LAHAINA, Maui (HawaiiNewsNow) – An 18-year-old man has died after a single-vehicle crash early Wednesday morning in Lahaina.

According to the Maui Police Department, at around 1:30 p.m., near the intersection of Honoapiilani Highway and the Kaanapali Parkway, a white 2000 Chevy Silverado traveling at a high rate of speed on Honoapiilani Highway when the driver lost control, went off the roadway, traveled down an embankment and crashed into a tree on the driver’s side.

Maui police said the driver was pronounced dead at the scene.

The victim’s identity is being withheld pending notification of next of kin.

Investigators said the driver was not wearing a seat belt at the time of the crash.

Authorities said speed was considered a factor in the crash.

The investigation is ongoing, and police said it is not yet known if drugs or alcohol were factors.

This is Maui County’s ninth traffic fatality of 2026, compared to 12 at the same time last year.

If you fly through Honolulu, Lihue, or Kahului over the next year, some of the airport food is going to start looking a lot more appropriate, or at least familiar. Alan Wong, MW Restaurant, Koloa Rum Company, Maui Brewing and Ocean Organic Farm & Distillery are among the Hawaii names now attached to new airport restaurants, bars and grab-and-go concepts scheduled to open through the end of 2027.

Seeing those names on airport signs might give you the impression that a group of independent Hawaii businesses is moving into the terminals, but that’s not how this works. HMSHost, part of global travel-retail company Avolta, remains the long-term food and beverage concessionaire working with the state and will operate all of the new concepts through partnerships with the chefs and brands whose names travelers will soon see.

That puts a different frame around this week’s announcement. Hawaii airport food is getting a substantial refresh, but the company behind the counters is largely the same one travelers have been dealing with for years.

Local names are coming through a global airport operator.

HMSHost operates more than 1,000 food and beverage locations at nearly 80 North American airports. Its parent, Avolta, is far larger, with operations in more than 70 countries and over 5,000 retail and dining locations worldwide. The Avolta announcement itself describes HMSHost as HDOT’s existing partner, not any newly selected company arriving in Hawaii.

The Hawaii names attached to the new restaurants, however, are real ones. The announcements don’t explain the business arrangement behind each airport location, including who owns the individual operation, how the local name is licensed, what role the chef or brand retains in operations, or how revenues are divided.

That was part of the conversation earlier this year when we asked why Leonard’s Bakery could get close to Honolulu Airport but not inside it. Readers questioned why iconic independent Hawaii food businesses remained outside the terminal while lackluster airport concessions continued to run through a large mainland operator.

At the time, Alan Wong, MW Group, Aloha Plate and The Lei Stand were already among the names being floated for HNL. Seven months later, those projects have moved beyond “coming soon” talk far enough for HMSHost to identify specific concepts and terminals, although individual opening dates still haven’t been announced.

Here’s what travelers will actually get to experience.

Honolulu gets four of the newly announced concepts. Alan Wong’s and Aloha Plate are headed to Terminal 2, along with The Lei-Over, a sister concept to Honolulu’s The Lei Stand. “On the Fly” by MW Restaurant, from award-winning chefs Wade Ueoka and Michelle Karr-Ueoka, is planned for Terminal 1.

Lihue gets two. Wailua Falls Market will sell sandwiches, salads, fruit, juices and other grab-and-go items, while Koloa Rum Company Cocktail Room will feature the Kauai company’s rum in what HMSHost describes as the first airport concept of its kind in the small airport.

Kahului also gets two new names for now. The Tap House by Maui Brewing Co. will serve Maui Brewing beers, seltzers and cocktails, while Ocean Organic Farm & Distillery will open an airport location featuring cocktails and food tied to its own Maui operation.

Existing concessions won’t disappear. HMSHost says Stinger Rays and Lahaina Chicken will receive refreshed spaces, as will Burger King, California Pizza Kitchen and Dunkin’. Digital waitlists, QR ordering and payment, and self-order kiosks are also part of the changes. We can only hope these changes improve things.

The announcement leaves out how food and beverage costs will land.

