Kuhio Avenue Food Hall in Waikiki: the $29 Chee Hoo Combo, and a $16 poke bowl at the new Nori Bar
On 17 May 2026, the eighth day of a Waikiki stay, the plan was meat: a lot of it, carried back to our timeshare condo in Waikiki and worked through with beer and red wine. When we want that, we buy the Chee Hoo Combo from Chee Hoo BBQ in the Kuhio Avenue Food Hall. With the meat in the bag we added a poke bowl from Nori Bar, a new shop on Kuhio Avenue, and later ended up asking an AI who runs it.
The two buys, at a glance
| Counter | What we ordered | Price | Paid with tax |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chee Hoo BBQ, Kuhio Avenue Food Hall | Combo Plate with coleslaw, potato salad and kimchi | $29.00 + $1.50 takeout fee | $31.87 |
| Nori Bar Waikiki | Fresh Poke Bowl, Ahi Shoyu | $16.00 | $16.75 |
Before either, a Target run for beer and groceries came to $36.52. More on that below.
Chee Hoo BBQ: four meats for $29
The food hall’s address is 2330 Kalakaua Ave, but it sits on the ground floor of International Market Place and you walk in from the Kuhio Avenue side, which is where the name comes from. Chee Hoo BBQ is one of the counters inside.
The board in May 2026 sold the smoked meats one at a time, each as a plate with three sides: baby back ribs $23, smoked sausage $21, beef brisket $24, kalbi short ribs $24. The Chee Hoo Combo puts all four of those in one box, still with three sides, for $29. That is $5 to $8 more than any one of them alone.
We chose coleslaw, potato salad and kimchi (Kim Chee-Hoo, on the board). To go, each side gets its own cup. The takeout fee was $1.50, and with tax the receipt came to $31.87.
How the combo ate
Back in the condo, the sides went first.
My wife tried the coleslaw and reacted at once: “This one. Coleslaw has to be like this.” She meant compared with the coleslaw from Me BBQ, the Korean plate-lunch place on Kuhio Avenue, which we’d had the other day and which was mostly sweet and light. Chee Hoo’s has real acidity and more going on, and it is the better of the two. The kimchi was properly sour. The potato salad was more mashed than the ABC Store one, but with whole chunks of potato still in it, and good as well. The sides alone kept the drinks moving.
The combo had kalbi too, but we had just finished some Me BBQ kalbi that was left over, so the other three went in the microwave: sausage, baby back ribs, brisket.
- Sausage: spicy, a bit like chorizo. A beer sausage, not a wine one.
- Baby back ribs: a strong pork aroma. One of us loves that. My wife doesn’t care for the smell, and after one bite she passed them over to the one who does.
- Brisket: good, but a little light on salt. A pinch of salt tightened it right up.
Chee Hoo or L.A. Brisket?
After the three meats, we agreed: L.A. Brisket in Ala Moana is a level above on the meat itself. And L.A. Brisket has that rice, which is part of why we keep going (our Ala Moana food court run is here).
Chee Hoo has the one thing L.A. Brisket doesn’t, for us: we can walk to it. When the wish for meat arrives, we can just go and get some. “We’ll be back here a few more times,” we said to each other. The place for the best plate and the place for an ordinary night of meat and drinks don’t have to be the same place, and Chee Hoo does the second job.
Nori Bar: is this a Japanese place?
Nori Bar Waikiki, at 2255 Kuhio Ave, had only recently soft-opened. The Waikiki shop opened on 1 April 2026, per Aloha State Daily, so it was about a month and a half old when we went.
We ordered the Fresh Poke Bowl with Ahi Shoyu poke: $16.00, or $16.75 with tax.
After the first bites we looked at each other. The rice is properly vinegared, and the nori was crisp. The cucumber works like a Japanese pickle, a little on the salty side, which suits the vinegared rice.
My wife isn’t big on raw fish, and said so before adding: “The tuna is cut small here, so it doesn’t feel raw. It’s easy to eat.” Next to the ahi poke from Waikiki Market or an ABC Store, the pieces were finer and looked more carefully cut. The whole bowl tasted Japanese, in a way that is hard to pin down, and we both wondered out loud whether a Japanese company was behind it.
