Highway Inn Powers Bishop Museum Cafe

Bishop Museum is proud to announce the opening of Bishop Museum Café by Highway Inn, offering selections from the Hawaiian food favorite on the historic grounds of the museum. Bishop Museum Café is open from 10 a.m.-3 p.m. daily to both museum visitors and the general public.

Highway Inn began offering select favorites from its menu at the Bishop Museum Café on Sept. 10, 2015. Eventually, the plan is for the restaurant to offer an expanded menu once the museum completes renovations on a nearby space in 2016.

“Bishop Museum was reexamining how it can improve its visitor experience through food service, and Highway Inn came up as the clear choice for a partnership,” said Bishop Museum president and CEO Blair D. Collis. “This is a partnership that we are proud of. Highway Inn not only delivers a top-notch food experience, but it’s a local institution that is in alignment with the museum’s mission and goal to perpetuate the Hawaiian culture,” he added.

“We couldn’t be more excited about this partnership,” said Monica Toguchi, president and CEO of Highway Inn. “It’s really a great opportunity for us to bring people and food together as well as perpetuate Hawaiian and Hawaii’s food history and culture in the perfect place, Bishop Museum,” she added.

Bishop Museum Café currently offers a scaled down experience in both menu and facility from other Highway Inn locations on O‘ahu. Among the current offerings are a Hawaiian plate complete with kalua pork and lomi salmon, beef stew, shoyu pineapple chicken, poke bowls, sandwiches and grab-n-go items like musubis. The café also serves breakfast options and house-made desserts and snacks.

While visitors can immediately enjoy having a dining option on the museum grounds, they can also look forward to a greatly enhanced experience in the near future. Plans for a $500,000 renovation are underway to create a new space for the eatery. At its completion, the new dining space will feature indoor and outdoor seating with vistas of Hawaiian Hall and the Great Lawn. On top of an expanded menu and alcoholic beverage options, the experience will be an enriching one, as visitors will be able to learn about Hawaiian Culture and their natural surroundings as they dine.

Construction of the new space is estimated to begin sometime between the end of this year and the beginning of 2016. The estimated opening of the new dining space is spring of 2016.