Post #468031 by mzoltarp on Fri, Jul 10, 2009 5:01 AM

Getting an interview with Bea Jewell has been hilariously difficult. One time I was down there on a Sunday and my visit conflicted with her Bingo game...this was after she knew I was coming, but she forgot she had Bingo. LOL! A few weeks ago my wife and I did a makeover to the lobby of the West Shores Chamber of Commerce building in Salton City (it's a delightful midcentury modern, boomerang shaped building that screams for preservation) and my wife, daughter (6), mother, and I all wore Salton Tiki t-shirts that I created through VistaPrint using ephemera. Any place we stopped from Salton City back to Indio, people stopped us to reminisce about Salton Tiki, how great the food was, how much they missed it, and wondered if the shirts meant the restaurant was back. From what I've been able to gather, the restaurant was tiki in the sense of its decoration. The food was fairly conventional and not full-on tiki food--probably wise in such a far-flung outpost. As I mentioned before, they never had a hard liquor license so there were no mai tais.

When I was down there in April, someone had stolen the Salton Tiki tiki that was about 6 feet tall and cemented into the ground!

The West Shores Chamber of Commerce is reinvigorating its Bingo operation and the place where the bingo board and electronic sign are located in the space is slated to become an homage to the Salton Tiki.