What Gemini said
One of us asked Gemini, as we tend to. Its answer: not a Japanese company. Nori Bar is run by a Hawaii group, Chao Restaurant Group; it goes for Koshihikari rice and good, crisp nori; and the Waikiki shop is its second, after the first at Ward Village in Kakaako.
The operator part holds up in later reporting: Chao Restaurant Group runs Nori Bar and also Paradise Poke. Nori Bar’s own site names three things it builds on: carefully chosen fish from Hawaii and Tokyo, Koshihikari rice and crisp nori. A local company aiming deliberately at that standard explains why the bowl sat so easily with two Japanese palates. “It’s local, and it tastes like this. Impressive,” we said, more or less together. Nori Bar is on our list to go back to.
The drinks, and a near miss at Target
Earlier, we had stopped at Target (2345 Kuhio Ave, also in International Market Place) because the IPA was running low. On the beer shelf was a can new to us: BERO, Edge Hill Hazy IPA. A new hazy IPA has to be tried, and it nearly went to the register with us before we spotted the small print: non-alcoholic.
Of the IPAs that did contain alcohol, we took the cheapest: Deschutes Fresh Squeezed IPA, six cans for $9.99. With milk, broccoli and a few other groceries, $36.52.
With the sides we opened Kona Big Wave Golden Ale, from the cans we keep stocked (Longs Drugs, 18 for $25.99 in May 2026). It is light, and the right first beer. After that, HESS Select Cabernet, a red that was $11.99 a bottle at Longs Drugs on our May 2026 receipts.
That leftover Me BBQ kalbi, microwaved, came with its rice, and the rice was as good as ever; at Me BBQ the rice is the thing. Then my wife produced her party trick: over that rice, a drizzle of prik nam pla, chilies in fish sauce, which Siam Square on Lewers Street had given us the day before. A sauce learned in Bangkok, on Korean plate-lunch rice, in Hawaii. She looked very happy eating it. One of us had a bite, and it was good: salt, umami and a little heat, and plain white rice keeps disappearing under it.
Practical bits
- Where: Kuhio Avenue Food Hall, 2330 Kalakaua Ave, on the ground floor of International Market Place with its entrance on the Kuhio Avenue side. Target is at 2345 Kuhio Ave, also in International Market Place. Nori Bar Waikiki is at 2255 Kuhio Ave. Chee Hoo is a walk from our condo; the minutes we didn’t time.
- Hours (each place’s own website, checked August 2026): the food hall 11:00 to 21:00 daily; Nori Bar 11:00 to 22:00 daily, happy hour 14:00 to 17:00. Chee Hoo’s own hours inside the hall we didn’t check.
- Chee Hoo’s board (May 2026): prices are bare numbers with no dollar sign, before tax. Single plates $19 to $24 with three sides; the four-meat Chee Hoo Combo $29. Sides on their own $5 to $7 small, $9 to $11 large. Takeout added $1.50 on our receipt.
- Nori Bar’s $16: the laminated takeout menu on the same day listed a Medium Poke Bowl (one choice, 1/3 lb) at $17 and a Large (two choices, 1/2 lb) at $20. Our $16 matches the soft-opening banner, so it looks like the opening price was still running; the receipt doesn’t say. Hand rolls, which we didn’t try, ran $4.50 to $8 on that menu.
- Ordering ahead: Nori Bar’s menu lists phone and online orders, plus Uber Eats, DoorDash and GrubHub.
- Paying: Visa at all three in May 2026. Cash we didn’t check.
- Seating: there are booths and tall stools near Chee Hoo’s counter (you can see them in our photo). We took everything back to the condo.
- At Target’s beer shelf: the BERO six-packs are non-alcoholic. Deschutes Fresh Squeezed IPA was $9.99 for six cans in May 2026.
To finish, the leftover Jollibee fried chicken from the fridge and the last two from a six-pack of Kohola Brewing Lahaina Haze IPA, a hazy from a Lahaina brewery on Maui, fruity and easy to drink. No feast. Just the two of us working through what was left, a little at a time, which is the kind of night we are most at ease with.
Facts checked 2026-10-14. Prices, hours and menus are what we saw on our visit; they change. Nothing here was sponsored or comped.
