The Little Hut, Vero Beach, FL (restaurant)

Name:The Little Hut
Type:restaurant
Street:10 Royal Palm Blvd.
City:Vero Beach
State:FL
Zip:
country:USA
Phone:
Status:defunct

Description:
Picked up this postcard from The Little Hut Restaurant located in Vero Beach, FL.

Here is the info from the back of the card. Standard 60's fare with the Bambu Room and the Little Hula Hut Gift shop.

Looks like the same architect (Franklin Hughes) did this one and the Luau in Miami Beach with that distinctive stone wall monument sign.

Here are a couple of close ups. Check out the space-age looking Tikis.

They also look like the same work as the ones done for the Luau by the artist Lewis Van Dercar as shown here.

This is a link to Bigbro's discussion on the subject.

http://www.tikicentral.com/viewtopic.php?topic=7197&forum=1&start=0

Florida sure had the Tiki going on. Be interesting to find out about the connection of these two places.

DC

nice post, DC ! I love the lettering used on both the Luau & Hut exteriors... Here's a lunch menu, with mention of Bobbie Burks as decorator:

the hut is currently still there but it's now calvetti hair and body salon or something...the rock wall, the hut entrance and building are still there but run down...i checked out the address by googling it and looked at the streetside view.....you have to move the cursor west of where google dumps you off and you will see it as it looks today....

" In a perfect world...Elvis would still be alive ....and all the elvis impersonators would be dead!!"

[ Edited by: Tipsy McStagger 2009-07-18 13:51 ]

[ Edited by: Tipsy McStagger 2009-07-18 13:51 ]

Not the same angle but with Tipsy's help there is The Little Hut in 2009.

I like the back of the menu illustration a lot, it seems to say "You want a Polynesian Restaurant? Get yourself a Tiki, a bridge, some thatch and a rock wall and you're good to go."

[ Edited by: Bora Boris 2009-07-18 15:36 ]

Puamana,

Awesome find on that menu. The graphic looks just like the alien Tiki out front.

Tipsy,

Here are a few more images of Cavelleti's Hair Salon in comparison to The Little Hut.

DC

[ Edited by: Dustycajun 2009-07-18 14:56 ]

Wow guys, good work, that space alien Tiki is the too cool, looks very much like a Van DerCar, I agree. What a crazy place, Poly pop inspired people to such nutty things! :)

That's cool--it became Bahama Joe's after this (before it became Calvetti's salon). I wonder how many other Tiki buildings were in Vero Beach. Thanks for the great pictures!

Had business in Sebastian and figured since I was passing by Vero, I'd swing by the Little Hut.

Nice location on the river.

howlinowl

Did you look behind the plants for that alien TIki back there?

No, too many people there. Maybe if I had printed out the postcard image and told them what I was looking for, they might have let me look. But I couldn't just start digging into their foliage, at least not with the risk of arrest.

There is a restaurant next door, I'm guessing that the front part was partitioned off into the hair stylist and the whole building was probably the restaurant.

howlinowl

Was looking through a .pdf of the June, 1957 issue of Playboy and found an ad for a Ava Gardner flick. Three years before the postmark on the above postcard. The Little Hut restaurant is possibly a namesake.

howlinowl

(edit: It's "ad"....not"add")

[ Edited by: howlinowl 2019-06-09 08:09 ]

On 2019-06-09 08:08, howlinowl wrote:
The Little Hut restaurant is possibly a namesake.

Maybe. Here's what Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide says about the movie:

"Busy husband [Stewart] Granger takes sexy wife [Ava] Gardner for granted. Will her friendship with [David] Niven stay platonic when all three are stranded on an island? Static, flat, talky sex farce from the Andre Roussin play."

And paraphrasing Wikipedia, the 1947 French play was a hit in Paris and then did well in London after it was translated into English in 1950, but it flopped on Broadway in 1953. Not sure the 1957 film did much better.

And that's despite the poster!

Get a load of the caption: "This is my costume - on the desert island where I was shipwrecked with Stewart Granger and David Niven. -Ava Gardner"

When Hula skirts are designed by Christian Dior, you know Polynesian Pop is at its peak :)

From TIKI POP, page 259:

In this contest...

...one could win a stay in a "little hut" outfitted by Don The Beachcomber: