Local news outlets this week covered the grand opening of a Zippy’s restaurant in Las Vegas.

Again.

It happens every time a Zippy’s or an L& L Hawaiian Barbeque or a well-financed poke bowl counter opens in Las Vegas and the restaurant’s marketing team sends out photos of the first-day customers like it’s a milestone event.

In these stories, there’s always a tone of giddy disbelief that chili served with rice or a weighty plate of katsu can actually be obtained outside of Hawaiʻi.

Ideas showcases stories, opinion and analysis about Hawaiʻi, from the state’s sharpest thinkers, to stretch our collective thinking about a problem or an issue. Email news@civilbeat.org to submit an idea or an essay.

Read More

There has to be some sort of cultural significance to this. Each time an out-of-state Zippy’s opens, news outlets run the story like it’s gleeful news, something truly meaningful, and not just a favor done for a company that buys air time.

Perhaps it’s because Hawaiʻi-style food represents a sort of claim, like sticking a flag made of a broken chopstick and paper wrapper in the sand and saying, “We are here.”

There are now four Zippy’s locations in Las Vegas and another set to open soon. That takes wun tun min and oxtail soup from an imported curiosity to an established part of the community. The colony has taken root.

There are 23 Zippyʻs restaurants across Hawaiʻi, from the scruffy-but-friendly neighborhood favorites to the upscale ones with a sushi bar. A Zippy’s restaurant is a symbol that local people still live in the neighborhood and that the area hasn’t become an overpriced resort community or a gated enclave for out-of-state owners. Zippy’s is a sign that working folks live nearby.

Zippy’s in Kahului, the first on Maui, opened in 2008 to much fanfare. There are Zippy’s in Hilo and Kona.  

However, there’s no Zippy’s on Kauaʻi.

There used to be a Zippy’s on Kauaʻi, right in Waipouli. It opened in the late 1980s and closed in 1992 after Hurricane ʻIniki.

Since then, Kauaʻi has carried on, Zipless, despite pleas from Gen Z on TikTok who say they’ve been waiting their WHOLE LIVES for Zippy’s to come to Kauaʻi, and it’s so unfair that Vegas got so many Zippy’s while Kauaʻi has none.

Perhaps Kauaʻi doesn’t have a Zippy’s because Kauaʻi doesn’t need a Zippy’s. Kauaʻi Hamura Saimin, still popular, still relevant, operating out of the same wooden building on Kress Street in Lihue. That is Kauaʻi’s saimin, second to none.

Tip Top Restaurant also has tasty saimin, but it has a more extensive menu. Tip Top has hamburger steak, oxtail soup, and Portuguese sausage-and-egg breakfast covered. Despite the Gen Z TikToks and their wishful pleas, there is no deficit of the salty, greasy, pork-heavy food lovingly referred to as “local.”

If there is a deeper meaning to Hawaiʻi’s celebration of every new Zippy’s in Las Vegas, it is perhaps this: It is a quiet, coded acknowledgement that Hawaiʻi people who move away from Hawaiʻi to places like Las Vegas don’t have it that bad. They don’t need pity. They have chili.

They’re not refugees from Hawaiʻi’s high prices who had no other choice but to abandon everything good about their hometown; they made a choice to be where they can own a nice house, buy cheaper groceries, travel to other states without having to get on a plane, and still have their 1430 calorie Zip Pac. That can be a pretty nice life.

For all the hand-wringing about Hawaiʻi residents moving away to places like Las Vegas so they can afford a nice house and send their kids to fancy schools like Bishop Gorman to play football, the deeper truth is that a lot of Hawaiʻi people enjoy the move. They may bring bits of home with them, like a small plumeria tree to grow in the back yard, but itʻs not at all a bad choice for many people. Hawaiʻi is a place that is easy to love but hard to live in. You can either be dearly homesick for the islands or nearly homeless trying to raise a family here.

If there’s a Zippy’s within 15 or so miles of your abode, it’s a marker, like the tree line on a mountain or the vegetation line on the shore. It is a sign that certain kinds of organisms can exist and even thrive there. In the case of Zippy’s in Las Vegas, it says, “You, braddah. You, sistah. You can have the nice house and the good schools and all the fried noodles too.”