Post #323355 by telescopes on Sun, Aug 5, 2007 10:31 AM

Bigbrotiki, the Bavarian flip side of Tiki would be the Beer Palace in St. Louis known as Bevo Mill and it's sister counter-part down the road, Grant's Farm. In almost every way comparable, the German Beer Palaces of the Mid-west mirror the Tiki Palaces in their attempt to create a paradise that never was but oddly seems to linger in the recesses of human memory as if they really were reality. The Bevo Mill is to the Tonga Room in the same way that Grant's Farm is to the many acred Tiki Palaces that allowed guest to roam about in an escapist pleasure setting. I don't know if your familiar with either Grant's Farm, http://www.grantsfarm.com/, or the Bevo Mill, http://www.bevomillstl.com/,but they are so surreal in their portrayal of German Beer Culture that you are immeditely put in a place of great awe.

The comparisons of a tiki bar to a sports bar are incongruent to each other. A better comparisson is the tiki bar and the Bavarian Beer Hall. So similar are they that an enthusiast of either one would feel comfortable in either setting. For the Urban Archeologist, the differences are comparable to the differences in unearthing a Mayan Temple versus an Egyptian Tomb.