ABOVE: A neo-noir bar scene comes to life.
Speakeasies ain't what they used to be. The original illicit Prohibition-era bars strove to avoid attention. Today's speakeasy-themed bars have fun with secret entrances and passwords, but you can easily find them on Yelp. People of the 1920s and early '30s had a sinister fascination with what was going on behind those barred doors. Today's speakeasy-goers like it if you don't know about these places, but they can do without the police raids, gangland violence and risk of going blind from a bad batch of bathtub gin.
The modern speakeasy trend has been around since the turn of the twenty-first century—longer than the youngest bargoers have. But it's still relatively new in Hawaii. So in the spirit of flouting the National Prohibition act of 1919, I set off on a crawl through modern Honolulu's hidden bar scene to see how things are going.
A Singapore Sling (left) and a Cool Haircut (right) at Green Lady Cocktail Room.
Decommissioned illegal gaming devices give Wild Orange an extra shot of underground bar credibility.
Deep inside the shadowy warren of events spaces at the HB Social Club on Kapiolani Boulevard, I drop a nickel into an Aloha Maid drink vending machine, causing it to speak: "Welcome to Wild Orange. Access granted."
The vending machine is actually the door to Wild Orange, a speakeasy fashioned after a secret Tokyo hip-hop bar. Glowing lanterns hang from the leafy branches of an otherworldly orange tree appearing to grow in the center of the room. Samurai manga adorn the bar-top. The illuminated backglasses of two dozen Bally bingo pinball machines—disabled remnants of illegal gambling devices—decorate an entire wall, an homage to the room's past incarnation as an underground gaming parlor.
A young guy wearing a leather jacket and a man bun takes the barstool next to me. Okolehao Joe, as he wishes to be called (referring to a liquor distilled from ti root, the "Hawaiian moonshine"), turns out to be a kind of speakeasy superfan. He works with international students, and when they want to go out on the town after hours, he loves taking them to bars like Wild Orange. "If you didn't know this place was here, you would never find it," he says. "But if you know, you know."
Wild Orange has fashioned itself after a secret Japanese hip-hop bar.
I ask Joe about other Honolulu speakeasies, and as we sip $20 cocktails and share an order of char siu tofu bao made by the vegan sushi chef in the corner, he tells me about places that have come and gone. There was Harry's Hardware Emporium, which masqueraded as a hardware store closed for renovations. Behind the facade was a room done up like everyone's idea of a 1920s Chicago-style bar. There was the Blind Ox, a carnivore's whisky bar that used bacon as a garnish and had a phone box out front for communicating directions to its hidden entrance. There was The Lei Stand, which had an elaborate facade made up as a downtown lei seller's—voila!—you were in a bar.
When I ask about existing speakeasies, Joe clams up, unwilling to spill the beans on any place I don't already know about. I ask about the Green Lady Cocktail Room. "I saw it on Yelp!" I say. He knows it well. "People walk right by and don't even realize it's there!" he says. He knows about Yours Truly, too, a tiki room hidden behind a wall of post office boxes at a downtown hotel. "The bartenders dress like mailmen," he says. "To order drinks, you fill out postcards." It seems he knows all the speakeasies until I ask about The HI BRAU Room. "The where?" he says.
Bring your nickels: The drink vending machine concealing the entrance to Wild Orange accepts change.
Outside the Aloha Beer Company in Kakaako, Joe and I find the door to a darkened stairway marked "The HI BRAU Room." This was the first modern Honolulu speakeasy, opening in early 2017. Originally, the door was unmarked, but if the lantern above it was lit, HI BRAU was open. If you knew the weekly password, posted on Instagram, you got in.
The lantern is lit, but nobody's upstairs manning the door's fancy brass peephole, so Joe and I walk in unvetted. The dim, dark-wood-paneled room is filled with whimsical touches, like the antelope head over a mantel flanked by neoclassical portraits of Russian generals, their faces swapped out for Keith Richards' and Mick Jagger's.
Behind the bar, the beer taps are conspicuously unlabeled. Under the topsy-turvy economics of Prohibition, many casual beer drinkers were driven to hard liquor. According to an analysis of Prohibition by the Cato Institute, the Libertarian think tank, "Prohibition made it more difficult to supply weaker, bulkier products, such as beer, than stronger, compact products, such as whisky, because the largest cost of selling an illegal product is avoiding detection."
