Boozy juice, mini umbrellas: Tiki bars return to Detroit

A boozy tide of Painkillers, Mai Tais and other tropical, fruity cocktails with little umbrellas is washing into Detroit.

The city gets its second tiki bar in about six months when Lost River is to open this May along Mack Avenue on the east side.

"We want to transport you when it's snowy and rainy and gray," co-owner Karen Green, 33, said recently at the bar on 15421 Mack, across the street from the Grosse Pointe Park border.

A hand-painted wall mural of colorful flowers covers the east interior wall, near a bar lined with ceramic mugs in the shapes of parrots, an elephant and an octopus. There's a wood-carved tiki figure from a decades-old United Airlines promotion, and the bar is covered in coins — a reminder of the Detroit's grandiose Polynesian-restaurant past.

Tucked along a strip of mostly blank storefronts, Lost River will accommodate about 80 people, offering a place for "fun, funky cocktails," said co-owner Matt Mergener, 33.

About a 14-mile drive away in southwest Detroit, Mutiny Bar has been serving tiki drinks since November at 4654 Vernor Highway. Serving only drinks for now, both bars are the first of their kind, in years, to open in Detroit.

Detroit waterfalls, luaus

Burning tiki torches in the late 1960s greeted people entering Mauna Loa, a short-lived restaurant in Detroit's New Center that included three waterfalls and several pools, with one deep enough for performers to dive into and "retrieve pearl-bearing oysters," according to a March 1967 story in the Free Press. The article cited the interior designer, calling it "one of the two most elaborate Polynesian-type restaurants in the country."

"The main floor resembles a native village in the islands with thatched roofs, walkways, bridges and streams. Elaborately carved posts, a war canoe, shields and other Polynesian art objects add atmosphere," according to the article.

Mauna Loa's two floors combined to accommodate a total of 750 people, with two kitchens: one serving Asian cuisine, the other American. There was even a barbecue available for "a luau, a clambake or a Texas barbecue," according to an August 1967 article. The theme restaurant on West Grand Boulevard and Cass Avenue cost about $2.25 million, which today would be $16.8 million.

"It was a spectacular restaurant at that time," said Marshal Chin, owner of Mon Jin Lau in Troy. "But it didn’t last long, for whatever reason. It was a huge restaurant, just needed more volume and tourism."

The 1967 riot (or rebellion) and ensuing flight of residents to the suburbs also didn't help, he said. Chin's brother, Marvin, owned Chin Tiki, another restaurant of the same theme that also opened in 1967 but was downtown, on Cass Avenue a few blocks north of Grand River Avenue.

Chin Tiki, while not as extravagant as Mauna Loa, was loaded with Polynesian decor: artificial palms, bamboo, coconuts, servers wearing leis over sarongs, and even little bridges over pools of tropical fish. Mauna Loa was open a few years, but Chin Tiki remained in business until 1980, and the building was featured in the 2002 film "8 Mile" before Marvin Chin died in 2006 and the structure was torn down in 2009.

Trader Vic's, which continues as an international chain, once had a location in the Detroit Hilton (Statler) Hotel at Bagley and Park avenues in downtown's Grand Circus Park.

The themed, upscale tropical restaurants opened near the end of America's postwar obsession with Polynesian culture that began with the Broadway musical (1949) and film version (1958) of "South Pacific," based on James Michener's 1948 novel "Tales of the South Pacific," according to a previous report in the Free Press. As many as four tiki bars operated during or near the 1960s in Detroit. But until recently, tiki beverage appearances were mostly restricted to eclectic menus or occasional pop-up events.

A tropical escape

The wave of tiki bars already hitting cities such as Chicago and New York City arrived recently in Detroit amid high enthusiasm for craft cocktails.

"People are willing to spend more on the rums, liqueurs and extracts and all of that," Chin said.

The Sugar House, one of Detroit's premier craft-cocktail bars, opened in 2011 in Corktown and offers a spectrum of often-imaginative cocktails made with high-quality spirits and ingredients. Dave Kwiatkowski, a partner of its parent company that owns several bars and restaurants in the city, owns the Mutiny Bar.

A wide variety of people can enjoy tiki drinks, as there's less of an acquired taste involved than with harsher or more-bitter, less-fruity craft cocktails.

"Tiki is like, the most accessible form of mixology," he said. "I don't want it to sound pretentious. If you taste a Painkiller, that's f****** great."

The most popular drink at Mutiny Bar, the Painkiller includes Brugal Anejo rum, Malibu rum, coconut, orange, lime and pineapple for $9. The bar's ambiance is relaxed; from outside, it looks like an average local dive — but the interior includes a thatched roof over the bar, with leis draped on bar stools and drinks sometimes set on fire.

"I wanted to do a tiki bar in Detroit for a while," he said. "I just wasn't sure the city was ready. Tiki is nuanced. It's weird. It's easy to do poorly. It's easy to have drinks that are too sweet, too boozy."

Locations can range from the elaborate ambiance like Lost Lake in Chicago, "which is one of the greatest tiki bars in the country right now," to Cane and Table in New Orleans, a "stripped-down, kind of felt like a bar in the Bermudas. It's a really flexible kind of genre, and I love that," Kwiatkowski said.

Mergener said in an e-mail that Lost River name has no "relation/connection/inspiration" from Lost Lake, that it was a reference to a creek at a cemetery in Detroit and also a Ryan Gosling film by the same name. He and Green are from advertising and marketing backgrounds, but Mergener said he has been making tiki drinks for years and began researching the bar idea about five to seven years ago. He said the drink prices will be about $3-$12.

"We want you to be able to come in and get a beer and a shot," Mergener said. "You can also get that 12-ingredient cocktail."

Both casual and aimed at a wide audience, Mutiny Bar and Lost River are a leap from the full-spectrum experience of the fancy, 1960s theme restaurants.

"It's just the drinks, it's just the bars, it's just the cocktails," Chin said. "It's not the whole ambiance of the whole Polynesian feel."

He said there's flexibility to what a tiki-themed establishment can offer, with places applying influences from Japan, Korea and beyond.

"Hawaii is just a mixture of everything," he said. "That's what Polynesian (is), with all the cultures, you have a mix of all the Asian influences."

He said the new tiki bars are "great for the city of Detroit. This movement, and all of that to try to recapture a lot of that (theme), is great."

He said Mon Jin Lau previously offered a "very diverse Polynesian drink menu" and is creating more tiki drinks to add to its current offerings "because that's kind of becoming a big thing now."

Lost River, like Mauna Loa, has coins embedded in the bar. While the latter's owners created the bar with Chinese coins, the Lost River owners inherited their penny-lined bar from the previous owner, Memories Jazz and Blues Lounge. There are no televisions, and a few flower leis hang from the bar.

"There is kind of an escape element to it," Green said.

After some events in the next month, the bar is expected to open to the public in May with hours 4 p.m. to midnight, Tuesday through Sunday.

Spirits of Detroit columnist Robert Allen covers craft alcohol for the Free Press. Contact him: rallen@freepress.com or on Untappd, raDetroit; Twitter @rallenMI, and Facebook robertallen.news.