The Story of Trader Vic (vintage newspaper story)

(from the Long Beach Press Telegram, 12 July 1973)

THE STORY OF
TRADER VIC

By Victor Wilson
Newhouse News Service

WASHINGTON — "My dad was a fantastic cook,"
explains Victor Jules Bergeron, "and he loved to make
ham and eggs with fried pineapple and fried bananas."
While the pre-teen-aged boy with the empty left
pants leg watched, his father would sautee a sliced
banana with a bit of butter in a frying pan, then in the
same sauce he'd fry some canned pineapple slices. The
"sliced ham went in, and finally the eggs.
"It was a great dish," Bergeron recalls. "I don't
know what dad called it, but it was fabulous. We call it
ham and eggs Hawaiian," he goes on in "Frankly
Speaking: Trader Vic's Own Story" (Doubleday, $5.95).
"We first presented it to our customers 25 or 30
years ago, and it was so popular that today, in our
restaurants, we even have special plates."

WHEN Trader Vic says "our restaurants," he
means the 20 establishments he owns in the United
States, and in Puerto Rico, London and Munich, with
Japan coming up — and if he can be persuaded —
Paris.
Vic got the "trader" monicker hung on him by his
first wife, Esther, because, she said he was "always
trading something". But that was some years after his
birth (in good-eating San Francisco, naturally), on Dec.
10, 1902, four years after a quake and fire nearly destroyed
the city.
The youngster's father, a French-Canadian, worked
as a waiter at the city's famed Fairmont Hotel, and
cooked as a hobby. The lad's mother, a native of the
French Pyrenees, raised another son, and a daughter,
but Vicky was her closest. Perhaps because he contracted
bone tuberculosis from contaminated milk, lost
his left leg at age six, and a bit later a kidney.
Meanwhile, the family moved to Black Point,
Calif., far enough from San Francisco so that the father
could get home only about every two weeks.
Later, however, when finances picked up, they finally
located in Oakland, where the father started a grocery.

VIC, on crutches, attended grammar school, then
look what jobs he could get with that handicap, finally
assembling enough money to buy his first wooden leg.
(Years later, he was to tell a friend, " . . . kid, don't get
one of these things unless you really need it.")
But the leg helped him get better jobs, including
one in an Oakland club where "I learned a lot about
excellent cooking."
Finally, with $800 borrowed from an aunt, he hired
an unemployed carpenter to build for $500 a 22x26
structure on a lot the carpenter owned. With the $300
balance, Vic furnished the place as a saloon named
Hinky Dinks after the World War song "Hinky-Dinky,
Parlay-Voo". That was just after prohibition was re-
pealed.
One thing led to another (especially food with a
Polynesian flavor), until in 1941, a San Francisco news
paper columnist was able to write: "The best restaurant
in San Francisco is in Oakland." The completion a
bit earlier of the famed Bay Bridge to Oakland, and the
Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Is-
land, helped. Also the name Hinky Dinks had been
replaced by "Trader Vic's".

HOTELMAN Conrad Hilton induced Vic to open
places in a couple of his establishments, and finally Vic
got up courage enough to start another place of his own
in San Francisco in 1951. U boomed, and it's been
Strictly a downhill pull ever since, with Paris the only
untested culinary challenge. Says Vic:
"You know, a French partner thinks that he knows
more than anybody in the stinking world, and I happen
to think that I know more than anybody in the stinking
world — about food, anyway — so it would be a con-
stant beef. Oh, I don't, doubt we'll have a restaurant in
Paris one of these years. The Frenchman is sick and
tired of eating the same old French crap . . . "
As of January 1972, Vic "officially" retired. But no
one believes it, especially his executive vice president
Chan Wong, who started with Vic 30 years ago as
busboy, Keith Hardman, his other executive vice pres-
ident. and his younger son, Lynn, now the Trader Vic'
Company president. Another son handles a separate
food products company, and a son-in-law takes care of
supplies and restaurant furnishings.
VIC also is a drink as well as a food innovator, an
his Mai Tai is world famous. Ingredients: old Jama-
ican rum, curacao, orgeat syrup, rock candy syrup an
lime juice over shaved ice with a mint sprig.
Does he know a REAL hangover cure? Sure: one
ripe banana in a blender with four ounces of milk and
a shot of rum. "Grind it up and drink it. You'll think
somebody has given you a cold shower."

Nice find. I don't think he ever opened one in France did he? Was there ever a Paris Hilton? Hee hee.

[ Edited by: The Gnomon 2007-08-31 08:32 ]