Royal Hawaiian Bakery

Pink pastry on the Coconut Lanai

The colour comes first here, and it is deliberate. Royal Hawaiian Bakery is the pastry counter of The Royal Hawaiian on Waikiki in Honolulu, the hotel known as the Pink Palace of the Pacific, and it translates that identity into Pink Snowballs, Pink Palace pancake mix and pink macadamia nuts. It opened around the hotel's ninetieth anniversary in 2017, the first Oahu hotel with a stand-alone bakery of its own, and it has always worked as three things at once: a bakery case, a coffee counter and a shop for edible souvenirs. The result is less a generic resort sweets counter than a bakery built around one hotel's colours, flavours and keepsakes.

A counter on the terrace, and a walk to the beach

The rhythm is casual and counter-led. Pastries, coffee and packaged goods are chosen quickly rather than ordered from a table, and the bakery sits on the Coconut Lanai with terrace seating looking over the courtyard and its coconut grove. A Pink Snowball can be eaten there, carried down to the beach or taken back upstairs, which is the resort version of a bakery visit. Drinks stay simple and useful: fruit juices, espresso, cappuccino and the house Royal Hawaiian latte. It works as a coffee house as much as a bakery, and the two roles overlap all morning, with pastry going out to the terrace and coffee going back to the rooms. The room leans into the hotel's styling, pink through the decor and tropical in the confectionery, and it is small enough that the smell of baking carries out onto the lanai.

Start with the Pink Snowball, then the banana bread

The Pink Snowball is the signature and the bestseller, so start there. Banana bread is the other anchor, made with ripe bananas and sour cream and finished with macadamia nuts if you want them. Beyond those two, the case runs through croissants, danishes, macarons, cinnamon kouign-amann, brioche, haupia and coconut cream pastries, and Big Island honey macadamia-nut sticky buns, with banana nut muffins for a plainer morning. The take-home side is worth a look on the way out, since Pink Palace pancake mix and pink macadamia nuts are built for a suitcase rather than a plate. Treat it as a resort patisserie: breakfast sweets and coffee first, souvenirs second.