When someone she didn’t know contacted her offering free money to renovate her family’s historic bakery and store in Makawao, Betty Shibuya, the business’s worry-worn manager, was immediately suspicious.

“I don’t think this is right,” Shibuya recalls thinking. “Who would be giving away money? So I said no, thank you, I’m not interested.”

Entrepreneurs on Maui are suspicious these days. Small businesses on tourism-dependent Maui, like T Komoda Store & Bakery, founded in 1916, have been battered in the past five years. First came the Covid-19 pandemic, when state officials slowed the spread of disease by rigorously shutting down travel, which threw tens of thousands out of work and forced restaurants to close their doors or reduce their operations. Many restaurants in Hawaiʻi shut down.

Commerce slowly returned as the pandemic eased, but soon labor shortages and soaring product prices put new pressures on the profit margins of still-shaky enterprises. Then, in August 2023, terrible fires hit Lahaina and Kula, shuttering tourism all over again.

The economy just hasn’t been able to rebound on Maui, hotel bookings are unusually low and businesses are continuing to struggle.

For all those reasons, Shibuya was dubious of anyone who came along offering false hope.

Then a string of longtime customers, including her dentist, showed up at the bakery, having heard about an unusual new grant program. They urged Shibuya to apply. Finally convinced to give it a shot, she filled out an application.

With that, T Komoda, named for Shibuya’s grandfather, Takezo Komoda, became one of five historic restaurants on Maui that received $40,000 renovation grants through a program administered by the Washington, D.C.-based National Trust for Historic Preservation and funded by American Express.

“I couldn’t believe we got the money, that we were selected,” Shibuya said recently. She will use the money for exterior improvements, including uncovering a boarded-up window with historic lettering that had been too costly to fix. “I couldn’t believe that it was really true.”

The five restaurants are scattered around the island. Two are located in or near the West Maui burn zone — Mala Ocean Tavern, an open-air, fine-dining restaurant that miraculously survived the Lahaina fire that burned much of the rest of the town, and Leoda’s Kitchen and Pie Shop, a plantation-style eatery that serves homestyle comfort food from the 1950s, located in Olowalu.

Two more restaurants are in the island’s upland paniolo cowboy country — T Komoda in Makawao and Ulupalakua Ranch Store in Kula, which offers grilled meats and outdoor, picnic-style dining on a rural, mountainous slope perched high above the ocean. The ranch, owned by the Erdman family since 1965, has been in operation since the 1850s.

The fifth restaurant, Ichiban Okazuya, a popular traditional Japanese delicatessen, is located near the county seat in Wailuku.

The National Trust initiated the “Backing Historic Small Restaurants” program in 2021 to give a helping hand to eateries suffering during the Covid pandemic and has since given out more than 100 such grants nationwide, all funded by American Express. The Maui grant program is a one-time offshoot of that program tailored specifically to the island, recognizing that establishments there had suffered additional injury from the 2023 fires.

“We just wanted to try to be helpful to the local businesses,” said Seri Worden, the National Trust’s senior director of preservation programs. She said she and her colleagues were inspired to do something after seeing news coverage of the fire.

The National Trust set the parameters for the grants. They required the restaurants to pledge to use the money for renovations or upgrades rather than for operating expenses and to ensure the improvements are done in an historically appropriate manner. The restaurants had to submit applications that explained just how they would use the money.

The Trust turned to the Historic Hawaiʻi Foundation, a conservation advocacy group, for help in identifying and encouraging likely grant recipients.

Kiersten Faulkner, the foundation’s executive director, said she and her staff and the foundation’s trustees were thrilled to participate. She said they had a great time thinking of historic eateries on Maui that served good food and that serve as community gathering places.

They came up with a tentative list and started to reach out to the restaurants to ask them to apply. But, Faulkner said, some restaurant owners were initially reluctant to participate.

“A few of them were skeptical,” she said. “They were concerned this might not be something real. And so some of our board members went and actually met with them and said, ‘This is legit; it’s not a scam trying to take advantage of you.’”

Another grant applicant who needed to be convinced was Javier Barberi, principal owner of Mala Ocean Tavern, an oceanfront restaurant in Lahaina, and one of the few establishments on Front Street that survived. The fire somehow passed it over.

“We made it through Covid and then it was over and then the fire came and tried to burn us down,” Barberi recalled.

He’d also been disappointed by other purported loan opportunities that didn’t materialize. Barberi said he was told he qualified for a Small Business Administration loan after the fire and applied 15 different times but was rejected each time. He got an accountant to try to help but he couldn’t make it through the bureaucratic maze either.

“That’s what the government does; they just want to shut down small businesses,” he said.

Getting the $40,000 grant from the National Trust, however, has given him hope. He is using the money for exterior lighting and landscaping.

“For a small business, that’s a lot for us,” he said. “We work on a razor-thin margin. It makes a big impact.”

The five restaurants that were chosen are all unique, well-loved in the community. They also represent different phases of Maui history.

In the past, Japanese delicatessens, or okazuya, were common in many parts of Hawaiʻi. Now Ichiban Okazuya, established in 1982, is one of the few survivors. Ichiban means No. 1 in Japanese.

The business attracts a steady stream of customers but it’s a constant struggle to keep up food quality as prices rise, which leaves very little money for larger projects, said Tony Masa Sasaki, 75.

“Everything is expensive now,” he said. “The cost of living in Maui is pretty high, even compared to Honolulu.”

That meant that some structural repairs he had needed to do at the front entrance were delayed, year after year. He had been worried the front of the restaurant would collapse. He considered doing the work himself but his family feared he might injure himself if he tried. Now, thanks to the grant, the work has been completed by a contractor who specializes in historic buildings.

“We are nothing but grateful,” said his daughter Yu Sasaki.

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by a grant from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.