Post #774968 by mike and marie on Tue, Apr 11, 2017 1:15 PM

We made a strange discovery while on a road trip last autumn. We were making the boring long stretch through New York state and it was growing dark, we had the phone on, and somehow a Yelp search for where to stop for something to eat led to us clicking the embedded map that showed where we were on the turnpike, and that turned into a possible tiki sighting: coming up on Google Maps we saw the phrase Jack's Reef ... somehow our "tiki sense" got tingling and we zoomed in, and it definitely showed a location that said "Jack's Reef Port O' Call."

What? Immediately we thought of Ports o Call in San Pedro, had thoughts of finding a major tiki score here in the middle of upstate New York ... and with a name like Jack's Reef Port O' Call, how could it not be cool? We had visions of a large reef aquarium tank at the bar, blacklight murals and hanging fishnet, plenty of heavily-varnished wood, and hopefully some old Oceanic Arts stuff.

Well a quick search on Yelp showed no reviews at all. Don't people use Yelp out here? We checked Google and saw real estate listings, knew it was closed, it was black as space at that moment and we still had several hours of driving ahead, so we decided it would be better to make not and investigate some other time during daylight hours.

Following up on that lead we found there was a restaurant there. It was also at one point Jack's Reef Hotel, and it's right on a lake (with dockage) in Memphis, New York, in the Finger Lakes region.

The property had gone up for sale in 2016. Not sure if there was a buyer.

From what few images we've found we saw it was definitely nautical, but wasn't quite the "Port O Call" we were hoping for. Haven't seen anything on the inside so don't know if there was any tiki -- or reef aquaria or blacklight murals -- at all.

Lesson: keep a Google Maps or GPS window open during a road trip, and keep your eyes peeled. You never know what might come up!

[ Edited by: mike and marie 2017-04-11 13:20 ]