On May 1, 2025, Hawai'i County turned a stretch of Ali'i Drive into a one-way street. The idea was straightforward: paint 46 new free parking stalls into the northbound lane between Kailua Pier and Hualālai Road, ease the years-long complaints about $12-to-$21-an-hour private lots, and give the Kona Historic Business District a reason to feel busy again. Six weeks later, the county reversed it. A community poll drew more than 2,700 responses, most of them against the change, and by June 16 the lines were repainted back to two-way traffic.
If you live near downtown, you probably remember the confusion, and you probably remember it not working. What you may not have connected is what happened on that same block about a year later, with no traffic study behind it at all.
The Fix Nobody Voted For, Because Nobody Had To
The one-way pilot was a government answer to a government-shaped problem: too much paid parking, not enough free stalls, businesses on Ali'i Drive losing walk-in traffic to lots charging more per hour than a plate lunch. Ross Wilson, who runs the Kailua Village Business Improvement District, called the effort bold at the time. But the extra parking came with new congestion at the Hualālai Road turn, and residents said the trade wasn't worth it. Mayor Kimo Alameda ended the trial early, thanked the community for its patience, and said the county would keep exploring other ideas, including possible partnerships with hotels and a larger parking lease elsewhere on the road.
That's where the official version of the story stalls out. Nothing about downtown's slow-motion problem, the one where storefronts sit empty and the sidewalks go quiet by 8 p.m., got solved by county government in 2025. What changed the street's pulse happened for a completely different reason, in a completely different building, and it didn't need a pilot program or a vote.
Three Restaurants, One Hundred-Year-Old Bar
In March 2026, the owners of three long-running Kona restaurants, Jackie Rey's, Harbor House, and Umekes Fish Market Bar & Grill, formed a new company called the Island Restaurant Group. Weeks later, the group did something that had been sitting unresolved on the market for two years: it bought the Kona Inn Restaurant and the Kona Canoe Club.
The numbers tell you how stuck that deal had been. The leases and contents for both restaurants listed for $3 million in 2024. By March 2025 the asking price had dropped to $1.5 million, and it still took until April 2026 to close. Nakoa Pabre, who owns Umeke's and now chairs the group, grew up in Kona going to the Kona Inn lawn for events and hitting the arcade next door, Fun Factory, before it closed.
"We're coming up with creative ways to bring life back to the whole shopping center." — Nakoa Pabre, executive chairman, Island Restaurant Group
The Kona Inn itself opened in 1928 as the island's first luxury hotel, and the restaurant that carries its name has been serving Mai Tais off a horseshoe-shaped koa bar for most of the century since. Lelia Kanuha, the general manager, has worked there 19 years and told Big Island Now she was skeptical when the sale first went through, worried the new owners would gut the nostalgia that keeps regulars coming back. She stayed anyway, and by June she was telling reporters every day had gotten better.
The grand reopening landed June 18, 2026: a Hawaiian blessing, live music and food spread across the front lawn, and fire dancers to close the night. A new chef, Kaikili Roldan, came over from the Four Seasons Resort Hualālai to build a revamped menu, including a Hawaiian-style beef Wellington. Roldan grew up visiting the Kona Inn as a kid and remembers the whole strip being lively before it faded. One longtime patron who showed up that night, Jerome Kanuha, has been eating there since he was four years old. His father worked the bar and worked security at the Kona Inn back when, as he put it, everybody in Kailua worked there at some point.
"It's what Kailua is all about." — Jerome Kanuha, longtime Kona Inn patron
That's the pattern worth noticing. The fix that actually stuck on Ali'i Drive wasn't imposed from outside. It came from three families who already had 300 people on payroll between their existing restaurants, buying back a building most of them had personal history in, and betting that the way to revive a shopping center was to run it like it still belonged to the neighborhood.
What's Actually on the Calendar This Month
If you're timing a walk downtown, the easiest fixed point on the calendar is Kokua Kailua, the monthly art stroll the Kailua Village Business Improvement District has run for years along Ali'i Drive. It's not tied to the restaurant group's comeback story, but the two now overlap on the same sidewalks. The 2026 schedule runs:
- August 16
- September 20
- October 18
- November 15
- December 13, the larger Kailua Kalikimaka edition with extra vendors and entertainment
Local musicians perform along the vendor line every month, and the December stroll expands into a bigger holiday event with more crafts and concerts. If you haven't walked one in a while, the next one lands this Sunday.
The Food Truck Night That Kept Getting Kicked Out
The other fixed point in the week is Friday, and Food Truck Friday has had a rougher few years finding a home than most people realize. For roughly two years it ran out of the Target Kona parking lot, drawing around 20 regular vendors. It ended there after what organizer Catie Anderson, who also owns Sugar's Hawai'i, described as unsupervised teenagers damaging property inside the store. Target discontinued the event rather than deal with it.
The county's Department of Parks and Recreation stepped in with a temporary fix, moving the event to the south runway at Old Kona Airport Park for a 90-day pilot that ran every other Friday from July 18 through September 26, 2025. Since then it has settled into a new weekly home at the former Kmart lot next to Macy's on Kamakaeha Avenue, running Fridays from 4 to 8 p.m., free parking included. Regular vendors include Big Island Provisions, Califas Mexican Food, FOB's Polynesian Cuisine, Hāmākua Creations, and Lock Jaw Lemon Peel, among others, plus the craft vendors who set up alongside them.
Anderson has said at least 20 families depend on the event as part of their income. It's a small detail, but it's the same shape as the Kona Inn story: something that got knocked out of its spot by a corporate landlord's problem, and got put back together not by a master plan but by the people who actually run it.
The Same Lesson, Three Times
None of this means county government doesn't matter here. It clearly does, and the parking conversation on Ali'i Drive isn't over. But if you've lived downtown through the quiet years, the thing worth updating in your head is this: the comeback didn't wait on the county to get the traffic pattern right. It came from three restaurant families who bought back a hundred-year-old bar they used to work in, a village business district that never stopped running its monthly stroll on schedule, and a food truck organizer who kept finding her vendors a new parking lot every time the old one fell through.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property near Ali'i Drive, or you just want to talk story about the new menu at Kona Inn over a plate lunch, Hawaii 5 0 Realty is local, and Donna and Jonathan are easy to reach. Call anytime you want a real read on what's actually changing in this neighborhood, not just what's on the flyer.
