![]() "We’d be wearing wigs and costumes that were falling apart and by the time dinner was done, we’d be practically naked, trying to cover ourselves with whatever leftover clothes we had because we didn’t want to change, we just wanted to eat." We make all our own gravies and spaghetti sauce from scratch. ![]() “We still make our own batter for the pancakes, which has to sit overnight to rise. “We’ve been open 49 years and served 14 million meals,” Tom says. They renamed it Wailana Coffee House, “wailana” in Hawaiian meaning buoyancy or to float on water, like a lilypad. In 1969, the family partnered with developer Bruce Stark to build a 24-story condominium on the property, and to transform Kapiolani Drive Inn into an 8,000-square-foot restaurant (plus cocktail lounge) that could seat 250 people. So changing the restaurant was a way to take better advantage of the space,” says Tom. In Hawaii, land is expensive, and even then you could see the prices rising. But tastes are always changing, and car hop service and self-service was a dying trend. “This was a drive-in from 1950 all the way to the late 60s. A neon sign above the building lit up at night, welcoming guests with the image of a guy strumming an ukulele and a swaying hula girl. On weekends, especially after proms or whenever the drive-in hosted its famous five-hamburgers-for-$1 special, a line of cars would snake out of the parking lot and down the street. It was open 24 hours and could fit over a hundred cars. Mary and Francis originally named their restaurant Kapiolani Drive Inn. People thought my father was crazy to buy it,” Tom says. It was just a swamp area as far as I understand. No paved road, no Hilton Hawaiian Village. In 1949, Francis Tom partnered with friends and relatives to purchase a piece of land at the corner of Ala Moana Boulevard and Ena Road (where the restaurant is today), considered the outskirts of Waikiki at the time. His parents, Mary and Francis Tom, had originally opened Wailana as a drive-in restaurant in 1947 but relocated once a fence was erected, which kept cars from actually being able to pull up and order. It was a concession back then,” says Kenton Tom. Among the lunch and dinner entrees was a half-liter of house wine for $8.50-your choice of Burgundy, Chablis, or rosé. ![]() Wailana was famous for its salad bar featuring broccoli slaw, sliced canned beets, kimchi, Jell-O, diced tomatoes and onions in vinaigrette, three-bean salad, pasta salad, and five kinds of dressing, available every day from 11 AM to 11 PM, often as a side to entrees like “beef stew casserole,” breaded pork cutlet, beef liver, Salisbury steak, and “Moby Dick” fish and chips. There were a dozen different burgers and four-count ‘em, four-sections dedicated to sandwiches, from clubhouse triple-deckers (in a section called “Remarkable Combination Sandwiches”) to hot meatloaf sandwiches with special sauce (in another section called “Every Sandwich is a Specialty of the House”). ![]() Special” of creamed beef on toast with two eggs was available on Saturday and Sunday, or you could enjoy all the pancakes you could eat (plus two eggs and two strips of bacon) for less than ten bucks. Local specialties included macadamia pancakes “Hawaiian-style” breakfast with butter grilled banana on corned beef hash with eggs and a breakfast bowl with hash browns, sausage, bacon, and scrambled eggs drizzled with coconut syrup. You could order breakfast at any hour everything from giant Belgian waffles and Scottish bangers to eggs Benedict and overflowing fruit bowls. Wailana catered to all kinds, with a menu that spanned six pages in an oversized cloth-bound compendium of diner favorites.
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