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

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 crawled 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

A L A N R I C H M A N

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