Lydgate Farms

The Lydgate Tasting Room sits inside the historic Shido Building, built in 1923 as a general store after the Great Kapaʻa Fire leveled much of central town. For decades it was the home of the Shido Store and House of Fabric, run by Fusako Hashimoto Shido, who served the community well into her later years. Her family's store helped stitch Kapaʻa's plantation-era main street together for generations.

The Lydgate name on the new tasting room is no coincidence. Owner Will Lydgate is a fifth-generation Kauaʻi resident whose great-grandfather, John Mortimer Lydgate, moved to Kauaʻi in the 1890s. He was a congregational minister, a surveyor for King Kalākaua, and an apprentice to Wilhelm Hillebrand, the German botanist who first brought cacao to the Hawaiian Islands. That early cacao variety from Mexico is still grown on Kauaʻi today.

J.M. Lydgate was also the man who rediscovered the Hikinaakala Heiau and advocated for the preservation of the land that is now Lydgate Beach Park. His descendants now grow the very chocolate that has put Kauaʻi on the global craft cacao map.