Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh

by Unknown

  My status with this child-woman was somewhere between sycophant and manservant. Sometimes I ironed her hair before she went out with the older men she was used to dating, many of them twenty years old or more. I knew I had no chance with her, but I thought perhaps I could improve my station were I to escort her to the Pub-Tiki, the most sophisticated Polynesian restaurant in Philadelphia.

  The main dining room featured eight-foot-tall wooden sculptures and a lava-rock fountain. The Outrigger Room had a genuine outrigger 1 0 6

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  canoe hanging from the ceiling—outriggers have always been de rigueur in Polynesian restaurants. The Map Room dazzled with a hand-painted mural of Polynesia.

  I could imagine how the date would go: when our modestly but fetchingly attired pseudo-Polynesian waitress came to take our order, I would take charge. For me, the sesame chicken. For her, the Shrimp Bongo-Bongo—red and green maraschino cherries electrified this dish.

  One bite of the succulent shrimp, deep-fried and immersed in a swoon-ingly gooey sauce, would cause her to fall back into the depths of her wicker chair. It would be paradise by the tiki lights.

  It’s not easy explaining to people of today what Polynesian restaurants meant to those of us who came of age, culinarily, in the sixties. In those days, nobody had any idea where Polynesia actually was, or what Polynesians actually ate. As far as we knew, Elvis Presley’s Blue Hawaii was a documentary. I suppose, if pressed, I might have said that Polynesians dressed in floral polyester shirts, listened to swaying Hawaiian music, and ate heavy-duty Chinese food.

  Polynesian restaurants were nothing if not inauthentic, but they changed the way Americans dined out. Before they arrived, finding pleasure in restaurant food was something best left to the wealthy or the French. Restaurants like the Pub-Tiki transformed the dining culture of America, turned the unionized masses into a dinner crowd.

  These places were also the precursor of food crazes to come. They had potted plants before anybody had ever heard of fern bars. They put ginger in food before the invention of Pacific Rim cuisine. They even made drinking a family sport. Perhaps those Polynesian concoctions—

  “island cocktails,” according to Trader Vic’s, the seminal Polynesian-restaurant chain—tasted a little too much like rum mixed with sugar and rubbing alcohol, but they were fun for Mom, Dad, and Junior, too.

  The drinks came in whole pineapples or in coconut shells. Sometimes they came in ceramic bowls as big as wagon wheels, with flaming lavender gel and straws as long as canoe paddles. These cocktails were far greater than the sum of their rums. They carried you away to F O R K I T O V E R

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  a rusted deck chair on a tramp steamer, or to a hemp hammock on a lost island. They were a state of mind, until you downed a few of them, and then they were a state of mindlessness.

  Most important of all, the Polynesian palaces were America’s first theme restaurants, and now they seem to be dying out, disappearing like thatched huts in a hurricane. My beloved Pub-Tiki closed in the early eighties. Trader Vic’s, the General Motors of Polynesian restaurants, has six locations left in the United States, down from a peak of nineteen in the early seventies. (The chain is doing better outside the U.S., where the concept is fresher.) Of the five great Polynesian restaurants that once thrived in Los Angeles—Trader Vic’s, the Luau, the Islander, Kelbo’s, and Don the Beachcomber—only the Trader Vic’s in the Beverly Hilton Hotel remains a full-time restaurant. Kelbo’s has been renamed Fantasy Island and operates as a “lingerie cabaret supper club,” which apparently means its strippers stop short of removing all their clothing.

  Polynesian restaurants are not only fading away, they seem to have been forgotten. A few months ago I read an article in USA Today that concluded: “Most restaurant experts agree the modern theme restaurant era began in 1971, when Hard Rock Cafe opened in London.” There was no mention whatsoever of Polynesian restaurants, no suggestion that the owners of today’s theme restaurants should raise a mai tai in memory of the drink’s creator, the late “Trader Vic” Bergeron.

  It isn’t hard to figure out why restaurants accenting Polynesia are no longer thriving. To start with, Polynesia seems to have lost its allure.

  Even though we know where it lies—between Hawaii and New Zealand, on this side of the International Date Line—we no longer care. Our travel fantasies have shifted to Italy. It could be argued that all the inauthentic Italian restaurants so popular in America today are really Italian theme restaurants, fulfilling the same fantasies that Polynesian restaurants once did.

