What’s Behind the Red Door: A Night at Nylos
Photo Courtesy: Dining Maui
What's behind
the red door?
A night at Nylos — Chef Jeremy Solyn's 14-seat tasting menu restaurant in Paia. We went. We never wanted it to end.
There's a red door on Baldwin Avenue in Paia that most people walk right past. No flashy sign, no velvet rope, no sidewalk sandwich board telling you what's inside. Just a red door. And behind it — if you were lucky enough to snag one of fourteen seats on OpenTable before they vanished — is what might be the most extraordinary dining experience in the State of Hawaiʻi.
Nylos. Chef Jeremy Solyn's 300-square-foot, 14-seat tasting menu restaurant has been quietly redefining what a meal can be on Maui since 2017. I went on a Tuesday night with our marketing director Nanea — it was her 21st birthday — and walked out three hours later having lived through something I'm still thinking about days later. Nothing gets you sensorially present quite like a great tasting menu. This one in particular.
I don't eat fish. They made it happen on the fly, mid-service, without missing a beat. That alone tells you everything you need to know about what kind of operation this is.
Nothing gets you sensorially present quite like a tasting menu — especially this one. About three hours of experience, but we never wanted it to end.
— Maui Makai
The Room
Fourteen seats.
Every single one a chef's table.
The room is tiny. Gloriously, intentionally tiny. 300 square feet means every seat faces the open kitchen, which means you watch Jeremy cook every course, every plate, every detail — live, in real time. It feels less like a restaurant and more like being invited into someone's home kitchen, if that kitchen happened to be producing food you'd expect at a three-Michelin-star establishment in a major city. The intimacy is the point. You feel like the only ones in the room, because essentially, you are.
Paulina runs the front of house — and she is extraordinary at it. Warm, impeccably timed, genuinely present. The kind of service that makes you feel taken care of without ever feeling managed. This is a husband and wife operation in the truest sense: Jeremy in the back, Paulina up front, both of them giving everything to every table every night. Wednesday through Saturday. That's it. That's how seriously they take this.
The Resilience
They survived all of it.
And they're still here.
What Jeremy and Paulina have endured to keep Nylos alive would have ended most restaurants. COVID. The August 2023 fires — and even though they're on the North Shore, the weight of that fell on everyone in this community. And then, most recently, the Kona lows that flooded Paia — twice. Flooded. Their tiny, beautiful 300-square-foot restaurant, underwater, twice. And they came back. Both times. That's not just resilience — that's love. You taste it in the food.
The Food
Thoughtful doesn't
begin to cover it.
The menu changes nightly based on what's available — that's the whole philosophy. The finest ingredients the globe and the island of Maui have to offer, whatever that looks like on any given Wednesday. What we had on April 25th was a six-course journey that I'll be unpacking for a while.
The sparkling grapes — a palate cleanser between courses — were like eating Pop Rocks that someone had given a Michelin star. Lilikoi shave ice and lime zest alongside them. It sounds playful and it was, but it was also precise. That's the whole meal in miniature: playful and precise, indulgent and considered, luxurious and deeply rooted in place.
The wagyu was absolutely delicious — the kind of bite that makes you stop mid-conversation and just be quiet for a second. Nanea had the halibut. We agreed that we could have switched and both been equally thrilled. The pork belly course — which I had with lamb instead of shrimp — was an homage to Paulina's Mexican heritage. Chef Jeremy built a dish around his wife's roots. That level of thoughtfulness is everywhere if you're paying attention, and at Nylos, you will be paying attention.
Nanea had the wine pairing for her birthday — a kaleidoscope of reds and golds and pinks, each glass perfectly matched to its course. It added another whole dimension to an experience that was already operating in multiple dimensions. Do the wine pairing. Especially if it's a birthday.
It felt like a trip somewhere new — New Orleans, maybe? A city with heat and soul and history and serious culinary chops. Something that takes you somewhere else entirely while being rooted completely in Hawaiʻi. That's a hard thing to pull off. Jeremy Solyn pulls it off every night.
Go. Book now. Seriously.
📍 115 Baldwin Avenue, Paia, HI — look for the red door
🗓 Wednesday – Saturday evenings only
💰 $230–$300 per person · Wine pairing priced separately
🔖 Reservations required via OpenTable — they fill fast
⚠️ Dietary restrictions require 48-hour advance notice
Visit nylosmaui.comThe Bottom Line
Nylos is not just the best restaurant on Maui. It might be the best restaurant in Hawaiʻi. Fourteen seats, one couple, one menu, one night at a time — and every single detail attended to with a level of care and craft that is genuinely rare anywhere in the world. Jeremy and Paulina Solyn have built something that survived a pandemic, a historic wildfire, and two floods, and comes out the other side still cooking at this level. That's not a restaurant. That's a calling.
Book the table. Do the wine pairing. Order whatever they tell you to order. And when the sparkling grapes arrive — just smile. You'll know why. 🤙
"You feel like the only ones
in the room. Because
essentially, you are."
