The bar sits within the open-air lobby of Fairmont Kea Lani, part of a wider renovation in which cultural advisors, environmental consultants, and local craftspeople worked alongside the design team. The first thing guests encounter on arrival is a carved monkeypod wood feature – a native timber selected to anchor the space visually before the view beyond comes into focus. Pod-style seating arranged beneath indigenous plantings gives the room the feeling of a well-considered living space rather than a hotel adjunct.

The decision not to install a back bar was deliberate. Bottles would have broken the sightline to the ocean, so the design team worked instead on under-bar storage – specialist refrigeration and organisation systems that keep an extensive spirits selection fully accessible to the team while remaining invisible to guests. The ocean does the work the back bar cannot.

The physical menus take their form from hinaʻi – traditional Hawaiian fish traps woven from natural fibres – rendered here in woven textures and organic materials. Coasters are made from recycled cotton and printed with phrases in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, their English translations alongside. Guests are encouraged to take them.

Drinks are built around the mauka to makai principle – mountain to ocean – which in practice means selecting ingredients that trace the islands’ vertical geography. Mountain-grown honey, lavender, and smoked bee pollen sit alongside foraged seaweed and ocean-adjacent botanicals, each chosen as much for what it represents as for what it tastes like. Presentation follows the same logic – cocktails are finished tableside with smoke from keawe wood chips, served over hand-cut ice stamped with the Pilina logo, and garnished in ways that echo the landscape they’re drawing from. The glassware, too, is chosen to reinforce the sense of place rather than as a purely aesthetic decision.

All syrups, shrubs, and juices are prepared fresh each morning. A bartender works through the kitchen prep area – available to bar use throughout the day – producing the ingredients the evening service will draw on. The kitchen’s professional-grade equipment supports the culinary-forward approach, with the limu and ogo syrup made from foraged seaweed, the macadamia nut orgeat using nuts from the Big Island, and the honey syrup infused with Kula lavender and butterfly pea flower each requiring a level of precision that benefits from the space. Local Maui licensing laws prevent spirit infusions and batched cocktails, which makes the quality of these house-made components all the more central to what ends up in the glass.

The spirits list prioritises island distillers – Kuleana Rum Works, Waikulu Agave, Ko’olau Distillery, and Ocean Distillery among them – with a smaller selection of international bottles held as house pours in line with Fairmont brand requirements. The same sourcing logic extends across the full drinks offer, from the Pilina Golden Ale brewed by Maui Brewing Company five miles away to the non-alcoholic options, which draw on hibiscus, pīkake, lemongrass, and li hing mui mango from Maui farms.

Team members visit local farms, distilleries, and ingredient suppliers as part of their development – trips that are treated less as field trips and more as part of how the bar builds its knowledge base, informing both how the team talks about ingredients and how those ingredients are developed into drinks. Entry-level roles are structured with progression in mind, and several team members have moved into senior service positions since the bar opened two years ago. Feedback is given in the moment rather than stored for formal reviews, supported by six-monthly performance evaluations.

The hotel holds a five Green Key Global rating, and within Pilina that commitment runs through the detail of daily operations – a house filtration system, on-request eco straws, reusable stir sticks, and batch preparation scaled to avoid overproduction. Citrus trimmings are redirected into syrups and garnishes, and technology waste returns to the hotel’s IT department for repair or repurposing.

Beyond the bar itself, the hotel acts as a grow hub for Treecovery Hawai’i, nurturing native trees for wildfire-affected areas of Lahaina and Kula, while a partnership with Hawaiʻi Land Trust and Ka Pōholima Kāʻeo supports the revitalisation of traditional fishponds and taro patches – land practices that connect, in some cases, to the same agricultural networks that supply the bar. Evenings bring a rotating roster of local musicians performing in the open air, a reminder that the sense of place Pilina works to build through its drinks and its sourcing is also something that simply arrives, unhurried, with the island itself.