Ask someone who lives out here where to eat, and the answer usually involves a paper plate and a picnic table. The best Turtle Bay restaurants are roadside shrimp trucks, a working farm cafe, and a bakery known for one particular slice of pie. Here at Turtle Bay Condos, our whole team lives on the North Shore, so these are the places we point guests toward.
Best Restaurants Near Turtle Bay
The Kahuku Shrimp Trucks
The most famous restaurants near Turtle Bay, Oahu, are not restaurants at all. A few minutes up Kamehameha Highway in Kahuku, a cluster of trucks and roadside stands serves garlic butter shrimp with two scoops of rice.
Giovanni’s Shrimp Truck started the tradition in 1993, and its white truck, covered in years of customer signatures, is a landmark in its own right.
Romy’s Kahuku Prawns and Shrimp raises its own prawns and cooks every plate to order, which is why it often sells out before closing. Lines are longest between 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m., so go early or wait until the afternoon.
Kahuku Farms
Turtle Bay dining does not get more local than a plate of food grown in the field beside your table. Kahuku Farms is a fourth-generation family farm with more than 100 years of history on this coast, and its open-air cafe serves paninis, smoothies, and acai bowls made with acai grown on the property, among the first cultivated anywhere in Hawaii. The chocolate comes from the farm’s own cacao.
The cafe runs 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and closes Tuesdays and Wednesdays, so it is worth planning around.
Seven Brothers at the Mill
Set at the old Kahuku sugar mill, Seven Brothers began as a family burger shop on this stretch of coast and has since grown to Laie, Haleiwa, and even Utah. Of all the Turtle Bay restaurants on this list, it is the one where you sit down at a table with a menu, which makes it an easy call after a long beach day. The Paniolo Cowboy Burger, stacked with an onion ring and barbecue sauce, is the order to beat.
Hours vary by location, so check before you drive over.
Ted’s Bakery
A short drive west toward Sunset Beach, Ted’s Bakery is the coast’s longtime dessert stop. The chocolate haupia pie, chocolate pudding layered with coconut haupia under a cap of whipped cream, is what people line up for, though the plate lunches and sandwiches are why locals turn up at noon.
Buy a whole pie and take it back to the condo!
Beyond the Turtle Bay Restaurants: Poke and Produce
Kahuku Superette, the small grocery in town, is a longtime local pick for poke by the pound, and it stays open later than most kitchens out here. Some of the best restaurants in the Turtle Bay area keep country hours and close by late afternoon.
Our Oahu North Shore condo rentals all have full kitchens, so plenty of guests build dinner around poke, Kahuku corn, and fruit from the farm stands.
