Born from Big Island Booch Kombucha, The Booch Bar serves living food in the heart of Hilo — made with the freshest local, organic ingredients.
Walk into the Booch Bar and most of what reaches your table was made in this building.
The ketchup. The vinegar. The bacon. The pizza dough. The cheese — including the vegan cheese.
The vegan side of our kitchen gets the same treatment as everything else. We make a cashew chèvre — soft and spreadable, in the style of a fresh goat cheese. We make a cashew-and-coconut mozzarella that actually melts. Our veggie burgers are ours.
And we cook without seed oils — across the whole kitchen.
We’ve done it this way since the beginning. It takes longer, and it’s worth it.
We cure and smoke our own bacon.
Our brisket is USDA Prime and spends twenty hours in the smoke. Our Paniolo pit pulled pork is traditional Kālua pig, following Texas-style rules. We smoke our own free-range turkey.
And every cut of pork that leaves this kitchen is Duroc.
Our dough is organic double-zero European flour, fermented for three days before it ever sees heat.
Then it goes into a 900-degree oven and cooks in minutes.
The three days are the point. That’s where the char, the chew and the flavor come from — and there’s no shortcut to it.
Every dessert we serve is made here.
Start with the ice cream. It’s ours, and it’s vegan — coconut-based, sweetened with coconut nectar, and churned in-house in small batches. The flavors rotate, so there’s always something new to try.
The one people ask for by name is the vegan cacao pie — which isn’t on the menu. It turns up as a special. That’s probably why they ask.
What we don’t make, we get from people we know.
We’re grateful to every one of them. A kitchen like ours is only as good as the people who grow for it.
We make the drinks too.
Kombucha and hard kombucha. Jun and hard Jun. Cold brew coffee. And craft beer from our own Honoliʻi Brewing Company — brewed here, pouring here.
It started with one bottle.
In 2013, Kela Cosgrave and Brendan Roberts sold a single bottle of kombucha at Uncle Robert’s ʻAwa Club in Kalapana. There wasn’t a market for it on this island then, so they spent the next ten years building one — one conversation at a time, with a lot of help from a community that kept showing up.
Big Island Booch grew. The Booch Bar came next: a place in downtown Hilo where the kombucha could be poured fresh, next to food made the same way it was — by hand, from scratch, from ingredients grown nearby.
All of this came out of that one bottle. We’re still grateful, and still at it.