Kelli Shiroma Braiotta Headshot

Kelli Shiroma Braiotta

Food & Dining

You can get a free Spam musubi on Aug. 8 at 

LL Hawaiian Barbecue sign 072126

In honor of National Spam Musubi Day, participating 

i and on the Mainland are giving away free Spam musubis between 12 and 4 p.m.

Select L&L Hawaiian Barbecue locations will have entertainment and additional deals. The first 100 customers in line will get an exclusive National Spam Musubi Day sticker, according to L&L’s 

The annual food holiday — which was created by L&L Hawaiian Barbecue in 2021 — pays homage to Hawaiʻi’s “808” area code.

The business began more than 70 years ago and has 

For the latest news of Hawai‘i, sign up 

LL Hawaiian Barbecue spam musubi 072126

<title>L&L Hawaiian Barbecue is giving out free Spam musubis on Aug. 8</title>

In honor of National Spam Musubi Day, participating L&L Hawaiian Barbecue locations in Hawaiʻi and on the Mainland are giving away free Spam musubis from 12 to 4 p.m.

L&L Hawaiian Barbecue is giving out free Spam musubis on Aug. 8

You can get a free Spam musubi on Aug. 8 at L&amp;L Hawaiian Barbecue.  In honor of National Spam Musubi Day, participating L&amp;L Hawaiian Barbecue locations in Hawaiʻi and on the Mainland are giving away free Spam musubis between 12 and 4 p.m. Select L&amp;L Hawaiian Barbecue locations will have entertainment and additional deals. The first 100 customers in line will get an exclusive National Spam Musubi Day sticker, according to L&amp;L’s website. The annual food holiday — which was created by L&amp;L Hawaiian Barbecue in 2021 — pays homage to Hawaiʻi’s “808” area code. The business began more than 70 years ago and has more than 235 locations worldwide. L&amp;L Hawaiian Barbecue has opened 13 new locations in eight states so far this year. CONTACTL&amp;L Hawaiian BarbecueVarious locationshawaiianbarbecue.com For the latest news of Hawai‘i, sign up here for our free Daily Edition newsletter.

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ASD Staff

Daily Smile

You don't intimidate me, you're going to be my best friend whether you like it or not!

Smile 26 7 27

<title>Daily Smile: Monday, July 27, 2026</title>

Daily Smile: Monday, July 27, 2026

i’s first solo dining katsu experience is opening in Honolulu.

, located in the former space of Little G Café, is opening to the public in the 808 Center on Wednesday, July 29. The business will be open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day except Mondays.

The new eatery’s concept is focused on an individualized dining experience. It’s reminiscent of 

, the popular Japanese ramen chain that’s known for its solo dining booths.

The business is still owned by Jared Brown — owner of Little G Café — who explains that the individual dining booths are inspired by the idea that food can be enjoyed and savored without distraction.

“Everybody here understands katsu,” he says. “We want customers to enjoy themselves and not feel rushed, not feel pressured.”

Little G Café’s interior has been transformed to offer solo dining booths; the counter can seat 12 individuals. No reservations will be accepted; seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis.

However, if you’re dining with another person, the partitions can be taken down so individuals can eat together.

Scan the QR code to look at the menu, order and pay. You can communicate with the staff by using the wooden tags (“more rice, please;” “more cabbage, please”) and ringing the bell at your booth for assistance.

The menu features a variety of katsu sets and bowls. Choose from pork loin tonkatsu (240-gram and 180-gram portions available), pork collar, chicken katsu and tiger shrimp katsu. At the time of our media preview, menu prices were not finalized.

Sets include rice and soup; customers and enjoy unlimited rice and cabbage. Everything is made to order, and the sauces are made in house.

Customers can also get sesame seeds with a grinder to mix with the business’s tonkatsu sauce, which features a sweet-yet-tangy flavor.

The pork loin katsu and pork collar are expected to be bestsellers. The shrimp katsu is also expected to be a customer favorite, due to its generous portion.

This experience is currently available for dine-in only; no takeout for now.

“We wanted to feature something that was interesting and familiar at the same time,” Brown says. “Plus, nobody does this concept here; we’ll give it a shot and see what happens.”

