Waipahu restaurant Highway Inn celebrates 78 years of serving it up Hawaiian style.

Lunchtime at Waipahu’s Highway Inn is lively and loud. Newcomers discuss the menu while longtime patrons, often multigenerational customers, order favorites such as beef stew and lau lau. A toddler enjoys her first taste of squid lū‘au. A tūtū (grandparent) celebrates her birthday with a haupia dessert. It’s a familiar scene, and one that has played out at the Highway Inn for decades.

A local favorite, Highway Inn opened its doors in Waipahu in 1947. Back then, the restaurant was a small operation with just three employees: founder Seiichi Toguchi, his wife Nancy, and a dishwasher. These were the plantation days, when sugar and pineapple reigned king in Hawaiʻi. During this time, the multiethnic labor force blended their culinary traditions, creating what we now recognize as local-style food, often referred to as “local grinds,” with dishes that represent a diverse range of cultures. For the nearby plantation communities, Highway Inn offered affordable and satisfying pau hana (postwork) meals, but with one key difference: Instead of serving more popular styles of the time, like American, Japanese, or Chinese dishes, Highway Inn focused on Hawaiian fare.

Seiichi, who was of Okinawan descent, “just loved Hawaiian food and wanted to share it,” explains Monica Toguchi Ryan, his granddaughter and third-generation owner of the Highway Inn. She took over the restaurant from her father, Bobby Toguchi, in 2009.

Seiichi was 14 when he learned to cook Hawaiian food while working at a local diner. Years later, during World War II, Seiichi and his family were forcibly relocated to internment camps on the U.S. mainland, alongside thousands of fellow Japanese Americans. While they were incarcerated, Seiichi spent years working in the camp kitchens in California and Arkansas, honing his culinary skills and recipes. When the family returned to Hawaiʻi in 1946, Seiichi laid plans to open a restaurant along Farrington Highway, serving up ubiquitous comfort foods in contemporary Hawaiian cuisine, like chicken long rice, lomi salmon, and poi.

“There weren’t a lot of Hawaiian food restaurants in the 1940s,” Monica says, noting that the menu has barely changed in the last 70 years. Hawaiian food remains a keystone. “We’ve always been doing this, regardless of its popularity or unpopularity.”

What started as “kind of a hole in the wall,” has since grown into a three-restaurant enterprise serving over 500 meals a day at its locations in Waipahu, Kaka‘ako, and Bishop Museum. Highway Inn’s customer base is wide and diverse. Congressmen drop by. High school sports teams arrive for a post-match fix. But always, there are the beloved regulars ready for their favorite local grinds, especially apparent in Waipahu, where it all started.

“We always consider Waipahu our home,” Monica says with pride.

To learn more about Highway Inn, visit myhighwayinn.com.