The Kid Comerford Hired to Play Waikīkī Now Owns the Bar: Tavana Takes Over Anna O'Brien's

Here is the kind of full-circle story a music town gets maybe once a generation. Sometime in his early twenties, a local musician named Tavana McMoore got one of his first Waikīkī gigs from a bar owner named Bill Comerford. Roughly sixteen years later, Comerford is retiring — and the musician he once put on a stage is the one taking over the venue. As of July 2026, Tavana runs Anna O'Brien's.

If you've spent any time in Mōʻiliʻili, you know the address: 2440 S. Beretania St., a longtime Irish pub and live-music dive that opened back in 1969 as "Anna Bannanas" and took its current name in 2010. It is one of those rooms a scene measures its own age by. So when word gets out that the longtime operator is stepping away after about sixteen years, the reflexive local fear is the one every small music city knows too well: another venue about to go dark.

It didn't. That's the lead. Anna O'Brien's did not close — it soft-opened under new ownership on July 10, 2026, and reopened split into two rooms with two identities. Downstairs stays the pub you know, "Anna O'Brien's." Upstairs, the showroom has been rebranded "Tavana's at Anna's" — the new owner literally putting his name over the stage he's now responsible for filling.

That's more than signage. A working musician taking the keys to a room instead of just the mic changes the incentives. Tavana, going by the plan he's described, isn't treating the place as a bar that happens to have live music; he's pitching it as a project meant to "unite" the local scene, with monthly open-mic nights on the slate alongside a broader run of live programming.

The open-mic detail is the tell, and it's the reason this belongs in a music column and not just a business brief. Open mics are unglamorous, occasionally painful, and absolutely essential — they're the on-ramp, the place a nervous first-timer becomes a regular becomes, eventually, someone worth booking. A new owner who leads with open-mic nights is signaling that he cares about the bottom of the pipeline, not just the paying headliner at the top. Coming from someone who was that nervous first-timer once, that's not marketing. It's memory.

Why it matters beyond one bar: Honolulu's grassroots venue map is thin and getting thinner, and ownership transitions are exactly the moments rooms quietly vanish — a retiring operator, a landlord who'd rather rent to a franchise, a stage that becomes storage. This one broke the other way. A beloved dive changed hands and stayed a music venue, run by someone with a personal stake in the scene's health rather than an exit strategy. In a market where you can't just drive to the next town for a gig, keeping a room alive is a civic act.

So mark it down. The bar that raised a musician now belongs to him, and he's opening the doors — including, on the nights that matter most, to whoever's brave enough to sign the open-mic list. Watch @tavanasatannas for what fills the upstairs calendar. Comerford picked a good one to hand it to.

Sources: Meet the new face of Anna O'Brien's (Hawaiʻi Public Radio)