Post #212734 by bigbrotiki on Sun, Feb 5, 2006 12:06 AM

The wonders of the internet! Even though I am snowed in in the Bavarian backwoods, a few mouse clicks make me feel back at home with the Tiki community.

Tiki Bob's..OK...here we go:

As I did mention in the BOT, it was opened in 1955, after Bob Bryant had a falling out with Trader Vic (which I am sure was not hard to do with the ol' hard ass). The Trader had hired him away from the Matson Line (or was it Lurline?) when he met him aboard on one of his Hawaii trips.
Apart from the concept, Bob also lifted Asian beauty Florence Nowlen from the Trader's gift shop and opened Tiki Bob's in partnership with her, just one block away from the Trader's S.F. outpost on Cosmo Place, in a corner bar previously known as the "Castle Rock Bar". The concept was clear: Just like Zombie Village opening across the way from the original Trader Vic's in Oakland, Tiki Bob's would catch the successful Trader's overflow by proximity. Hence TB was also referred to as "the poor man's Trader Vic's".(As proof of the influence of Trader Vic's in Northern California, note that how many Tiki joints that followed in his wake used the "nickname" concept: Trader VIC's--Tiki BOB's--Skipper KENT's--Tiburon TOMMIE's--and of course Tradr SAM's).
Also from knowing him through Trader Vic, Bob hired Alec Yuill-Thornton as the designer for his unique logo Tiki. Alec worked for Gardner-Dailey architects (they built the S.F. Trader), and had previously illustrated Trader Vic's Kitchen Kibitzer Cookbook.
As was the goal of many entrepreneurs ogling the success of Vic and Don, Bob Bryant hoped to franchise out his name. In 1959 he opened "Tiki Bob's Mainland Rendezvous" on 333 Bush street in S.F.'s business district, and when it wasn't an immediate success, he tried to make up for the lack of Polynesian decor with lunch time lingerie fashion shows. The hundreds of curious customers that showed for that brought the cops in, who tried to close it on an indecency charge but didn't, which gave Bob an additional boost in free press PR. The novelty must have worn off quickly though, because after that nothing more was heard of T.B.'s Mainland. In the early 60's, a Tiki Bob's opened under license at the Capitol Inn in Sacramento, but met a similar fate of obscurity.
I have no idea what happened to Bob Bryant later. Florence Nowlen took over Tiki Bob's, moving down to an office building on Market Street in 1969, where she opened "Raffles" on the ground floor. That's where I found her after asking around in the Tiki Bob neighborhood in the early 90s. A few artifacts of Tiki Bob's hung on the walls in what otherwise seemed more like a coffee shop. Thanks to her information and mementos I was able to piece together the pages you see in the BOT. Later a nephew of her's showed up on Tiki Central briefly, but was not heard of again.

I still would name Bob Bryant/Alec Yuill Thornton as among the first to use a highly stylized modern Tiki as a complete business concept in NAME and IMAGE (entrance statue/mug/salt'n'pepper shakers/menu/matchbooks/cocktail), thus marking the beginning of the TIKI period of Polynesian Pop. TB's was the originator of the "Sneaky Tiki" cocktail, later used by Harvey's in Lake Tahoe.