Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (rm book recommendations .TXT) 📕

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,