Open from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesdays to Sundays (closed Mondays)

Katsu Zen tonkatsu 072626

<title>Hawaiʻi’s first solo dining katsu experience is opening in Honolulu</title>

Katsu Zen — located in the former space of Little G Café in the 808 Center — is opening to the public on Wednesday, July 29. Customers can scan the QR code and choose from a variety of katsu bowls and sets; options include pork loin, pork collar, chicken katsu and tiger shrimp katsu.

Hawaiʻi’s first solo dining katsu experience is opening in Honolulu

Higa headshot white shirt square

Sterling Higa

Government & Politics

Columnists

Hawaiʻi now has more residents 65 and older than children under 18.

At statehood, the Islands were young. They are not anymore.

This did not simply happen. Some of it was planned. The man who led the planning died in April at the age of 100, after a long life of honorable service. He counted the slowing of Hawaiʻi’s growth among his proudest achievements.

Gov. George Ariyoshi led the state of Hawaiʻi for 13 years, from 1973 to 1986 — longer than anyone before or since. He belonged to the last generation that believed, without irony, that government could improve the condition of man. He dressed for the office he held: pressed suits, perfect hair, a bearing that reminded people of Kennedy. He and his wife Jean matched the dignity of the role. Today’s politicians often carry the detachment of people who half-suspect the whole thing is theater. Ariyoshi never did.

Ariyoshi was not a cynic or a schemer. He was a capable, earnest man who believed the most respected experts of his age. And the experts were wrong.

In 1968, a Stanford biologist named Paul Ehrlich published 

. It opened by declaring the battle to feed humanity already lost. Hundreds of millions would starve in the coming decade, he warned, no matter what anyone did. Four years later, the Club of Rome released a report built on a computer model. Factor in population growth, food, resource depletion, industry, and pollution, and the machine predicted total collapse. The model was treated less like a guess and more like an oracle.

The books sold millions. But beneath the charts sat one assumption: that a human being is a mouth and nothing more. The models saw people as problems, never as problem solvers. Every child arrived on the ledger with a minus sign.

Scripture starts from the opposite premise. “Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from him,” says Psalm 127. A blessing, not a burden.

The blessings came. The same humans the models had written off went on to breed drought-resistant crops and feed them manmade fertilizer. Famine retreated to the margins of the earth. A trucker named Malcom McLean packed cargo into standard steel boxes, and over the next 50 years the shipping container rewired world trade. Moving goods became so cheap that distance nearly stopped mattering. A farmer in Iowa could feed a family in Osaka, and a factory anywhere could serve customers everywhere.

None of this was in the model. A computer could extend a curve. But it could not foresee the impact of a steel box.

Where the prophets were believed most completely, the results were darkest. China’s One Child Policy enforced the arithmetic with forced abortions and sterilizations.

Hawaiʻi’s response was gentler, and the worry behind it was not lunacy. The Islands grew fast after the war — new subdivisions, new hotels climbing out of the sand at Waikīkī. A reasonable person standing in the governor’s office in 1975, watching the curves climb, could honestly ask how much the Islands could carry.

Ariyoshi’s answer was “managed growth.” He used no coercion. Instead, he built a State Plan that set targets for slowing population growth. And he wielded a Land Use Commission that kept most land closed to building. What land remained was wrapped in red tape that slowed development to a tree snail’s pace.

The plan worked the way a tourniquet works. Growth slowed, as did homebuilding. The supply of houses fell behind the number of families who needed them. Prices did what prices always do when many people chase few homes. Working families were priced out, then pushed out — to Las Vegas, to Texas, to anywhere the math still worked. The state that set out to slow the growth of its population ended by exporting its children.

Ariyoshi never disowned the project. In 2009 he published a short book looking back on 50 years of statehood. In it he wrote with evident satisfaction that annual population growth had “slowed to about 1.5 percent, at least partly due to managed growth policies.” In the same pages he looked ahead: by 2035, he projected, our state’s population would be 1.6 million people.

Ariyoshi was optimistic. Hawaiʻi’s population has declined now in five of the past six years and is below its peak of 1.45 million. The model missed again, this time in the other direction.

The planners who could not foresee abundance also could not foresee the empty cradle. Today, Hawaiʻi has nearly twice the population it had in 1972, yet has 

The old ideas did not die when the famines failed to arrive on schedule. They split. One branch grew more radical. There are people today who describe humanity as a cancer on the planet, who greet falling birth rates as good news, who tally each new child chiefly as a carbon cost. That is the same arithmetic with the mask off: People as problems, all the way down.