  Polynesian restaurants have fallen too far behind the times. Their cornstarch-based pseudo-Cantonese cuisine compares poorly with the creations of modern masters of the whimsical, like Wolfgang Puck, whose colorful, sweet, and creamy dishes are far tastier and infinitely 1 0 8

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  more refined. Even the classic Polynesian decor of spears, shields, water-falls, footbridges, and tiki-people salt-and-pepper shakers seems hopelessly dated when contrasted with the interactive entertainment and animated displays of modern theme restaurants.

  Nevertheless, Polynesian restaurants were, and still are, something that modern theme restaurants are not: in their own way, they are the real thing. They are total packages of cuisine, attire, and decor, whereas today’s themeries are more in the entertainment-and-shopping business than in the food business.

  With few exceptions, the menus in theme restaurants are hamburger-and-pasta-based, their drinks are Polynesian-cocktail based, and their waiters are out-of-work-actor based. They sell bomber jackets, glassware, and sweatshirts, making anywhere from 25 to 50 percent of their profits on merchandise. Robert Earl, the creator of Planet Hollywood, made this remarkable statement: “I don’t think of myself as a restaurateur; I’m in the trademark business.” Modern theme restaurants are perfectly acceptable forms of family entertainment, but they are more amuse-ment parks than restaurants.

  Not long ago, I saw hope for a Polynesian resurgence in Gauguin, which had replaced Trader Vic’s at New York’s Plaza Hotel. Unfortunately, before I had a chance to sample such new-style fantasies as wok-seared lobster with black-bean butter sauce and flaming volcanic ice cream island floating in a sea of blue curaçao, Gauguin closed down.

  The Plaza’s management called the place a “den of iniquity,” incensed not by the sarong-clad waitresses but by the male go-go dancers and “a clientele with deviant sexual pleasures.” That was the last true Polynesian stronghold in Manhattan. I searched, but the best I could come up with was the Cantonese restaurant Tai Hong Lau on Mott Street in Chinatown. I would not even have known it had Polynesian preten-sions were it not for a basket of tiny umbrellas in one window.

  I realized that if I was to find vestiges of this once-great dining tradition, I would have to head west, to California, the cradle of the Polynesian movement. I also understood that as a native Philadelphian, I knew little about the once-flourishing West Coast Polynesian-restaurant F O R K I T O V E R

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  culture. Helpful contacts directed me to Max Baer, Jr., who played Jethro on The Beverly Hillbillies, and who retains a well-earned reputation as one of Hollywood’s great Polynesian-restaurant regulars.

  Baer once ate ribs with Elvis in a Polynesian restaurant—he thinks it was Kelbo’s, although he isn’t sure. Mostly he hung out at the Luau, on Rodeo Drive, with his friends from Warner Brothers, drinking Polynesian cocktails and eating whatever followed. “Let’s face it,” he says,

  “after three or four of those drinks, you could eat Alpo—you didn’t know what they were feeding you.”

  As a Hollywood insider, Baer considered the Luau as much a club-house as a restaurant, a place where he’d meet up with Troy Donahue, Natalie Wood, Cesar Romero, and Broderick Crawford, among others.

  Crawford was the easiest to find. He’d be planted at the bar, drinking until he couldn’t drink anymore. Not that Baer’s self-discipline was much better. “I cra
wled out of the Luau more than once,” he recalls. “Mostly I remember drinking mai tais and Scorpions. As far as I can tell, one was made with pineapple and one was not. I’d sit there getting shit-faced. Once, I remember, I was there with Lance Reventlow and Jill St.

  John, and I think Tony Curtis was there, too. The Luau had a walk with palms, and in the middle of the walk was a ship’s steering wheel. I remember standing there one night at the helm, saying, ‘I’ll get this motherfucker to shore!’ ”

  These days heavy drinking is considered untoward, but back then the fine-tuned alcoholic stupor validated a man’s celebrity status (witness, for example, Dean Martin, Jackie Gleason, et al.). With cocktails at the core of every fine-dining experience, inebriation was a kind of Zen state, and the Polynesian cocktail was the most painless path to Nirvana.

