Post #636555 by Dr. Zarkov on Tue, May 15, 2012 8:02 AM

On 2012-05-10 17:46, TropicDrinkBoy wrote:

The Tonga Room seems to be very busy these days. I tried to make reservations for a birthday dinner on a Sunday night in mid April and they were booked the entire night from opening to close! Making reservations two weeks later wasn't easy either. When I first started going during the worst of the demolition talk we had the same plans, Sunday evening at 6PM. We had the entire place to ourselves. Maybe "The Layover, San Francisco" exposure helped along with a better economy with more convention traffic or maybe M.C. Hammer's 300 friends told their friends and the next thing you know, it's packed.

I was there in March when the association I work for held its annual convention at the Fairmont. The first night I arrived I ambled down to to the Tonga Room for a drink and was told that it would be a 20-minute wait just to get into the bar. This surprised me because in the past I could just walk right in and there were never more than a few people in the whole place, which was not surprising given how wretched the food was in past years.

While I was waiting, I asked the guy who was guarding the door why they were so crowded and he told me it was because of Bourdain's show. He said that night, a Thursday, they had parties of 30 and 60 people who had made reservations just to dine. I saw them enter and they looked like they were part of a tourist bus tour. The employee guarding the door said he definitely recommend reservations or you will risk no being able to get in these days.

While I was waiting to get into the bar I met a couple from Vancouver, B.C., and we later had Mai Tais together at the bar. It turned out that the man was a music teacher who led a ukulele festival each summer that all of the schools on Vancouver Island participated in, which included inviting ukulele stars in from Hawaii and elsewhere to perform with them.

The following night our staff dined at the Tonga Room and I was pleasantly surprised by the much-improved quality of the food. Later one of the hotel managers told me that was because the chef who had been hired to boost the menu quality in the hotel restaurant upstairs had revamped the Tonga Room menu as well. However, be forewarned: This does not apply to the buffet they serve at happy hour in the bar, which was a terrible, greasy mess that looked like it had been chopped in from a nearby chop suey carryout.

I later ate at the bar in the hotel restaurant and highly recommend it -- it was some of the best food I've eaten, and the prices are reasonable if you did what I did and just order a salad, appetizer (superb calamari) and a side (french fries cooked in duck fat) along with a glass of wine (Hess Estate Chardonnay: some of the best white wine I've ever tasted).

[ Edited by: Dr. Zarkov 2012-05-15 08:54 ]

[ Edited by: Dr. Zarkov 2012-05-15 08:57 ]