Kine Musubi, the Hawaiian Spam musubi spot that spent more than a year and a half as a weekly pop-up, has officially opened its first brick-and-mortar shop on the Upper West Side.
Advertisement
The shop opened on Thursday, September 24 at 128 West 72nd Street, between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, per an Instagram post from @uwsxnyc that lists Kine Musubi as a collaborator. The post’s author said founder Chi Ian Chan was in the store on opening day and that the whole team was excited to finally be open.The musubi are made fresh with a house-made teriyaki sauce, layered over jasmine rice and wrapped in nori, according to the menu on Kine Musubi’s website. Prices run from $6 to $8. The lineup starts with the Local, which the menu calls the Hawaii classic, and branches out from there. The Spam Lakika tops Spam with takuan, a crunchy pickled radish, and red chili flakes over gochujang, a Korean fermented chili paste. The Ebi Opae is crispy shrimp katsu layered with teriyaki mayo. There’s also a vegan section with organic tofu versions and the Musu-V, made with a soy-based Spam alternative. Customers can choose between furikake rice and fried garlic rice, and a mix-and-match box of five musubi goes for $30. The drinks menu includes UCC Hawaii Kona coffee and Hapa Co. Hawaiian plantation iced tea.
The opening-day post singled out the Spam Lakika, which the poster had on fried garlic rice and named their favorite of the two musubi they tried.
Chan and his wife, Lizzy Han, both grew up in Hawaii. According to Eater, Chan’s family moved there when he was five and he was raised in Honolulu’s Chinatown, while Han grew up in Kona on the Big Island. Chan told Eater that he started making his own musubi after moving to New York because he couldn’t find the quality he grew up with. He said getting the ratio of Spam to rice right is key. The couple jokingly calls his from-scratch teriyaki sauce the liquid ‘shaka sauce,’ a nod to the friendly Hawaiian hand gesture.
Advertisement
Before the shop opened, the couple sold their musubi at a Sunday pop-up at the now-closed Sushi Nonaka from August 2023 to March 2025, according to the Kine Musubi website. Eater reported that the pop-up’s rotating specials included a musubi take on a bacon, egg, and cheese.When Eater covered the project in April 2025, Kine Musubi was aiming for an August opening that year, and we first wrote about the shop shortly after.
The website also lists pre-ordering and a “Kine Mart” section, both marked as coming soon.
Have a news tip? Send it to us here!
