Walk the Kapalua Coastal Trail south to north this month, from the Bay Villas parking lot past Hawea Point toward the Oneloa Bay boardwalk, and you'll pass a building most regulars still call Cane & Canoe. The sign says otherwise now. It reads The Restaurant at Kapalua Bay. Ask someone waiting for a table which one they booked and there's a decent chance they'll still say the old name out loud, then catch themselves.
That gap between what the building is called and what people call it is worth sitting with, because it tells you something the sign itself doesn't: how much has actually changed at Kapalua Bay right now, and how much hasn't.
What actually happened
The short version. In November 2025, Kemmons Wilson Hospitality Partners bought the remaining residences and hotel and event spaces at what had been Montage Kapalua Bay. On March 14, 2026, management of the property passed from Montage Hotels & Resorts to Marriott International. The Montage name came off the building. Spa Montage became The Spa at Kapalua Bay. Cane & Canoe, the oceanfront restaurant that anchored the property since it reopened in 2009, became The Restaurant at Kapalua Bay. The Hideaway lounge reopened in February 2026 under the new management.
None of that is the interesting part yet. The interesting part is where this is headed. Marriott has signed the property to convert to St. Regis, with the flag change expected sometime in 2027 after a renovation. According to reporting on the deal, that would mark St. Regis's return to Hawaii after the brand's Kauai property, the former St. Regis Princeville, left the flag back in 2022. In other words, the sign at Kapalua Bay has already changed once this year and is scheduled to change again, and this second change is the one with an actual construction timeline attached to it.
If you've lived here through a resort cycle or two, you already know how this goes. The Ritz-Carlton up the road went through its own version of this, a renovation reported at roughly $100 million that wrapped in 2022 and reset how that property competed for the same sunset crowd. Kapalua Bay is now on a similar clock, just a few years behind.
What hasn't changed
Here's the part that matters if you're deciding whether to book dinner this month rather than wait. The restaurant is still open to the public, no room key required, the same as it was under Montage. Executive Chef Justin Purpura's menu is still built around dishes like the Kahuku Sweet Corn Agnolotti and a charred octopus plate, the kind of food that made the room a regular booking rather than a hotel-guest afterthought. The view out over Kapalua Bay toward Molokai and Lanai hasn't moved. The renovation that will eventually change the physical space hasn't started. What changed in March was the operator and the name on the door. What changes in 2027, on the current timeline, is closer to everything else.
That's the practical read for anyone who eats along this stretch of coast regularly. You're not booking a construction zone. You're booking a restaurant mid-transition in ownership, not mid-renovation in fact.
The reservation math nobody explains up front
If you're trying to land a sunset table anywhere along this part of the trail, the three benchmark bookings are Merriman's, The Restaurant at Kapalua Bay, and The Banyan Tree at the Ritz-Carlton, and they don't run on the same clock.
Merriman's releases its reservations 60 days out, at 6 a.m. Hawaii time, and the best sunset tables are reported to fill within hours of that release, every day of the year including holidays. That's not a seasonal quirk. It's a standing pattern.
The Restaurant at Kapalua Bay and The Banyan Tree work on a longer runway during peak season, roughly November through April, when both are commonly booked several weeks in advance. September sits outside that peak window, which is one reason a walk past Kapalua Bay this month feels less crowded than the same walk in February. If you've been putting off a reservation because the wait felt permanent, this is the month where it probably isn't.
The rest of Kapalua isn't standing still either
The restaurant rebrand landed in the same stretch of the year as two other things worth knowing about if you live here rather than just visit.
The Maui Jazz & Blues Festival ran at the Ritz-Carlton Maui, Kapalua from August 31 through September 6, its second consecutive year on the west side, with a lineup that included trumpeter Eddie Henderson and saxophonist Javon Jackson, plus a two-night takeover from the team behind New Orleans's Jewel of the South at the resort's Alaloa Lounge. The festival also donated more than 200 tickets to Lahaina fire survivors, which is its own kind of local detail worth knowing even if you weren't in the room for a set.
The 4th West Maui Rec Expo was scheduled for September 26 at The Barn at Kapalua as a free family event run by Mana Mentors and the West Maui Recreational Committee, with performances from groups including West Maui Dance, Prime Dance, and Na Kamaliʻi. It was planned as a grassroots gathering, not a resort promotion, and was meant to tell you more about the texture of a place in a given week than any brand transition does.
Why the naming lag is the actual story
None of this is really about a restaurant's letterhead. It's about how slowly the ground truth of a place catches up to its corporate paperwork. The building changed operators in March. The sign changed with it. The renovation that will genuinely alter what it feels like to eat there hasn't been scheduled yet, and won't be finished before the St. Regis flag goes up sometime in 2027. Everything in between, this whole stretch of 2026, is the version of Kapalua Bay that still runs like the one everybody already knew, just under new management and a name that hasn't caught on yet.
That's worth knowing if you're weighing a reservation this fall, or if you just want to understand why the person ahead of you at the hostess stand asked for "Cane & Canoe" and got seated without anyone correcting them.
If you spend enough time on this stretch of coast to notice things like a restaurant's name changing before its regulars do, you already know the neighborhood better than most guidebooks do. If you ever want someone who tracks these shifts as closely as the tide tables to talk through what's actually happening around Kapalua, reach out to Mark Marchello.