Post #119312 by christiki295 on Tue, Oct 12, 2004 7:43 PM

Dangergirl229 previously contributed this:

In the East Bay:

-- Conga Lounge, 5422 College Ave., Oakland, (510) 463-2681

-- Trader Vic's, 9 Anchor Drive, Emeryville, (510) 653-3400

In San Francisco:

-- Tonga Room (in the Fairmont Hotel), 950 Mason St., (415) 772-5278

-- Bamboo Hut, 479 Broadway St., (415) 989-8555

-- Hawaii West, 729 Vallejo St., (415) 362-3220

-- Lingba Lounge, 1469 18th St., (415) 355-0001

-- Trad'r Sam, 6150 Geary Blvd., (415) 221-0773

-- "Tiki Art Now!" is at the Shooting Gallery, 839 Larkin St. until Oct. 9. Gallery hours are noon-7 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. For the exhibition's closing night party on Oct. 8, international ukulele star King Kukulele will perform from 5:30-7:30 p.m. Tiki expert and exhibition curator Otto von Stroheim will lead an educational walk through the gallery from 1 to 2 p.m. Saturday. For information, call (415) 931-8035.

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Tiki, which began during the Depression under the undeniable lure of cheap rum, became a national phenomenon after World War II. The returning soldiers brought back tales and artifacts from the South Pacific, which informed James Michener's adventure novels, and the play and movie "South Pacific."

Even though the first tiki bar (Beachcomber Don's) opened in Los Angeles in 1934, it was in Oakland in 1944 that the first Mai Tai was poured, according to Cocktails.com and the Trader Vic's restaurant group. Victor Bergeron owned the bar Hinky Dinks on San Pablo Avenue, which he fashioned as a kind of Western saloon. Vic himself mixed the Mai Tai, with a 17-year-old bottle of Jamaican rum as the basis for the refreshing cocktail. The name came from a woman from Tahiti, who took one sip and proclaimed, "Mai Tai, Roa Ae," which roughly translates to "Out of this world, the best." Voilà!, the Mai Tai.

Hinky Dinks became Trader Vic's in 1936, and Oakland was known as "a hotbed of tiki action," according to Michael Thanos, owner of Oakland's Conga Lounge.

Zombie Village, the main competitor of Trader Vic's, was just across the street. In the golden years, the late '40s through the '50s, Trader Vic's, Zombie Village and the Reef anchored the East Bay tiki scene, and the Tonga Room in the Fairmont Hotel became the star of San Francisco.

Christened the S.S. Tonga in 1945, the bar and restaurant didn't give itself over to the tropics until the late '50s, when the renamed Tonga Room and Hurricane Bar featured indoor rainstorms and a band playing on a raft. In 1967, Oceanic Arts, the world's premier supplier of tiki decor, was commissioned to make the place more explicitly tiki, with wooden carvings and tiki mugs. Other San Francisco tiki establishments, such as Skipper Kent's and Tiki Bob's, once flourished next to the San Francisco outpost of Trader Vic's and have since closed. The Tonga Room has stayed open continuously, a rarity in the tiki world.

Tiki restaurants and bars became so successful, it became a franchise. At its peak, Trader Vic's had 25 outposts, from Emeryville to Hamburg, Germany. Disney opened the Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland in 1963, a bar and restaurant filled with singing birds, robotic animals and talking tiki totems. It was hugely popular, allowing Disney to install an even more spectacular tiki restaurant in Orlando's Disney World, adjacent to the world's largest tiki hotel, the Polynesian Resort.

America's adoration of the mainland take on island life manifested itself across many mediums. Tiki culture has musicians (Martin Denny, Elvis' Blue Hawaii recordings, Don Ho), artists (Shag), cuisine (well, mostly drinks such as "Suffering Bastard" and "Tonga Itch") and many collectibles (mugs, totem poles, record covers, menus).

During its peak in the '60s, home tiki bars and luau parties were popular across the country. One didn't need to live in California to see a tiki palace; one of the largest and most famous was Kahiki Supper Club in Columbus, Ohio.

Then Vietnam came, and the vision of South Pacific paradise was shot to hell. Tiki lost its charm as the freewheeling spirit of the '60s darkened into the scandal-packed '70s, and became just an embarrassing relic of kitsch as identity-based politics rose in the '80s. "It targeted a culture too specifically. In other words, you wouldn't have an American Indian bar or an American Indian restaurant and have people dressed up like Indians who weren't Indian," said tiki scholar Otto von Stroheim in an NPR interview.

As Professor Allan Isaacs of Wesleyan University said, mulling over the concept of tiki, "Really, I'm recalling the TV show 'Hawaii 5-0,' which most clearly showed how, in that (cultural) moment, the Pacific had two faces -- paradise and trauma of Vietnam escape."

Certainly, one of the most objectionable and enticing aspects of tiki culture has to do with eroticization of island women. The word "tiki" itself is sexual: it means the phallus of the god Tane, who created women in Polynesian mythology. Like Hawaiian hula girls, the shirtless women of the velvet paintings that became a staple of tiki bar decor were silent, available and always smiling. Tiki, as Isaacs said, "embodies the libidinal investment of economic and sexual come-on of Hawaii."Von Stroheim acknowledges those aspects of tiki, but contends that to focus on the politics of tiki "misses the point." Moreover, von Stroheim says, "This isn't a retro trend, like lunch boxes or comic books. Tiki has so many forms. It ran as a cuisine, an artistic style. It was popular from the '40s to the '70s. You can't tie tiki down to a particular decade. It's not tied to one generation, either - it's tied to three to five generations."