With all of Aloha Beer's enormous gleaming beer vats downstairs, I wonder aloud if these unmarked taps aren't the ironic nod of a nouveau speakeasy to avoiding detection. Nah, says the bartender—it would just look stupid if all the taps said Aloha Beer on them (HI BRAU serves only Aloha Beer). Also, he says, HI BRAU doesn't identify as a speakeasy anymore. "We're transitioning to a listening-bar concept," he says, referring to the trend of turning bars into places for listening intently to curated selections of vinyl records. "But you've got a peephole!" I argue. "Real speakeasies don't put their names on the door," he says.
During Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933, unregulated speakeasies sprung up everywhere, giving drinkers places to gather in defiance of the nation's anti-alcohol laws. The HI BRAU Room was the first of the modern Honolulu speakeasies.
Determined to drink at another speakeasy not in transition, Joe and I march down a bamboo-paneled hallway at the White Sands Hotel, a revitalized low-rise holdout from mid-twentieth-century Waikiki. Suddenly, Joe veers left, walks straight toward the wall with an outstretched arm, and pushes open the cleverly concealed door. Behind it lies the dark, lush and exotic Green Lady Cocktail Room.
Entering is like stepping into a Depression-era Singapore bar scene in a neo-noir film. Outdoors we find a spacious seating area, hidden in plain sight behind bamboo fencing. A festive crowd there downs artisanal cocktails and basks in the glow of string lights and the feeling of exclusivity. "Unless you happened to see someone push open the door," Joe says. "You would never know this place was here!"
The Green Lady has concocted a curious origin story for itself, claiming inspiration from "a woman born of Chinese immigrants who defied the norms of her time," who drew upon her "intimate knowledge of sugar fermentation gained from her plantation upbringing," and who "established a hidden speakeasy concealed within a hotel room." It's a thin story, but after the second Singapore Sling, who cares? Although, it's not like Hawaii doesn't have some real-life Prohibition-era legends to be discovered.
Consider John Henry Wise, a prominent Native Hawaiian political leader who was the territory's top federal dry cop in 1924 and 1925. Believing alcohol to be harmful to the Hawaiian people, he vigorously enforced the Prohibition laws. He raided speakeasies and soft-drink parlors serving more than just soft drinks. He seized sake presses and smashed stills producing okolehao. When a rum-running sampan docked on Kauai to unload its contraband, his agents pounced. Wise was the bane of bootleggers. When his brief tenure ended and he retired to Molokai to farm, drinkers all over the Islands must have raised a toast to farming.
But a better muse for a modern Hawaii speakeasy might be Big Mary, a.k.a. Rose Kukahiko, who served okolehao to soldiers and ironworkers at her squatter's shack on the beach in Kakaako. One day Wise showed up, and as his agents searched the premises, he spotted Kukahiko outside with a glass jar. He dashed after her. He was a former college football player, but she ran faster, toward an ashcan. When he caught up, as the Honolulu Advertiser wrote in 1924, "he found only the triumphant Mrs. Kukahiko and the fumes of okolehao."
The HI BRAU Room's Swizzle (left) and Old Fashioned (right).
The coppers aren't putting the screws to speakeasies like they used to, but law enforcement did bring down Harry's Hardware Emporium. Harry's was the high-end auxiliary of Pint+Jigger, the popular Moiliili gastropub and sports bar. In 2020 both Harry's and Pint+Jigger got booted from their original location to make way for a new branch of the Hawaii Law Enforcement Federal Credit Union. Chalk one up for the drys.
Acting on a tip that Pint+Jigger had revived its speakeasy without fanfare at its new location in the Ala Moana Hotel, I grab a seat at the bar to investigate. Spotting Dave Newman, one of the owners, I blurt out over the noise of the room, "Where's the speakeasy, Dave?" Newman rolls his eyes toward the ceiling, holds up a finger as if to shush me, mumbles something inaudibly, then vanishes.
Fearing I've violated the most obvious protocol of the speakeasy—don't draw attention!—I finish my Mesquite Smoked Manhattan and start to slink off. Newman suddenly reappears. "You want to see the speakeasy?" he asks, pointing toward the ceiling. I follow him to a shallow alcove with built-in shelving. He tugs on a shelf and the whole wall swings open—it's a secret door with a hidden stairway behind it.
Upstairs, the original Harry's—flocked wallpaper, pressed tin ceiling, top-shelf liquors, Jazz Age soundtrack—has been transplanted into a room previously used as a private sushi bar. In a nod to the gaping loophole in the National Prohibition Act that allowed licensed drugstores to sell prescription alcohol, it's now called the Apothecary. Staffing issues have kept Newman from opening it to the public, but it's available for private events. Somehow Joe failed to mention this place, but when I later tell him of my discovery, he coolly replies, "Yeah, I went to a private party there once."