  Today’s theme restaurants offer essentially the same kind of drinks, but they’re no longer called the Zombie or the Suffering Bastard. The names are more obvious: the Die Harder, at Planet Hollywood; the Hot Pants, at Fashion Cafe; the Cannibal Concoction, at the Jekyll and Hyde Club; the 10W40, at the Harley-Davidson Cafe; and the Midnight Train to Georgia, at Motown Cafe. I’m certain that Trader Vic’s endures because it has always done the cocktails better than anyplace else, 1 1 0

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  particularly the communal cocktails for two or four that the restaurant chain calls “the ancient Polynesians’ ceremonial luau drinks.” Bolstered by Baer’s enthusiasm, I continued my search for Polynesian perfection at the Trader Vic’s in Beverly Hills. When I walked in, the air smelled as smoky sweet as a Texas barbecue shack, and the bar was packed two deep. Young women were drinking from real pineapples, while young men were encouraging them to drink more. Except for the prices—$8.95 for one of those Pino Pepe pineapple jobs—I could have been in some sort of tiki time warp. I ordered a Scorpion, described on the illustrated drinks list as a “festive concoction of Rums, Fruit Juices and Brandy, with a whisper of Almond, and bedecked with a fragrant flower.” I thought it tasted the way Annick Goutal perfume smells.

  Besides pineapples, Trader Vic’s serves drinks in ceramic coconuts (the Kamaaina), earthen bowls (the Tiki Bowl), and rum kegs (the Rum Keg). It has them in tall glasses and in small glasses, with long straws and with regular straws. They’re garnished with sprigs and leaves and parrots and fruit and, of course, maraschino cherries. (The importance of maraschino cherries cannot be overemphasized—they are to Polynesian drinks what olives are to martinis.) They’re made with light rum and dark rum and sometimes with a splash of 150-proof rum. They come, allegedly, from Montego Bay and Rangoon and Samoa and Barbados and Hawaii and Havana and Jamaica and Tahiti and Sibony—I don’t remember anyplace called Sibony from the sixties, but I’m sure it was there even then. There’s even a drink called the Chinese Itch—who knew that China was an exotic tropical isle?

  Trader Vic’s has everything anybody could want in a Polynesian drink, everything but undersized umbrellas. When one of my dinner guests requested any drink at all, as long as it came with a tiny parasol, our waiter replied, “ Trader Vic’s doesn’t have umbrellas.” I thought this was indeed a sign that the Polynesian apocalypse was upon us, but the waiter added, “Trader Vic’s has never had umbrellas.”

  “Surely at one time . . .” I began.

  “Never.”

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  “How long have you been here?” I asked the upstart.

  “Since 1972,” he replied.

  I guess Trader Vic’s has never had umbrellas.

  The drinks, even left unprotected from the elements, continued to please. Not so the cuisine. As much as I’d like to praise food that I once liked so much, I cannot. Not only did Trader Vic’s food taste bad, it looked bad. In memory I see beautiful dishes. I see Shrimp Bongo-Bongo. At Trader Vic’s, visually unappealing food was shoved together on the plate in such a manner that the half-empty dishes leaving the table in the hands of busboys looked pretty much the same as the full dishes that arrived in the hands of waiters. Only the coconut shrimp reminded me of classic Polynesian food—sweet, succulent, oily, and absurdly delightful.

  Cuisine aside—and, admittedly, that’s a big aside—the absolutely best spot to experience the nearly lost mysteries of Polynesia is the Tonga Restaurant & Hurricane Bar, located in San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel.

  The place has abandoned Polynesian cuisine in favor of the sort of indeterminate Chinese fare that’s available on almost every corner in San Francisco, but the preparations are skillful and the prices extraordinarily low. Anyway, I didn’t go to the Tonga room, as it’s commonly called, for the Szechuan beef or the Canton prawns. I went for the atmosphere. In terms of sheer delight, the Tonga room is the Rainbow Room of Polynesia.

  On weekdays from five p.m. to seven p.m., you can sit in the bar, listen to recorded Waikiki luau music, and quaff Polynesian drinks served by waitresses clad in red Susie Wong–style dresses. (Susie Wong was another mid-century icon.) I ordered the Bora Bora Horror, a blend of rum, banana liqueur, orange-flavored brandy, and pineapple juice. Do not repeat my mistake, for this was the worst Polynesian cocktail I’ve ever tasted. I liked the five-dollar all-you-can-eat happy-hour appetizer buffet, which included admirable miniature pork buns, tiny spareribs, and steamed shrimp dumplings.

