Our story · Lower Makiki
One corner,
forty years.
Pasta, sauce, a hot wood oven — that has always been the whole idea. But people have been eating in this little room at Beretania and Pensacola since 1983, so here is the short version of how it came to be.
1099 S Beretania St
Honolulu, Hawai’i
The building
A room that was never
meant to be big.
1099 South Beretania is a single-story corner room of about 2,090 square feet, standing where Beretania meets Pensacola in the flat part of Makiki, close enough that the neighborhood walks to dinner. Low ceiling, narrow floor, windows onto two streets. It was built as a storefront, not a banquet hall.
The block around it grew up: walk-ups gave way to towers, the traffic thickened, the same glass kept the same view. We have repainted the inside twice, replaced the burners, patched the floor. The shape of the room we never touched — it is the reason you can hear the table beside you, and end up talking to it.
The restaurant
Built on a sauce
that cannot be hurried.
Word traveled the way it does in Makiki — by neighbor. Within a few years the little Italian room was part of the week: Friday pasta, birthdays, the table after graduation. Nothing about the cooking was ever precious. It was food that tasted like somebody’s family had been at it all day, because somebody had.
That is still the rule. The dining room seats fewer people than the line outside it, which is why we take reservations and why we pack takeout by the bagful. Everything else — the wood oven, the hand-cut pasta, the same corner — stays where it is.
- 1983
- The doors open at Beretania and Pensacola with a handful of tables and a red sauce that took all afternoon.
- 1990s
- More Auntie Pasto's rooms open around O'ahu. The corner stays the original, and the line still runs out the Pensacola Street doors.
- Today
- One kitchen, one menu. Pasta rolled before service, dough proved overnight, sauce finished to order.
The owner
Ed Wary
He opened Auntie Pasto’s with a few tables, a secondhand pasta board and the stubborn idea that a neighborhood restaurant should cost less than it tastes. Four decades later he is still in the dining room most nights — greeting the regulars by name and asking the kitchen, every time, whether the sauce has had long enough. It has.
- Grew up in Honolulu and graduated from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, class of 1968.
- A restaurateur before this corner existed — Dixie Grill was his other kitchen.
- Opened Auntie Pasto's in 1983 and has kept the room ever since.
- Honored by his alma mater, the Shidler College of Business, for a career in Island restaurants.
“A restaurant is just a room that keeps its promises.”
The rest of the story is on the menu.