Newman highlights some luxe details, like the extra elbow room at the bar. Twenty-four inches per customer is the industry norm; here you get thirty. Anybody can drink at home, Newman says. "When people go out, they want an experience." Newman sweeps his arm across his plush interpretation of a 1920s barroom and says, "This is an elevated experience."
Supporters of Prohibition had argued for decades that alcohol was at the root of the nation's social problems, but their so-called "noble experiment" was a bust. After thirteen dry years, Prohibition was repealed, but the glamour of bootleggers, passwords and gangsters lives on. A DJ spins vinyl at The HI BRAU Room.
On a barstool at the Kailua Town Pub & Grill, a grungy and rollicking Windward Oahu bar, I pause for a beer before having another elevated experience. Every few minutes a gimlet-eyed hostess in a form-fitting dress pops out of an old-fashioned wooden phone booth, scans the crowd, checks a computer screen for reservations, then ducks back into the booth. The booth is actually the hidden entrance to Gaslamp, a Gatsbyesque speakeasy and steakhouse nested within the dive bar.
Following the hostess into the booth, I cross the threshold between clamorous pub and glamorous inner sanctum. Well-dressed diners on tufted-leather settees and Icelandic fur chairs tuck into seafood towers and beef Wellingtons. A saxophonist perched in a loft plays ethereal jazz. Leopard-print chandeliers hang over the bar. The bartender regrets to inform me that the fire dancer will not be performing until later in the evening. I will be gone by then, but the bar will be cleared and she will dance on top of it—careful, I imagine, not to set the chandeliers on fire.
Setting fire to things is apparently a theme. Flaming limes garnish cocktails served in skull mugs. Servers with kitchen torches melt butter over tomahawk cuts of Wagyu beef swinging above bowls of mashed potatoes. To deglaze the tasty residue of an order of bone marrow with escargot, the bartender ignites shots of chartreuse inside the canoe-cut bones, then instructs the guest to sip the warmed liquor from the ends of the bones, as if drinking from tiny flumes.
Speakeasies appeal to "those seeking an aura of mystery and exclusivity," says the bartender, Clark Dean, who is also Gaslamp's managing partner. "We seem to book an abundance of date night and anniversary occasions." Kailua's vacationing celebrities seem fond of the place, too. Poor Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who once booked Gaslamp for a private party, got swarmed by the pub crowd on his way to the shared restrooms. Barack Obama has hosted a few private parties here. During Prohibition, President Warren G. Harding had his personal bootlegger deliver booze to the White House. Obama books Gaslamp.
Historic speakeasies varied widely, from a guy selling moonshine from his kitchen table to clandestine nightclubs featuring live entertainment, like the Cotton Club in New York City. Modern speakeasies take many forms, too. Green Lady Cocktail Room's outdoor seating area hides in plain sight behind bamboo fencing.
I end my speakeasy crawl at 1242 Punchbowl Street, a place the Honolulu Advertiser once called "Honolulu's wettest spot." That was in 1929, when the block was filled with automotive shops and tenements, with Queen's Hospital across the street and a row of doctors' offices around the corner. The house at this address became a speakeasy after the elderly man who lived there died. Now it's the parking lot for the state Department of Health, right across Beretania Street from the state Capitol.
Despite at least five police raids during 1928 and 1929, Honolulu's wettest spot kept springing back. The place was set up for evasive action, with a trapdoor beneath the liquor cabinet that could be tripped to send bottles crashing onto rocks below, and "special boxes" that could be quickly drained into the sewer.
Government office buildings have taken over the block. Standing in this parking lot, I try to picture the illicit bar in the old two-story house that was once here. Maybe it had a warmly lit parlor with comfortable furniture and Bessie Smith playing on a phonograph. Maybe co-workers met there after hours and talked about Babe Ruth, the latest Model A Ford and the new blood test for syphilis. Maybe when the vice squad started sledgehammering the door and the management scrambled to pour evidence down the drain, the regulars laughed and said, "Here we go again!"
Or maybe it wasn't like that at all. Precious few details were recorded about the secret watering holes of Prohibition-era Hawaii. Certainly, none of them would have had vegan sushi chefs or Burning Man devotees prancing on the bar-top. But what were they actually like? As Joe says, "If you know, you know"—and in this case, those who knew ain't sayin' nuthin'.
