As we share this story about a community rebuilding after a fire, the National Trust for Historic Preservation joins Los Angeles County in mourning the loss of life arising from the devastating wildfires in January 2025,as well as the loss of people's homes and gathering places that form its vibrant communities. We are working with local, state, and federal partners to help communities across the Los Angeles area rebuild the physical spaces which form the foundation of the social and cultural ties that unite them.

Battered by natural and economic disasters over the past five years, five community-centered historic restaurants on the island of Maui were startled and delighted to find themselves the surprise beneficiaries of the “Maui Climate Fund” from the Backing Historic Small Restaurants (BHSR) grant program.

Developed by American Express in partnership with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, this one-of-a-kind fund is intended to help preserve the island’s unique cultural heritage in the face of the devastating wildfires that struck the historic oceanfront town of Lahaina in August 2023,killing 102 people and destroying some 2,200 buildings, while also damaging parts of the island’s interior as well. The historic small businesses that survived the conflagration had to contend with an economic crisis as tourists fled and did not return and residents suffered job loss, inflated prices, and homelessness.

“It’s been a really nice gesture, a godsend to help us out with that money,” said Javier Barberi, principal owner of Mala Ocean Tavern, a scenic seaside fine-dining eatery in Lahaina that survived almost miraculously when the flames passed overhead, destroying much of the surrounding neighborhood and the store’s equipment and stock but leaving the restaurant’s interior mostly intact.

Seri Worden, senior director of preservation programs at the National Trust, said the program was initiated to help Maui in its hour of need, in awareness of the “loss and trauma” Maui had suffered, but also specifically to help bolster the chances of survival for historic small businesses that might be in particular danger due to the economic fallout following the fires. They are also the kind of enterprises that provide the vital connections that allow communities to recover from tragedy, she said.

Maui is the Best

The five restaurants are scattered around Maui, helping to preserve the heritage of the island as a whole. Maui is a spectacularly beautiful place, formed by two separate volcanoes that rose from the bottom of the sea that eventually came to be linked with a central isthmus. It is the home of sparkling beaches, rich green pasturelands, and vaulted mountains whose spires offer panoramic views over the Pacific Ocean. After Hawaiʻi Island, Maui is the second-largest in the chain, and after Oahu, the home of Waikiki and Honolulu, Maui is the second-most-visited by tourists.

As the proud and independent-spirited people of the island like to say in Hawaiian, Maui Nō E Ka ʻOi, or Maui Is The Best, a phrase so common it is a refrain in a popular song.

Lahaina itself is the single most important historic place not only on the island but, arguably, also in the state, representing within about a mile of the ocean settlement all the major eras in the island’s recent human history.

It was long viewed as a sacred spot to the Hawaiians, serving as the resting place for some of its most noble families, and then became the kingdom’s capital in the reign of King Kamehameha III, where he drafted the emerging nation’s first constitution. The village drew early Christian missionaries from Tahiti and New England, teemed with American sailors during the rowdy whaling era, and housed some of the pioneering printing presses that produced books and newspapers that helped transform Hawaiʻi in the early 1800s into one of the most literate nations in the world.

Lahaina next became a global economic powerhouse in the sugar plantation era, drawing workers from all over the world, which permanently changed the island’s demographic mix and its natural ecosystems. Even as some found prosperity and jobs, streams were diverted to irrigate the cane fields, turning once-lush areas into deserts and depriving Hawaiian farmers of water to grow their crops. Then the sugar plantations folded.

Water continued to be diverted to maintain golf courses and hotel landscaping when Maui became one of the most popular resort destinations on the planet.

After the Fire

On August 8, 2023 a fire struck leveling much of historic Lahaina and causing major damage on the mountain slopes in the island’s interior. The root causes of the fires are complex, including rising temperatures, water shortages, drought conditions and a plague of invasive grasses that took root in abandoned sugar fields. The tinderbox was lit when dilapidated above-ground power lines collapsed amid unexpectedly high winds and ignited sparks in the parched fields.