The other branch grew respectable, and it lives closer to home. The staunchest defenders of Ariyoshi’s machinery today are not socialists. They are homeowners whose home values owe much to the scarcity his policies built. Many are conservatives who distrust government in every arena except land use. They praise the free market on Tuesday and testify against the apartment project next door on Wednesday. Managed growth survives because scarcity has shareholders.

Ariyoshi deserves better than blame and worse than a shrine. He placed too much faith in academics to predict the future and too much faith in the state to control it. In this he was a man of his time.

Every generation believes some prophecy. Ours may be the conviction that decline is destiny — that the young will leave, that the schools will empty, that the best a government can do is manage the shrinking.

There is another way to plan. Build as if children are a blessing. Open land for the families we hope to welcome rather than ration it to keep out the ones we fear. Build the houses, the classrooms, and the roads for a Hawaiʻi that grows, and let families, churches, and builders do the work the models never accounted for.

A state that plans for decline will get it. A state that receives the next generation as a gift may be surprised by what that gift brings with it.

The Islands were young once. They could be young again.

Empty playground

<title>Hawaiʻi population decline: How George Ariyoshi’s managed growth policies shaped today’s…</title>

George Ariyoshi dressed for the office he held and trusted the most respected experts of his age — and the experts were wrong. ASD opinion columnist Sterling Higa on the population prophecy that failed twice.

Hawaiʻi population decline: How George Ariyoshi’s managed growth policies shaped today’s crisis

Stephanie Salmons Headshot

Stephanie Salmons

Business & Tourism

The best of Hawai‘i — the best family attraction, cruise, lū‘au, resort, restaurant and tour company — has been decided by voters in USA Today's 10Best Readers' Choice Awards.

Nominees in each category were chosen with the help of a panel of experts but the winners were determined by votes and announced July 22.

[{"type":"text","text":"Here's who made the cut in 2026:"}]

Oahu aerial unsplash 051525

<title>Here's the best of Hawai‘i, according to the people</title>

The best family attraction, cruise, lū‘au, resort, restaurant and tour company in Hawai‘i have been decided by voters in USA Today's 10Best Readers' Choice Awards. Read on to see who made the lists.

Here's the best of Hawai‘i, according to the people

This session the legislature raised the income tax on anyone in Hawaiʻi earning more than a million dollars a year. Our 13% top rate now sits among the nation’s highest.

The bill passed quietly. The papers noted it the way they note a road repaving: a thing done, presumably good, needing no comment.

Nobody is weeping for people earning a million dollars a year.

That is precisely why the tax deserves a second look. The measures that pass without argument reveal what a society has stopped arguing about.

Envy is the one vice that never announces itself. Pride struts and greed hoards, but envy always arrives dressed as justice. A tax on millionaires feels like fairness. But fairness is not the only good.

A society can absorb a great deal of unfairness and survive. What it cannot survive is a politics that runs on resentment.

Envy used to know where its target lived. The peasant could see the landlord’s manor from his field, and the plantation worker could see the manager’s house from the rows of pineapple. Hawaiʻi’s own labor movement emerged from those fields with real grievances.

Wealth has since moved out of sight. It lives in brokerage accounts and holding companies now, not on estates. The wealth of the super rich has become intangible, and even their ranches are mirages. Mark Zuckerberg feeds his cattle macadamia nuts on Kauaʻi but eats perfectly well at his home in Palo Alto. Meanwhile, beachfront hotels in Waikīkī are owned by thousands of shareholders. You cannot storm an investment portfolio.

Envy is fed like a furnace. Social media puts every lifestyle on earth in every pocket in Hawaiʻi, heaping the coal into the flames. Envy becomes a mood — a low, constant awareness that somebody, somewhere, has the kitchen or the vacation or the body you were denied. A mood cannot be satisfied, but it can be channeled, and it is channeled toward whatever target happens to be within reach.

On Maui, neighbors were within reach. The short-term-rental phase-out was sold in the language of housing justice, taking from the wealthy to shelter the poor. But the owners it actually strikes are schoolteachers, retirees, the upper middle class — and a seaside condo in Kīhei carrying a $3,000-a-month maintenance fee cannot be cut into four pieces and handed to four needy families. It can only be made worthless, which is a strange kind of charity.

