Trader Vic’s

This legendary restaurant was born in Oakland, California, in 1934. That summer, restaurant owner Victor Bergeron returned from a vacation in Tahiti and introduced native Chinese and Javanese dishes to the menu of his modest establishment, Hinky Dink’s. More significantly, he also added sweet, potent rum drinks to the bar offerings, redid the place in faux tropics style, and changed its name to Trader Vic’s. The revamping proved enough of a success that it gradually evolved into a chain over the years, with twenty-three outlets at its peak. (Bergeron’s other claim to fame—the introduction of the mai tai cocktail stateside—came about after another South Seas sojourn in 1944.)

A prototype of the theme restaurants that would proliferate toward the end of the century, Trader Vic’s first debuted in Manhattan at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel in 1958. When that hotel was demolished to make way for the General Motors Building, the restaurant moved across the street to The Plaza’s basement, opening in August 1965. In its new home, it replaced what was originally a Turkish bath and later the hotel barbershop with a restaurant whose decor was a kitschy mix of fishnet, thatched ceilings, and South Seas carvings, crowned by the outrigger canoe from the film Mutiny on the Bounty mounted in the entry hall. Movers and shakers took to it at once, among them Jacqueline Onassis, Salvador Dalí, Richard Nixon, and the couple pictured here, diva Maria Callas and fashion designer Oleg Cassini, together for an occasion long ago forgotten.

Trader Vic’s closed in 1993 after an impressive twenty-eight-year run. An entire generation would carry fond, if blurry, memories of its signature Fog Cutters, Scorpions, and Tidal Waves. Here, the rather racy cover of its menu.