Post #76044 by Tiare on Fri, Feb 13, 2004 5:35 PM

Hi All- I have a friend who recently moved to Springfield and sent me this Tiki report of when he and his girlfriend went at the end of January. He has given me permission to post his review. I have never been there but it sounds worth a visit, I especially like the part about the gumball machine with fish food:

Immediately in front of you as you enter is a glass waterfall. Looking
down, you notice that there are Plexiglas panels on the floor running
throughout the restaurant. There are koi swimming beneath the panels.
There is a bubblegum machine with koi food, so for a quarter you can
Feed the fish. I would say half of the seating is in the form of booths.

These are no ordinary booths, however. They are done up to look like
Thatched roof huts. On the wall in each of the booths has a colored chalk drawing of scenes of the South Pacific....most of them are hula girls.

The lighting is pretty cool. Each booth has a light made from a piece
Of bamboo. In the rest of the restaurant, the light fixtures look as
Though they are made from carved wood. There were a couple other lights made of sea shells! Not much on the walls outside of the booths. There was one scary looking mask on one of the walls.

The bar was boring.

Included with each place setting there was a plastic lei. I wore mine,
But Dawn refused. The wait staff all wore flowered shirts....no grass
skirts on the ladies, however.

As was mentioned on that Tiki board, the menu is mostly Chinese. We
Each had a drink. I had a flaming volcano for one and Dawn had something called a beachcomber (it was blue). The drinks were both very good, though I was disappointed that mine was not actually flaming. My drink was served in a sort of ceramic bowl with hula girls around the sides. I'm sure it is new, but it looked like it would have been right at home in 1955. Dawn's drink was just served in a pilsner glass.

The food was surprisingly good.
Dawn had some pan fried noodles with chicken and I had a spicy orange beef dish. We didn't have an appetizer, though if we had, we would have chose the hibachi grilled beef skewers. Pretty reasonably priced. With the drinks, the bill was $31 before tip.

Service was excellent. Our waitress was responsive without bothering
us all the time. They had a small army of people running around to refill water glasses and keep the floor clean. The hostess kept going around wiping up stuff that spilled on the pleixglas.

The beachcomber Dawn had was made with some sort of citrus vodka, blue
curcao and some fruit juices. It was nice and tangy and citrusy...I
think that is why she liked it. She doesn't like super sweet drinks. I thought it was pretty tasty myself.

I found out from one of my co-workers that it is owned by the people who own Mr.Yen's. This is significant because Mr. Yen's is the only 'nice' Chinese restaurant in town that we've seen. There are a ton of Chinese buffet restaurants here, but the quality is questionable at a lot of them. Mr.Yen's has really nice dim sum on the weekends.