The economic damage came next as tourism declined, initially out of necessity, then out of sympathy from visitors, but has since failed to rebound. More than 1,000 people have moved away.

The fire was only the latest blow to Maui. In 2020, to protect the remote chain of islands from the COVID-19 pandemic, Hawaiʻi officials enacted some of the most rigid quarantine programs in the country, for some months virtually banning tourism. While the strict rules saved lives, they came at a steep economic cost for those whose jobs depended on tourism or interaction with the public. Many locally-owned small businesses closed permanently.

The five restaurants chosen for the BHSR awards are among the survivors, first of the COVID-19 shutdown, the fires, and the economic decline that followed.

Supporting Critical Needs

The “Maui Climate Fund” Backing Historic Small Restaurants program was developed to help some of Maui’s most historic restaurants navigate through these daunting challenges.

Two of the oceanside restaurants that were selected to receive the $40,000 American Express renovation grants are located in or near the West Maui burn zone—Mala Ocean Tavern, a seaside-dining restaurant, and Leoda’s Kitchen and Pie Shop, a sugar plantation-era eatery that serves homestyle comfort food from the 1950s.

Two more restaurants are in the island’s upland paniolo cowboy country—T. Komoda Store & Bakery in Makawao, a multi-generational, small-town bakery that began in 1916 as part of their home before moving to the existing building in 1932 , and Ulupalakua Ranch Store in Kula, which offers grilled meats and outdoor picnic-style dining on a rural, mountainous slope overlooking the ocean. The ranch has been in operation since the 1850s.

The fifth, Ichiban Okazuya, a popular traditional Japanese delicatessen, is located near the county seat in Wailuku, where officials have gathered to deliberate over responses to a set of difficult and confounding questions about how best to go forward in the wake of so much desolation.

For the five entrepreneurs, learning about the grant program, and then being told they had received the awards, has been a bright light of sunshine among the clouds. In fact, some of the businesses owners thought it was too good to be true when they were contacted about applying.

The applicants, for their part, needed to be convinced that the program was for real.

Kylee Okazaki, general manager of Leoda’s Kitchen and Pie Shop, was immediately suspicious when she got an email offering her free grant money to make store renovations.

“At first I thought it was spam,” she recalled recently with a laugh, noting that she just put it out of her mind. Then someone from the National Trust called her directly to tell her about the opportunity to apply for the funding.

“You’re a real person,” Okazaki said in surprise to the National Trust official on the other end of the line.

In some cases, the applicants needed to be coached in how to prepare the on-line application and what they would be allowed to do with the money.

“We’re a restaurant crew; we don’t know anything about grants,” said Barberi, owner of Mala Ocean Tavern.

Looking to the Future

The applicants had to pledge the money would be used in suitable ways, and that the construction would be done by contractors who had experience working with historic sites. That was another area where Historic Hawaiʻi Foundation trustees played a big role, Worden and Faulkner said.

The Foundation’s on-the-ground assistance was key, Worden said.

“We couldn’t have done it without them,” Worden said. “And they have been amazing because they had all those relationships, those local connections.”

Ultimately about 20 businesses were identified as potential applicants and five were awarded the grants.

“This is awesome,” said Roger Gazman of the Ulupalakua Ranch Store, which has used the money to buy new outdoor dining tables and for exterior improvements.

Mala Ocean Tavern, located on Lahaina’s devastated Front Street, is installing new exterior lighting and making landscaping improvements; Ichiban Okazuya, which translates from Japanese as “Number One” delicatessen, is making some much-needed exterior structural repairs; Leoda’s is upgrading its windows and repainting the front of the building.

T. Komoda Store & Bakery is using the money to fix a problem that’s gone unsolved for decades, too expensive to confront. Back long ago, when the bakery was also a hardware store, hard-drinking cowboys who frequented a local bar got into a brawl and smashed the plate-glass windows that advertised the goods for sale in the store.