  I stayed on for dinner, happily paying the three-dollar entertainment charge. And what entertainment it was. A three-piece floating—

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  yes, floating—combo adrift in a large pool that is the centerpiece of the room played perky show tunes. But the real fun came at the breaks, when lightning crackled, thunder boomed, and rain—yes, real water—

  fell around the periphery of the pool. As I sat listening to the native rhythms pulse savagely and watching the lightning flicker wildly, I felt as though I was being swept away, as they used to say, to an island paradise.

  It was supposed to be that way with her, all those decades ago. Our meal at the Pub-Tiki in Philadelphia was perfect, but she never looked at me the way she looked at older men. Not long afterward, we lost touch.

  I called her a few months ago, just to see if she had any regrets. She told me she was divorced. I expressed my sympathies. Then she told me she was living with a man she had met in college when she was a soph-omore and he was a senior. I tried not to laugh, but I couldn’t help it.

  Nothing had changed.

  I told her I had never forgotten our one dinner date. She told me she hadn’t, either.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, “the steak came on an inch-and-a-half-thick wooden board, and there were mashed potatoes all around it—they looked like they had been put into a tube and somebody had squeezed them out like whipped cream.”

  I stopped her. She was speaking of Chateaubriand à la bouquetière, a thick cut of beef for two that was the epitome of romantic dining in the fifties and sixties. She was, of course, remembering dinner with another man. I told her how I recalled every detail of our dinner, too, especially how beautiful the Sesame Chicken Aku-Aku looked that night.

  GQ, march 1996

  N O T M U C H O F A M A N I N H A V A N A On my first morning in Havana, this was my breakfast: six kinds of fruit juice, kielbasa, Vienna sausage, breakfast sausage, smoked bacon, unsmoked bacon, chickpeas, peas, cucumber slices, red peppers (mixed with corn), green peppers (sautéed), french fries, ratatouille, smoked salmon (after I elbowed my way past insatiable South Americans assembling overstuffed lox sandwiches, a habit they surely picked up at Wolfie’s in Miami Beach), scrambled eggs, fried eggs, a cheese omelette (inexpertly made to order), a chicken wing, a jelly-filled crêpe, a sugared doughnut, a sugared roll, a chocolate-covered doughnut, a chocolate-covered roll, a raisin Danish, a cream-filled Danish, a cheese sandwich, a lunch-meat sandwich, a lunch-meat-and-cheese sandwich (these last three, all dreadful, out of my desire to be one with the Cuban people, who appear to eat little else), a banana, a chocolate
-drizzled banana, grapefruit sections, orange sections, pineapple sections, melon sections, plain yogurt, orange-flavored yogurt, pears in syrup, four kinds of jam, two kinds of cellophane-wrapped cakes, picadillo de res (a sloppy joe–

  like hash so delicious I went back for seconds), eleven cereals (I was getting full so I didn’t try them all), eleven kinds of cereal toppings (Special K with chocolate sauce is tastier than expected), sparkling water, mineral water, coffee, and tea.

  A string trio played softly as I dined, slowly and with enormous resolve, finishing everything I took from my hotel’s breakfast buffet except the omelette, the sandwiches, and the chocolate-drizzled banana.

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  In a country where almost everyone except tourists goes hungry, wasting food feels even more immoral than eating too much of it.

  On that same morning, I visited a sixty-two-year-old Cuban woman named Nilsa. This is what she had for breakfast: a kind of powdered cereal commonly thought to be made from soy, to which she added water to make mush.

  As patently offensive as the contrast in our fare appeared, I was almost as dismayed by the explanation behind her request that I not use her full name. In Cuba, the spoken word can be judged inappropriate by all manner of overseers, including the ever-watchful Commit-tee for the Defense of the Revolution, a semi-vigilante, semi-volunteer organization made up of people who in most countries are referred to as neighbors. The members of the CDR are not gossips. They are for real. Even a Cuban as patriotic as Nilsa, a supporter of the revolution, a woman who went into the mountains during the literacy campaign of 1961 to teach reading to farmers, has to worry that her words will be harshly judged.

  I spent two weeks in Havana, entering without a visa and violating all manner of Cuban and American restrictions—the American government forbids tourism to Cuba but readily allows journalists to go there, while Cuba welcomes American tourists but insists that journalists apply for authorization. By going in the way I did, with permission from nobody, I was able to spend my time without government supervision.