Alan Wong has a restaurant again. After six years away, the chef who defined modern Hawaiian fine dining has opened a new restaurant inside The Kahala Hotel & Resort on Oahu. Hotel guests got first access on March 25, and the restaurant opens to the general public on April 8.

This is the biggest restaurant opening in Hawai’i in years, and it is not close. Wong’s King Street restaurant was the single most acclaimed dining room in the state for over a decade. When it closed during COVID, the loss felt permanent. It wasn’t.

The new space replaces Hoku’s, The Kahala’s signature fine dining restaurant for 30 years, which had its final service on February 20. Same room, different era.

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Alan Wong won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Pacific Northwest in 1996. He was one of 12 founders of Hawaii Regional Cuisine in the early 1990s, a movement that turned Hawai’i from a culinary afterthought into a legitimate dining destination. The other co-founders (Sam Choy, Roy Yamaguchi, Peter Merriman, Bev Gannon) all built empires of their own. Wong was the one critics kept coming back to.

His King Street restaurant opened in 1995 and immediately became the hardest reservation in Honolulu. Honolulu Magazine named it Restaurant of the Year at the Hale Aina Awards every single year from 1996 to 2009 — 14 consecutive wins. Gourmet magazine put it on the America’s Best 50 Restaurants list in 2001 and 2006. Presidents ate there. Celebrities ate there. Locals who saved up for one special dinner a year ate there.

Then COVID hit. The King Street restaurant closed in 2020, and Wong stepped away from the spotlight. For six years, the question in Honolulu food circles was always the same: is he coming back? Now we know.

The menu brings back the dishes that made Wong famous. Ginger-crusted onaga — the seared Hawaiian red snapper that became his signature — is back on the menu. So is Da Bag, the theatrical steamed pouch of clams and kalua pig that the server cuts open tableside, releasing a cloud of fragrant steam. The Coconut, Wong’s famous dessert of haupia sorbet encased in a chocolate shell, returns as well.

The philosophy has not changed. Hawaii Regional Cuisine is about taking the ingredients that grow here (local fish, island-raised meats, produce from Hawai’i farms) and filtering them through the diverse ethnic cooking traditions that define the islands. Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Portuguese, Hawaiian, and mainland American techniques all show up in Wong’s cooking, but the ingredients are always rooted in this place.

The kitchen team is strong. Chef de Cuisine Spencer Yamanaka runs the line. Pastry Chef Miya Nakashima handles the dessert program. General Manager Mark Shishido oversees the dining room. Wong is not a figurehead here — he built this team and designed this menu.

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Hours: Dinner only. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Reservations: Required. Book through OpenTable or call 808-882-5000. A credit card is required to hold the reservation, and there is a 48-hour cancellation policy. Do not no-show. They will charge you.

Dress code: Evening resort wear, Aloha wear, dress shorts, shoes or dress sandals. No sleeveless T-shirts or athletic wear. Children under 12 are exempt from the dress code.

If you are visiting Oahu this spring or summer, book now. This will be the hardest dinner reservation on the island for the foreseeable future. Six years of pent-up demand, national press coverage, and only five nights a week of service means tables will be scarce. Do not assume you can walk in.

The Kahala neighborhood itself is worth the trip even beyond dinner. Kahala Beach is a calm, uncrowded stretch of sand that most tourists never find. The residential streets are lined with plumeria trees and some of Honolulu’s most striking homes. It is a different Oahu from Waikiki — quieter, slower, more residential.

Pair this with a South Shore beach day. Kahala Beach is steps from the hotel. Waikiki is 10 minutes back toward town. Diamond Head is between the two. A morning hike, afternoon on the sand, and an evening at Alan Wong’s is a near-perfect Oahu day.

This is a splurge dinner. Expect fine dining prices. But this is also a restaurant with 30 years of reputation behind the name, a chef who changed how the world thinks about Hawaiian food, and a kitchen team executing at the highest level. For a special-occasion meal on Oahu, nothing else comes close right now.