Name:Hawaiian Room, Lexington Hotel, NYC
Type:restaurant
Street:Lexington Ave. and 48th St.
City:Ney York
State:NY
Zip:
country:USA
Phone:
Status:defunct
Description:
Pre-Tiki but I thought the information was good. From a 1958 article on NYC restaurants.
The Hawaiian Room in the Lexington Hotel, Lexington Ave. and 48th St., is and has been for the past 20 years one of the most colorful spots in town. Until recently it was actually better known in Honolulu or San Francisco than in New York. Recent television shows using the room as a background have made New Yorkers more aware of it.
The story of the HAWAIIAN ROOm dates from 1937.
The management of the Lexington Hotel, completed six months before the market crash of 1929 and costing $5,000,000, found itself stuck with a large and useless basement dining room. In 1932, it opened as the SilveL Grill, featuring bandleaders Ozzie Nelson, Little Jack Little, Artie Shaw and Carl Ravel (now Carl Ravazza) .
When its popularity waned, the manager, Charles Rochester, decided to experiment for a few months with all-Hawaiian entertainment in a cafe decorated with South Sea motifs and featuring Polynesian food. In 1937, the HAWAIIAN ROOm opened with Andy Iona as bandleader and Ray Kinney as featured singer. In '38, Kinney returned to Hawaii and brought back with him a trio of lovely hula dancers—Napua, Mapawana and Pualani; also a singing comedienne called Hilo Hattie, whose specialty was "The Cockeyed Mayor of Kaunakakai." The show was an instantaneous success and the pattern has varied little from then on.
Two years ago Restaurant Associates took over management of all the Hotel Lexington restaurants, with Jerome Brody, Joseph Baum and Alan Lewis—all in their thirties—to direct and manage the room. Lewis had fallen in love with Hawaii during the war and paid several return visits, so was a natural for his post.
Though the HAWAIIAN ROOm chefs are Swiss, the menu now features a greater variety of Polynesian dishes (not to be confused with Chinese) than ever. The drinks, fantastic concoctions involving coconuts and other tropical fruits, never fail to make a hit with visiting firemen. And the "old lady" always enjoys seeing her husband get up and make a fool of himself by trying to dance the hula in the "audience participation" numbers.
The motto of the HAWAIIAN ROOm is "Aloha," a very elastic word which can mean "hello," "good-by," "glad to see you," or—stretching it a bit—"if you can't come to the Islands, let the Islands come to you."
