Wo Fat

I was overjoyed to come across this sign! Wo Fat is the bad guy in Hawaii Five-O! Really, this was too much of a coincidence, so I had to look it up, and sure enough, I discovered that the producer of the original Hawaii Five-O series did in fact take the name from this Chinatown restaurant. Even better, it seems that the bad guy drug lord in Homicide: Life on the Street—another of my favourite TV shows—was based on Hawaii Five-O’s Wo Fat. Wo Fat, the restaurant, opened in 1882, and was Hawaii’s oldest restaurant when it closed 123 years later in 2005. The Wo Fat building is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Considering the characters it engendered, it is ironic that the name means ‘peace, prosperity and harmony’.