Post #794941 by EnchantedTikiGoth on Sun, May 5, 2019 12:18 PM

Can I ask a fairly obvious question, and excuse my ignorance since this all happened before I was ever into Tiki: towards the end, DID Kahiki turn into a dump? I mean, WAS it dirty and dingy and serve terrible food?

I posted the reviews for Mai Kai to show that negative reviews were in the minority, showing that they're probably explicable more by negative individual experiences and people who just aren't into Tiki anyways than by some massive shift in Tiki culture. I don't have those kinds of figures for Kahiki though. If a bar is getting a LOT of reviews that its dingy and dirty and serving terrible food, then that is probably a real problem on the bar's part.

I doubt that anyone thinks the loss of these grand old Tiki palaces is anything but tragic. But for as much as Tiki has changed, there's a lot of ways it has stayed the same. Back in the Fifties and Sixties, Tiki bars were designed to be themed escapes for people to get away from the urbanity of their lives. This summer my wife and I are going to Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, and Route 66 via Phoenix, and I've been looking at stuff about UnderTow. You can't tell me that isn't filling the same longing for themed escapism as the Mai Kai or Kahiki or the Sip n' Dip or the Tonga Room did 50 years ago. Or that Trader Sam's isn't doing that too, or Smuggler's Cove, or Hale Pele, or Shameful Tiki Room, or whatever. The fact that there has been a branching out into "modern" Tiki bars is itself symptomatic of Tiki's growth, not its decline.