Kakaʻako & Ward: The Honest Guide to Honolulu's Mural District

Kakaʻako and Ward Village are two names for one continuous district between downtown Honolulu and Ala Moana — flat, walkable, and a five-minute Uber from Waikīkī. Ward Village is the master-planned high-rise side, anchored by South Shore Market and the Saturday farmers market at Ward. Kakaʻako proper, immediately to the west, is the warehouse-and-mural blocks where POW! WOW! Hawaiʻi paints, where most of the craft breweries opened, and where SALT at Our Kakaʻako pulls together a courtyard of food, bars, and live music. Locals call it town. It is where Honolulu actually goes out.

Plan it as a half-day or an evening. If you have ninety minutes, walk the murals around SALT at Our Kakaʻako and have a beer at Aloha Beer Company, Bevy, or Howzit Brewing. If you have an afternoon, start at the Saturday Kakaʻako Farmers Market at Ward (8 a.m. to noon, the best of its kind on the island), drift west through the murals, and end at dinner. Off The Wall in Ward and Pig and the Lady (Chinatown location for the original, Kaimukī for the second) are reliable. The neighborhood is also where most of the design-y new restaurants in Honolulu have opened in the last five years — menus rotate fast, so check before you commit.

What is overrated: treating the murals as a backdrop. They are art, the artists are mostly local and Pacific, and a fifteen-minute walk learning the names behind them is a more interesting experience than a fifteen-minute photo session. What is underrated: Kakaʻako Waterfront Park. Free, almost never crowded, dramatic rocky coastline, kite flyers and dog walkers and yoga on the grass. Not a swimming beach, but the most underused green space in town and one of the best sunset spots on this side of the island. Pair it with dinner at Off The Wall or Howzit Brewing and you have a perfect low-key Honolulu evening.

One thing that matters. The murals here are not wallpaper. POW! WOW! Hawaiʻi and the artists who built the Kakaʻako mural scene are a real, ongoing community of mostly local and Pacific artists who treat these walls as a working gallery — pieces get painted over, repainted, and replaced on purpose. Photograph them, share them, but credit the artist when you can find a tag, and do not climb on anything to get a better shot. The neighborhood is also actively gentrifying, which the families who have lived in Kakaʻako for generations feel directly. Tip the truck. Spend at the small shops, not just the chain stores in the new towers. Be the kind of visitor who makes the neighborhood better, not just the kind who gets a good photo.