Travel News

Outrigger’s Waikiki Beach Walk Starts to Open
Published on: January 4, 2007

Outrigger Enterprises Group’s Waikiki Beach Walk is now partially open. The $535 million retail, entertainment, and hotel development is transforming nearly eight acres of central Waikiki into a pedestrian-friendly gathering place. The entire complex will include five hotels offering nearly 2,000 rooms and suites, and 47 restaurant and retail tenants in 93,000 square feet of space. The development includes the newly opened Embassy Suites-Waikiki Beach Walk and Wyndham Vacation Ownership Resort-Waikiki Beach Walk. The new district is also home to the Outrigger Reef on the Beach, currently undergoing a $100 million repositioning; the Ohana Islander Waikiki, which is slated for a complete makeover beginning in 2007; and the new Trump International Hotel & Tower-Waikiki Beach Walk, scheduled for completion in 2009. A wide selection of restaurants, casual eateries, specialty shops and boutiques has begun to open. Freaky Tiki Tropical Optical, Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Beard Papa’s Sweets Café, Coco Cove, Malibu Shirts, Tabora Gallery and Mondo Gelato were the first to open. The next three months will see a flurry of openings, including Quiksilver, Crazy Shirts, Wyland Galleries, Folli Follie, Sunshine Swimwear, Maui Divers Jewelry, Na Hoku and Mana Hawaii-Spirit of Hawaii Nei. Among the restaurants set to open in the coming months are Roy’s Waikiki, Ruth’s Chris Steak House, Yard House, Giovanni Pastrami, Holokai Grill, Kaiwa Japanese restaurant and Taormina Sicilian Cuisine. The Waikiki Beach Walk district will also feature island musicians and ongoing educational and cultural activities, such as ukulele, hula and lei-making lessons; story-telling; and wood-carving. Many of these events will take place at Waikiki Beach Walk’s center stage. After nearly 10 years of planning, the Waikiki Beach Walk development was announced in July 2001 and began construction in April 2005. The first phase of the project saw several older hotels — the Edgewater Lanais, the OHANA Coral Seas, and the OHANA Edgewater — come down to make way for the two-level retail/entertainment complex, designed as the centerpiece of the large open-air plaza intended to capture the ambience of vintage Waikiki.