The county plans to phase out roughly 7,000 units, though a cleanup bill 

 could exempt 4,500 units. That suggests Maui’s councilmembers have noticed the problem.

The partisans of envy are running the same play on the Mainland. New York has Mamdani's pied-à-terre tax. California has a wealth tax on the ballot, from which the billionaires are already excusing themselves by moving out of state.

The fair-minded reader will object that we owe something to the needy, and the reader is right. The widow and the orphan have a standing claim on us, and it’s older than any state. But the objection assumes the claim must be discharged through the state. Taxes for the rich, assistance programs for the poor.

Hawaiʻi already carries one of the heaviest state-and-local tax burdens in the country. The needy are not much better off for it. The burden of our state shows up in the rent, in the grocery bill, in the exodus of local families headed to Las Vegas. A man who can imagine no way to feed a widow except by voting to tax his neighbor has not discovered compassion. He has misplaced his imagination, and it is worth asking where he lost it.

He lost it at school. Consider the life of the average humanities Ph.D.: nine years spent in college and graduate school, paid for with loans and forgone wages. Now, a lottery for a shrinking number of academic posts, stagnant pay, and a publish or perish culture.

Nearing 30, our young doctor has many degrees, but no clear path to supporting a family. He has to take a part-time job as a barista to pay the bills. Meanwhile, his high school classmate who skipped college to fix air conditioners owns a home by the time of their 10-year class reunion.

A man in the professor’s position does not need much to grow resentful. He only needs to marinate. The trouble is that his marinade becomes his students’ curriculum. The resentment gets footnoted and graded. The graduates leave catechized in a simple creed: every problem is a distribution problem, and every solution is a state solution. Take from the rich, and give to the poor. Take from them, and give to me.

Our young professor enjoys a standard of living beyond nearly every human who has ever lived. He carries in his pocket marvels his grandparents would have gladly sweated in the pineapple fields to afford. None of it satisfies. He only needs to see someone doing slightly better, and the resentment is stoked again. Social media is happy to oblige.

That is why the millionaire tax will not be the last. Envy is not a debt that can be paid down because every payment enlarges the claim. When the millionaires have been taxed, the mood will remain, and it will go looking for whoever is next within reach.

This is an old road. The first murder was not committed for money or land. It was committed because one brother’s offering was blessed and the other’s offering was not. Envy had finished its work in Cain long before he lifted his hand. It hollowed him first. It always hollows the envier first, depriving him of the blessings he has by making them invisible.

The exit is not a cleverer tax or a purer market. It is contentment — the settled conviction of having received more than one was owed. It frees a man to look at his neighbor’s good fortune and simply be glad.

Nobody weeps for millionaires. Nobody needs to. They were never the ones in danger.

Firefly Gemini Flash illustration of tax a millionaire 593166

<title>Hawaiʻi millionaire tax: Why the new 13% bracket won’t be the last</title>

The millionaire tax passed with barely a murmur. ASD opinion columnist Sterling Higa on why the measures nobody argues about deserve the second look.

Hawaiʻi millionaire tax: Why the new 13% bracket won’t be the last

For business owner Vanessa Pascua, taking over 

 last year was a full-circle moment. She heard the okazuya was for sale, but didn’t seriously contemplate buying it at first.

“I was still pregnant with my son (when I found out it was for sale),” she says. “I worked for Todd (Matsumoto, the owner of Matsumoto’s Okazuya) when I was 15; it was actually my first job.

“I joked with Jay (my business partner), ‘It would be crazy if we took it over,’” she remembers.

The okazuya stayed on Pascua’s mind, and she ended up reaching out to Matsumoto about the space.

“I texted him, ‘Do you remember me, I used to work for you,’ and he was like, ‘Yes, Vanessa, how could I forget you?’” she chuckles. “I told him that I was interested in buying. We bought the business, but we didn’t buy the property. If we hadn’t taken over, he would have closed by December 2025, and that would have been it.”

Pascua and Jay Palma officially took over the business last August. Matsumoto’s Okazuya opened in 2005, so the duo took over during its 20th anniversary.

“The day we took over, we did free chow fun with every purchase,” Pascua says. “It didn’t matter if you just bought a drink; it was one free order of chow fun per person. We want to do that every year, in honor of us taking over.”

