & Marketing Manager

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Hawai‘i Scene on Social: Surf report

Authors

Kady Pascual

Social Media & Marketing Manager

More in Hawaiʻi Scene on Social

Enter for a chance to win tickets to see Disney’s live action adaptation of the animated film ‘Moana’

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