Post #206692 by DawnTiki on Tue, Jan 10, 2006 8:31 AM

Here's the article...thanks Tipsy McStager.....

Venerable restaurant is just trading spaces
South Sea Island chic put Trader Vic's on the map, but now the artifacts must go

By Jon Anderson
Tribune staff reporter
Published January 10, 2006

Trader Vic's--a great place to drink, eat and carouse. But have you ever tried to move one of those things?

Take the stuff now sitting in the basement of the Palmer House Hilton--please!

Outrigger canoes, hanging from the ceiling. Giant sacred statues. Wood carvings, the size of a man. Monster clamshells. Room after room of heavy tables, carved from monkey wood. And a one-piece bar--a centerpiece for the last 48 years--that curves around a corner out of sight.

Not to forget the 4-foot-high, 4-foot-wide, wood-fired Chinese cooking pots.

On Monday, architects and engineers, looking toward the future, began preliminary work in the lower-level expanse that the 240-seat restaurant occupied in the hotel at 17 E. Monroe St. before it closed on New Year's Eve. They plan to convert it into retail space.

But there will be a whole lot of movin' and shakin' goin' on before that day comes.

"Many of the artifacts we will remove," Hans Richter said last week. The president and chief executive officer of the Trader Vic's chain, based in San Francisco, which has three dozen of the South Sea Islands restaurants around the world, was here to take inventory.

He was also here to muse as he motioned a reporter into the locked-up island retreat for a look-around.

"This was one of the oldest Trader Vic's," Richter said, settling into a booth by the bar, underneath a fierce-looking Japanese devil mask. "A lot of these items go back to the 1950s. The architect who designed this for us had a great sense of space. It was big--but it also had a sense of intimacy."

One thing that Richter plans to save is a stone penguin carved by Victor Bergeron, the original Trader Vic.

He is also negotiating with movers to box up the bar, the tables, the chairs, the clamshells, the masks, the statues and the outrigger canoes.

"We've got guys who can pack all that. Whatever somebody got in, we can get out," Steve Hrushocy, general manager of Salvage One, said Monday. His company, which crates and moves everything from limestone columns to ornamental lions, is negotiating for the moving contract.

The tide of change that hit the restaurant began last August when Thor Equities of New York purchased the Palmer House from Hilton Hotel Corp.

When word spread that the new owners planned to cancel their lease, "we reached out to them," Grant DePorter, president of Harry Carry's Restaurant Group, said Monday. The new Trader Vic's, in the River North area, will be roughly the same size, with much the same stuff, DePorter promised.

Artifacts will be shipped to San Francisco for refurbishing, though souvenir-hunters have cut down the load by stripping the restaurant of ship models, seashells, table silver, table lamps, drink decorations and almost every glass with a Trader Vic's label, Richter said.

What can't be saved is the old wallpaper, made from mulberry tree bark that is soaked, pounded and painted with vegetable juices.

And the fabled Chinese cooking pots, too bulky to move, will be chopped to bits.