Button Up Cafe, the Korean-Hawaiian-American brunch spot that’s been feeding Pearl City since 2016, has reopened in a much bigger home within Pearl City Plaza. The new location seats 64 customers, a dramatic jump from the original space’s 19 seats, and for the first time, diners can eat their loco moco without sweating through it, thanks to newly installed air conditioning.
The cafe relocated from the front of Pearl City Plaza facing Kamehameha Highway to a larger unit on the backside of the same plaza, according to Aloha State Daily. Owner Brian Park said the move solved two of the restaurant’s biggest headaches at once: the lack of air conditioning and the seating crunch that had defined the cafe since it opened. The new address is 719 Kamehameha Hwy., Suite B106, in Pearl City, per the same outlet.
Anyone who tried to grab a table at the old spot knows the struggle was real. Food review blog From Pineapples documented back in 2017 that the original counter-service setup had just four window seats and eight two-person tables, a cramped footprint that regularly pushed customers toward long waits or takeout. That scarcity, paired with the cafe’s growing reputation, helped fuel demand that the old space simply couldn’t keep up with.
A Menu Built on Fusion and Excess
Button Up Cafe made its name by mashing up Korean, Hawaiian, and American comfort food into something dessert-adjacent for breakfast. Leeward Community College’s student publication Ka Mana’o reported in November 2024 that Brian Park founded the cafe in February 2016 specifically to merge local Hawaiian favorites with Korean flavors. That fusion shows up in dishes like bulgogi sandwiches and Korean braised short rib eggs Benedict, according to the same report…