Tūtū’s Place by Highway Inn — located between Hawaiian Hall and the J. Watumull Planetarium at Bishop Museum — has been in its soft opening phase for a few weeks now. Inspired by the culture and traditions passed down by kūpuna (elders), Tūtū’s Place is named in honor of Nancy Toguchi, who co-founded Highway Inn with her husband, Seiichi, according to third-generation Highway Inn owner Monica Toguchi Ryan.
Toguchi Ryan has fond memories of Sunday dinners in Waipahu with her grandpa, but says that her grandma died in 1975, when Toguchi Ryan was only around 3 years old.
“How I’ve gotten to know my grandmother was really through the stories that customers shared with me,” she says. “As we know here in Hawaiʻi, ‘tūtū’ is an endeared term, typically for our grandmothers. In this case, I really wanted to honor my grandmother, Nancy Toguchi, and all of the tūtūs out there, both in Hawaiʻi and across the oceans. They’ve often been the keepers of recipes and cultural preservation.
“When we think about who we ask for a good banana bread recipe or a mango bread recipe, it’s typically our tūtū,” she adds. “For some people, it’s their grandfather. Tūtū’s Place is really named in honor of our grandmothers and grandfathers.”
Highway Inn was established in 1947 and has grown to be a recognized establishment for Hawaiian comfort food. Through Tūtū’s Place, Toguchi Ryan says they hope to share the traditional flavors Highway Inn has been cooking for both local families and visitors alike for more than 75 years.
The menu at Tūtū’s Place reflects Hawaiʻi’s diverse culinary heritage through a variety of permanent dishes and rotating specials. Customers will find signature dishes from Highway Inn, including the business’s famed Hawaiian plate ($16.99), which includes kiawe-wood smoked shredded pork, white rice, ‘uala (sweet potato) and choice of lomi salmon, potato-mac salad or mixed greens with lilikoʻi dressing, plus haupia for dessert.
“Our Hawaiian plate is probably our most popular dish that we serve at Tūtū’s Place,” Toguchi Ryan says.
Meanwhile, the business’s lau lau plate ($21.99) — pork or chicken lau lau with poi or white rice, ‘uala, lomi salmon and haupia — and squid lūʻau ($12.99) are served only on Fridays and Saturdays. Squid lūʻau, which features steamed lūʻau leaves that are cooked in coconut milk with pieces of octopus or squid, is a dish Highway Inn is also well known for, according to Toguchi Ryan.
Other dishes are cafe-exclusives, but feature familiar elements from Highway Inn’s menu. For example, the smoked meat & onions flatbread ($15.99) — complete with onions, bell peppers, green onions and a drizzle of smoked aioli — features the business’s popular smoked meat.
“We do a really fun dish at our restaurant; it’s called the Smoked Moco,” Toguchi Ryan says. “We’ve taken that concept and put it on a flatbread so it’s easy to eat, like a pizza.”
The menu also features plate lunches — Hawaiian-style beef stew plate ($16.99) and miso chicken plate ($16.99) — along with a variety of sourdough melts ($15.99), poke bowls ($15.99 for tofu, market price for ‘ahi), and a variety of local snacks like Portuguese sausage hot dogs ($8.99) and Spam musubi ($2.99).
Tūtū’s Place also features vegetarian-friendly options, including a tofu watercress salad ($16.99), roasted veggie wrap ($15.99), lūʻau veggie flatbread pizza ($15.99) and lūʻau veggie tart ($7.99). The latter features a lūʻau spread topped with roasted zucchini, bell peppers and eggplant on a flaky puff pastry. It’s garnished with green onions and cherry tomatoes.
Keep an eye out for rotating weekly specials. The cafe featured a pork adobo dish last week, according to Toguchi Ryan.
“The goal for Tūtū’s Place is also to honor other types of dishes,” she says. “What we’re looking forward to here is to continue highlighting different ethnic cuisines that a lot of us are familiar with here in Hawaiʻi, but maybe not if you are visiting Hawaiʻi.”
Future specials will likely include popular dishes sold at Highway Inn — including the eatery’s famed hamburger steak — and other okazuya specialties, according to Toguchi Ryan.
“The one thing about Hawaiʻi that’s really unique is many of our grandparents and parents ate very simply,” she says. “That was driven by the economic hardships of the generations that came before us. It’s in that spirit to honor that time period. We grew up eating luncheon meat and Vienna sausage; perhaps some of us don’t eat that as often as we used to. But I think there’s an importance to that, in the sense that it brings back a lot of childhood memories that we may have forgotten.”
Tūtū’s Place also offers espresso drinks featuring locally roasted coffee from Tradition Coffee Roasters, along with freshly baked pastries like banana bread ($2.99), guava or lilikoʻi-mango mousse cake ($4.99) and chocolate chip mac nut cookies (three-pack for $3.99, six-pack for $6.99).
“What we really tried to do at Tūtū’s Place was to honor Highway Inn’s story, but also recognize that there are modern things that we have now available to us that people appreciate,” Toguchi Ryan says. “We have a much wider coffee menu — that’s not something that we do at Highway Inn, but that’s something that people love.”
The cafe’s interior is modeled after a plantation-era home, and is designed to be a comfortable space for families, according to Toguchi Ryan. It features vintage decor items — including a rotary phone and lunch boxes — a communal dining table, and a keiki play corner.
“It probably took me more than a year to collect different antique pieces,” Toguchi Ryan says. “The design really is a reflection of our culture here in Hawaiʻi and many different ethnic groups that have contributed to our understanding of what a tūtū’s house might look like, back in the day.”
Creating a keiki play area was important to Toguchi Ryan, who loves seeing parents interacting with their children.
“If we’re going to say keiki are our future, then it’s the physical spaces — whether it’s public spaces or private spaces — that really demonstrate they are important,” she says. “We have a wonderful keiki space, and I’ve seen parents sitting down, playing with their keiki.”
The cafe’s Wall of Discovery — which pays homage to the building’s history as the museum’s former Hall of Discovery — depicts archival photographs that showcases a timeline of Hawaiʻi’s food history, according to Toguchi Ryan.
“It takes you from pre-contact to European contact to the plantation period to the war, and then from the 1960s to modern-day Hawaiʻi,” she says. “Hopefully, this space will become someplace where you enjoy eating, but you can also learn something about our shared collective Hawaiʻi food story.”
Particularly notable is the cafe’s wallpaper, which is inspired by vintage menu covers, according to Toguchi Ryan.
“DeSoto Brown, the renowned historian here at the Bishop Museum, has an amazing collection of many things — one of them is vintage menu covers,” she says. “DeSoto shared with us many restaurants that were really popular, but no longer exist. We took some of those vintage menu covers and turned it into a customized wallpaper. Hopefully, when people walk in, they’ll remember places like Kapiolani Drive Inn and The Willows.
“There are so many stories that get lost and buried over time,” she adds. “Hopefully this space is a good reminder of where we came from, and to ground us in that story of who we are today.”
In the future, Tūtū’s Place will host talk-story sessions and special events that celebrate cultural knowledge and food.
Tūtū’s Place is open daily from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Museum admission is not required to dine at Tūtū’s Place. The cafe provides two-hour validated parking for restaurant patrons ($10 minimum purchase required).
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CONTACT
Tūtū’s Place
Bishop Museum
1525 Bernice St., Honolulu
808-954-4951
Instagram: @tutusplace
Open 10:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m. Mondays-Sundays (closed on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day)
Two-hour validated parking for restaurant patrons ($10 minimum purchase required)
Kelli Shiroma Braiotta can be reached at kelli@alohastatedaily.com.
