Humble Market Kitchin is Roy Yamaguchi cooking at his most relaxed: a big, open dining room and bar on the ocean side of the Wailea Beach Resort, fifteen minutes from the bungalows. Breakfast in the morning, a fish-forward Wailea dinner at night, and a golden hour at the Wai Bar that has quietly become its own tradition. When guests want one dressed-up-but-not-stuffy dinner in South Maui, this is the easy call.
Roy Yamaguchi's take on a Wailea dinner
Roy Yamaguchi is Hawai’i restaurant royalty, the James Beard Award winner who put Hawaiian fusion on the world map with Roy’s in the late 1980s. Humble Market Kitchin, his restaurant at the Wailea Beach Resort, is the looser, more personal version: a menu drawing on the Japanese, Filipino, Chinese and Hawaiian food he grew up around, in a room where flip-flops after a beach day do not raise an eyebrow.
Fish is the thing to order. The kitchen runs island catch through preparations that swing from delicate sashimi-style starters to richly sauced mains, alongside steaks and playful local comfort dishes. It is resort dining, priced like resort dining, but with a point of view you will remember after the vacation blurs together.
The name is not false modesty so much as a mission statement: Yamaguchi’s tribute to the humble markets and mom-and-pop cooking of his childhood summers. If you like eating your way through a chef’s family history, this room and Monkeypod Kitchen up the street make Wailea a surprisingly good food neighborhood.