- Caroline Roe
- Tiki Terrace in Des Plaines
It was an announcement to warm any exotica-listening hepcat’s heart: one of Chicago’s hot nightlife entrepreneurs was opening a new tiki bar in a hot neighborhood, where you’d be able to drink classic tiki cocktails that weren’t made out of grocery store-grade mixers. Here was a sign that the midcentury celebration of a South Seas fantasy as a rebellion against the conformist 1950s was coming back and hipper than ever, even as the original wave of such places from the 1940s through 1960s faded into obscurity in malls in second-tier suburbs. Yes, there seemed little doubt that a new tiki wave was coming . . . with the opening of Dion Antic’s Rock-A-Tiki in Wicker Park in 2002.
I asked her if anywhere else was having as much tiki activity, a tiki renaissance, like we’re having. “Chicago is booming with tiki right now. The west coast, you’ve got a fair amount of tiki, but you don’t have a lot of resurgence going on right now,” she says. “And the east coast is a little bit of a tiki void, so Chicago is its own little tiki island right now. You’ve got lots of good stuff going on with people who know tiki well and are doing it really really well.”
Another is Tiki Terrace in Des Plaines. “It’s a newer tiki place, and they’re the only ones who still put on a Polynesian dinner show, authentic with their own Polynesian Elvis,” she says. I mention that I’ve heard that, but I find it hard to believe that there’s a place that still makes a go out of a style of entertainment last seen in mainstream culture on a Dean Martin summer replacement show. “They’ve been at it for several years now,” she says. “They get a lot of celebrations, birthdays and things like that, but other times it’s just like, hey, it’s cold, it’s Chicago where it’s winter for way too many months. Let’s go somewhere that doesn’t feel like winter.”