On Aug. 1 — the business’s one-year anniversary under Pascua and Palma’s ownership — customers can enjoy a free chow fun order with purchase. The business is now called Matsumoto’s Okazuya by JV Kitchen — for Jay and Vanessa — but its menu is mostly the same, according to Pascua.

Customers can choose from an assortment of okazu items — ranging from chow mein ($3.63) and fried chicken ($3.63) to fish patty ($3.12), kimchi sausage ($2.86) and croquettes ($2.08) — or choose from pre-set bentos.

When it comes to the okazu offerings, Pascua recommends the vegetable tempura, kimchi sausage, garlic chicken and chow fun noodles.

“Our kimchi sausage is good; I don’t think a lot of other places have that,” she says.

[{"type":"text","text":"She also encourages customers to keep an eye out for featured specials."}]

“Jay is really good at cooking,” she says. “Even prior to buying the restaurant, he’s always made his own concoctions; that’s where the specials come from. Sometimes he features Filipino dishes and fish items like butteryaki and furikake ‘ahi katsu.”

While the biz often sells out of its okazu items by noon, they do their best to accommodate customers, Pascua says.

“If you give us a call, we’ll put the food off to the side,” she says. “If someone wants to pre-order, we place it (their food) on the side and put it in heaters.”

The okazuya’s Matsumoto ($15.52), Tyler ($14.49) and Taylor ($15.52) bentos are still on the menu, according to Pascua; the latter two are named after Matsumoto’s kids. Newer additions include the JV bento ($14.49) — which includes white rice with furikake, JV garlic chicken, hoki, tofu nuggets, teriyaki hamburger and takuan — and the fish bento ($16.10). The latter features chow mein and white rice with miso butterfish, teriyaki beef, hoki, a fried oyster and a tofu nugget.

“We just came out with the JV bento,” Pascua says. “We were brainstorming what we wanted in the bento; I like teri hamburgers and smashburgers, so we did a hamburger patty and teri sauce. I love the garlic chicken; not a lot of people get it because they don’t know how good it is.

“The prices on our menus are all card prices; it’s cheaper if you pay cash,” she adds.

The biz also features daily plates — which are more plate lunch-style — and include two scoops of white rice and one scoop of potato mac salad. The barbecue mix ($17.60) — barbecue chicken, teriyaki beef and kalbi — JV garlic chicken ($15.52 regular, $13.47 mini) and kalbi ($17.60 regular, $15.86 mini) plates are the most popular options, according to Pascua.

“We introduced the barbecue mix, kalbi and garlic chicken (plates) about two months ago,” she says. “Those really hit it off, I think, because of the portions. He (Jay) doesn’t skimp on the portions.”

In June, the okazuya closed briefly for renovations. New cabinets were added and the interior layout was altered, according to Pascua.

“It’s (the interior) shaped as an L-shape now, so customers can face us directly,” she says. “Previously, there was no ‘hand off/pay station,’ so we were maneuvering around the old display case and it was awkward. We also take card now as well.”

The biz is open for catering any day of the week, according to Pascua, who says that delivery is available.

“We get a lot of inquiries regarding catering; we do a live sushi bar and bento and pan catering,” she says. “We deliver to any celebration of life/mortuaries for free as well.”

Open 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. Tuesdays to Fridays, 5 a.m. to noon on Saturdays

Matsumotos Okazuya owners 071526

<title>Matsumoto’s Okazuya by JV Kitchen is giving out free chow fun</title>

The Kalihi okazuya is giving out complimentary chow fun with every purchase on Aug. 1 to celebrate its first anniversary under new ownership. Business owners Vanessa Pascua and Jay Palma also recently updated the business’s menu and renovated the okazuya interior.

L&L Hawaiian Barbecue is giving out free Spam musubis on Aug. 8

Kelli Shiroma Braiotta

Food & Dining Reporter

More in Food & Dining

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L&L Hawaiian Barbecue is giving out free Spam musubis on Aug. 8

Authors

Kelli Shiroma Braiotta

Food & Dining Reporter

More in Food & Dining

53 By the Sea has a new weekend lunch and happy hour

Miya Bowls is a new acai bowl shop in Wahiawā

SinIceStir Speakeasy opens in Honolulu

Common Ground launches The Food Fix in downtown Honolulu

Most read