First Don Ho, and now this?
The old Trader Vic’s at the Beverly Hilton closed recently. For 52 years it stood at the intersection of Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards, rising above those rivers of traffic like the prow of a mighty ship (or was it a dugout canoe?). The 1955 landmark will be torn down, and plans are to construct a $500 million luxury condominium complex and Waldorf-Astoria hotel tower. Meanwhile, a scaled-back version of Vic’s, shrunken like a plum-turned prune, has been wedged into a less flattering corner of the Hilton, beside the pool. The name may remain, but the thrill is gone. Oh, fickle public! Oh, fleeting tiki bar trend! Oh, beloved icon of postwar America!
I’ve had a crush on Trader Vic’s since I was four. It runs in the family. My parents tasted their first kiwifruit at the original Trader Vic’s in Oakland in the early 1960’s. My mom grew up in Minneapolis, and Vic’s was the most exotic place she’d ever been, or so she remembers through the haze of many Fog Cutters. At 23 she didn’t know ersatz from her elbow; for her, Vic’s was as convincing a place as any. "Everything was sprinkled with coconut and served in a hollowed-out pineapple," she recalls. "I can’t stand coconut or pineapple, but for whatever reason, [there] I loved it."
She’s onto something. Trader Vic’s had a way of making your own tastes or distastes seem provincial and small-minded. How can you not appreciate coconut? This is culture, for Pete’s sake. Whose culture, specifically, was unclear: Tahitian? Cantonese? Hawaiian? Indonesian? Who could say? Vic’s was its own weird planet, a blend of tropical cultures real and faux, the culinary equivalent of Esperanto. But no one did it better. Did you know that owner Vic Bergeron invented the mai tai? Yep, in 1944. It was Vic who introduced the drink to Hawaii, not the other way around.
My wife, Nilou, too, fell for Trader Vic’s at an early age—in Iran, where she grew up. There was a branch in Tehran at the time. Nilou remembers her parents sipping at a Scorpion Bowl through four-foot-long straws while she and her siblings swooned over the pupu platter. Vic’s sticky-sweet spare ribs were her introduction to "Chinese" food; years later, whenever we dropped into the Vic’s in Beverly Hills, the ribs had a Proustian effect. "They’re not inherently good," Nilou admitted. "In fact they’re pretty lousy, and way too sweet. But the taste is like mainlining my childhood."
So the food was never all that great. And those legendary cocktails were actually kind of gross when, heaven forbid, you tasted them sober. Still, they were big, and colorful, and usually on fire, which helped. And for all its camp and fakery and what would later be called cheesiness, Trader Vic’s had serious character—and commitment. This was the place where most Americans first experienced the dream of the South Pacific (or wherever we were presumed to be), and where many of the WWII-generation first caught the travel bug. Without Vic’s paddle fans and rum punch, what would our island fantasies be?
Of all the locations I’ve visited—there are now 33 worldwide, from Bahrain to Shanghai — the Beverly Hills outpost was the most immersive: lit by dozens of hurricane lamps, covered in acres of rattan and thatch and a reef’s worth of coral, decorated with antique nautical maps, steamship lithographs, and those old dugout canoes. Weathering six decades of shifting fashion and taste, it became a living museum. Right up to the end, the lobby still had a proper phone booth, complete with a leather armchair. And people used it. The soundtrack—Alfred Apaka crooning over a slack key guitar—hadn’t changed since the Ford administration. Even the drink descriptions, with their louche emphasis on potency, were hilariously outmoded (PERSUASIVE AMMUNITION FOR TOPPLING GIANTS! NO SISSY DRINK, THIS! A REAL DIRTY STINKER!), as if the only reason anybody went there was to get thoroughly blotto.
Judging by the crowd in Beverly Hills, that was entirely the case. On any given night, you might share the bar with a septuagenarian couple in matching white cowboy outfits, prom-bound teenagers with fake ID’s, maybe even Bruce Boxleitner from Scarecrow and Mrs. King. I never saw a werewolf drinking a piña colada at Trader Vic’s, but I saw just about everything else. I’ll miss the old joint. It was a real dirty stinker.