Neither HMSHost nor owner Avolta says what any of this will cost to eat or drink for now. No menus or prices have been announced for Alan Wong’s, MW, Koloa Rum, or the other new concepts, and nothing in the material released this week indicates how much airport prices will rise because of the changes.

Price and quality have already been big parts of the HNL discussion. When we revisited the $300 million Mauka Concourse and its sparse food choices in 2024, one reader said they had stopped buying food in the terminal altogether and picked something up before arriving. Another questioned whether airport rents were part of the reason local restaurants weren’t moving in.

Our own experience there wasn’t much better. During that visit, Dunkin’ was closed, the restaurant choices didn’t appeal to us, and we ended up walking back toward the older Terminal 1 area for dismal fast food. By 6 p.m., only Starbucks and Burger King were still open there.

More recognizable Hawaii names address one part of that problem. They don’t answer whether travelers will find the food worth what they’re asked to pay.

Construction could be another part impacting visitors.

The rollout will stretch from now through the end of 2027, so these changes aren’t happening immediately. HMSHost hasn’t released a location-by-location construction schedule yet showing when individual restaurants close or open, how long renovations will take, or whether temporary concessions will be added while work is underway.

For now, though, there’s a way to tell Hawaii visitors what to expect in terms of major dining disruption. So far, the announcement only gives us the end date for the broader rollout.

Hawaii has long promised better airport food but hasn’t delivered.

Waialua Bar & Cafe shows that some of this effort is already real. It opened at HNL Terminal 1 in December 2025, when HDOT said it was the first of several new dining options being developed with HMSHost. Earlier that year, the same partnership opened Panda Express in Terminal 1 and announced another for Terminal 2.

What makes this week’s announcement somewhat more hopeful is the specificity. Instead of another general promise about “local flavors,” travelers now know that Alan Wong’s is planned for Terminal 2, MW is headed to Terminal 1, Koloa Rum is coming to LIH, and both Maui Brewing and Ocean Organic are part of the Maui Airport changes.

We’ve also heard enough airport promises over the years to reserve judgment until these places open, start serving food, and post prices. At that point, we’ll return and give you updates. A Hawaii name over the door could be a meaningful improvement, especially at airports where choices have been this thin, but what happens after that will determine whether travelers experience much more than a change of signs.

Would Alan Wong, MW Restaurant, Koloa Rum, or Maui Brewing change where you eat at the airport, or will the price and operating hours still decide it for you?

Photo Credit: © Beat of Hawaii at HNL.

By Rob and Jeff, Beat of Hawaii.

Some of the most meaningful parts of Hawaii are the ones visitors walk right past without knowing they are there. We’ve spent nearly 20 years finding them firsthand for BOH as full-time Hawaii residents reporting on travel, culture, and island life, and telling you what they mean for your trip. Join us →

View from the pew

Hopefully, Hawaii Catholics will get stimulated to spend some interest and energy on celebrating next year when we reach a milestone of history, the 200th anniversary of Catholic presence in Hawaii.

The first missionary priests from a French religious order, the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, arrived in 1827. By that time, Protestant Christian missionaries from New England who started arriving en masse in 1820 had a strong foothold and backing of Hawaiian alii.

A reader or two scolded me for the August View from the Pew because I focused on the negative side of that history. But it’s a fact that the first Catholics were subjected to persecution and forced labor when the Catholic clergy were banished for a “dark decade” by the Hawaiian monarch at the behest of the Protestant church leaders.

However, that is so much in the rearview mirror. From the 21st-century perspective of interfaith acceptance and alliances, I doubt that it’s ever mentioned in classrooms or sermons.

Along with Catholic clergy worldwide, the Sacred Hearts order has dwindled in numbers of priests, brothers and sisters and now staff just a few parishes in Hawaii. And almost all of their newly ordained members are from other countries. In the whole Honolulu diocese, many of our clergy were not born in America.

My parish is in the hands of an Indonesian pastor and a Vietnamese parochial vicar, well-educated men whose accents make them nearly unintelligible to much of the congregation. “Do you know what Father said?” is the typical subject of parishioners’ conversation after Sunday Mass.

I work hard at understanding, and I reminisce about the Belgian and French clergy decades ago. Same problem trying to “get” what Father Matthew or Father Louis was saying. But we kept the faith, thanks be to God.

I have a theory that the climate of religious tolerance we enjoy can be credited to immigrants and Buddhists as much as to that intangible spiritual gift we call aloha spirit.

As I’ve come to know descendants of immigrants from Asia who became part of the energy, heart and soul of Hawaii over the past 150 years, I often feel a twinge of envy.

From 1852 through the early 1900s, waves of contract workers were brought here to work on the sugar and pineapple plantations.

The fact that each wave of people came from the same country and often the same community — starting with the Chinese in 1852, through Japanese, Koreans to Filipinos in 1906 — bonded these folks. Rather than go their separate ways, they stuck together. Back in the day, you’d hear about a “hui,” a group of Chinese people would pool their finances to help each other start a business. The island custom of tucking money in a condolence card started as a support system to help a family finance a funeral. Nowadays, we join in things like Chinatown events, the Okinawan Festival, Filipino cultural center activities and Japanese folk dances at Buddhist obon gatherings.

I miss the Portuguese Holy Ghost celebrations, which involved a parade of sometimes puzzling Catholic imagery and great food. Portuguese contract workers arrived in the 1870s, the only European migrants brought to plantations. That led to the island idiosyncrasy of separating that ethnic group from the inclusive and often derogatory Hawaiian identification of people of European descent as “haole.”

Despite all that wandering pondering, I’ll get back to the dark side where I started.

Here we are in a year of celebrating another historical milestone, the creation of the “one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all” 250 years ago. It’s somewhat questionable timing. But it suited the political motives of its advocate not to wait for the actual tri-centennial in 2076. Fireworks and concerts and road races, oh my!

We love to think that our country’s forefathers were unified about the freedom of speech and freedom of religion that they wrote into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. An article in the July-August edition of America, a Jesuit Catholic magazine provides a disturbing and eye-opening look at the anti-Catholic bias that ran deep for early centuries in our country.

The story, “Romanism and Rebellion” by the senior editor James T. Keane, can be found online. He used references to a series on the subject by historian Father Anthony Andreassi that can be found on OSV (Our Sunday Visitor) online.

They tell of the anti-Catholic bias which began in the 1500s when England’s King Henry VIII rejected the pope and created the Anglican church, followed by the Protestant Revolution launched by Martin Luther.

Centuries of religious persecution directed at Irish Catholics were part of the British heritage that America’s early settlers, starting with the Puritans in 1620, brought to the New World. Added to that was the earliest political rivalry with France, which was colonizing Canada, and, in the New World, Louisiana.

Charles Carroll, a prominent Maryland landowner, was the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

The Maryland colony passed a Toleration Act of 1649. But as Keane wrote in his article, Father Andreassi pointed out that the English Civil War in 1689 “hardened hearts against Catholics in British territories and by the 18th Century most Catholics were secluded from the colony’s public life and restricted to worshipping in private.”

The America editor used snarky remarks by John Adams who described a 1774 visit to St. Mary’s Church in Philadelphia with George Washington: “The afternoon entertainment was the most awful and affecting. The poor wretches fingering their beads, chanting Latin, not a word of it they understood. The mass included everything that can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.”

Keane wrote, “We might recognize that with the talk about American history being driven by the quest for religious freedom, we are at best misremembering a nuanced past, and at worst, telling a lie.”

Bishop John Carroll of Maryland, a cousin of the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, became the first Roman Catholic bishop and archbishop in the United States. He wrote that after the Revolutionary War, the new nation had “banished intolerance from their systems of government in part by giving everyone, regardless of creed, an equal right of participation in civil life. Freedom and independence, acquired by the united efforts and cemented by the mingled blood of Protestant and Catholic fellow citizens, should be equally enjoyed by all.”

In a few weeks, we citizens of 21st-century America can celebrate what those first patriots accomplished. Not just by praying for our country, but by filling in a ballot to select our leaders.