Kahiki Supper Club Page 2

  The 1936 MGM blockbuster movie Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Clark Gable, helped awaken the broader public’s interest in the islands. It was partially filmed in French Polynesia and gave moviegoers a glimpse of paradise in the form of Tahiti. Three years later, the Golden Gate International Exposition in California provided a showcase for Polynesian culture with the theme “Pageant of the Pacific.” It was symbolized by an eighty-foot statue of Pacifica, goddess of the Pacific Ocean.

  However, more significant was the December 7, 1941 Japanese air assault on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, which ushered the nation into a world war. A U.S. territory at the time, Hawaii became the locus of all military operations in the Pacific Theater. And for the first time, Americans began looking at the Hawaiian Islands as a part of the larger United States. The country, not just some remote piece of turf in the middle of the ocean, had been attacked. Returning American soldiers brought home stories, souvenirs and, occasionally, wives from the South Pacific.8

  A couple years after the war ended, explorer Thor Heyerdahl floated across the Pacific Ocean from South America to the Polynesian islands, demonstrating that such an expedition could have been possible in pre-Columbian times. Heyerdahl believed that the Easter Islands had been settled by migrants from Peru. His 1948 account of his voyage, The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas, became a bestseller and the subject of an Academy Award–winning documentary film. The same year, James Michener won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection of short stories Tales of the South Pacific, which was turned into the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific the following year. A darling of the critics, the show would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1950, at least in part due to its attack on racial bigotry.

  As the decade was winding down, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a 1959 act by Congress admitting Hawaii into the Union as the country’s fiftieth state. Soon U.S. tourists began flocking to Hawaii, and America’s love affair with all things tiki flourished. With the islands’ supply of real souvenirs soon exhausted, people made do with ersatz ones. Architects began incorporating Polynesian design elements into buildings, from single-family homes to shopping districts. And designers capitalized on Polynesian aesthetics in everything from clothing to furniture.

  Of course, the role of three Elvis Presley films—Blue Hawaii (1961), Girls! Girls! Girls! (1962) and Paradise, Hawaiian Style (1965)—cannot be overestimated in marketing the islands’ allure.9 Americans seemingly could not get enough of Polynesian culture, much of it manufactured to order.

  Meanwhile, back in Columbus, Ohio, two guys who had been friends since college took note of this trend and began to make some plans to construct their own little piece of Polynesia out on the far east side of town, near the sleepy suburb of Whitehall.

  2

  THE VIEW FROM THE TOP

  All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door.

  —Albert Camus

  The decade following World War II was the “Golden Age” of downtown dining in Columbus. While most of the city’s best restaurants were concentrated within a few blocks of the Ohio Statehouse, a few notable establishments had begun popping up in the outlying bedroom communities as well. The 1953–54 city directory lists some nine hundred eateries, serving a growing population in excess of 400,000. Among the best were the Chintz Room, the Clarmont, the Clock, the Crystal Room, the Desert Inn, Far East Restaurant, Hoover’s Restaurant, Ionian Room, Kuenning Brothers “19” Restaurant, Marzetti’s, the Maramor and the Jai Lai—none of which has survived. Although many were quite nice and occasionally bordered on chic, most served up typical midwestern cuisine in a relaxed setting.

  The Maramor and the Jai Lai were two of the most notable. The Maramor was started in 1920 by twenty-nine-year-old Mary Love in a house at 112 East Broad. The name was a contraction of Mary and amour, the French word for “love.” A home economist who had managed the tearoom at the F&R Lazarus Department Store, Love married, moved to California for a time and then returned to Columbus with her husband, Malcolm McGuckin, to resume operating the restaurant, now located at 137 East Broad Street.

  The Maramor garnered accolades not only for its food (critic Duncan Hines gave it a four-star rating) but also for its candy and gift shop and, in time, its entertainment. The McGuckins sold the restaurant to Maurice Sher in 1945, and a dozen years later, he hired Danny Deeds to manage it. During the 1960s, as many of Maramor’s downtown competitors started gravitating to the suburbs, Deeds gave the restaurant a bit of a makeover in the form of a nightclub that brought in nationally known entertainment, such as Phyllis Diller, John Davidson, the Smothers Brothers and even the “Velvet Fog,” Mel Torme. However, it did not survive the decade.

  The Jai Lai, by comparison, started life as a saloon in the Short North at the corner of Poplar and North High Streets, its opening coinciding with the end of Prohibition. No more than a hole-in-the-wall, it was founded by south-sider Jasper Wottring with $1,500 he borrowed. He took the name from the Jai Lai Club in New Orleans and stuck a sign outside advertising “Genuine Turtle Soup.” Its focus was more on selling whiskey than its delicious salt rolls. As Columbus Citizen Journal columnist Ben Hayes once wrote, “Opposite the bar, with its stools, the café had a few tables and chairs. A strip of new linoleum ran down the floor like a highway of refinement.”

  It wasn’t long before the Jai Lai expanded from 581 North High into the Old Vienna Café at 589. However, by 1955, it had outgrown both spaces and relocated to Olentangy River Road between Fifth and King Avenues. Built to resemble a Spanish castle with turrets on the north and south corners, the nine-thousand-square-foot building featured Old World décor with dark wood, tapestries and high-backed booths, as well as parking on the roof.

  Wottring had dreamed of having a flotilla of Jai Lai boats sail up the Olentangy River, carrying patrons to Ohio Stadium on Buckeye football game day. While this never came to pass, the restaurant’s final owner, Dave Girves, founder of the Girves Brown Derby chain of restaurants, arranged for a helicopter to do it during the 1974 season. Of course, the Jai Lai’s biggest fan was Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes. For years, his image was used to promote the restaurant with the slogan “In all the world, there’s only one!”

  This was the dining landscape when William “Bill” Sapp and Leland “Lee” Henry joined forces to create what quickly became a Bexley landmark: the Top Steakhouse (or the Top, for short). Friends since their undergraduate days at Ohio State University, Bill and Lee continued to pal around after Lee had graduated. While Bill was taking pre-law classes, Lee was working as an assistant buyer at the Union Department Store. “I realized I didn’t want to do that the rest of my life,” Lee said.

  “We would hang out at different places downtown and talk the bar and restaurant business,” Bill recalled. “I had been in the restaurant business for a small time in Florida. I told Lee I think it’s a great business, and so we got together and looked at different restaurants.”

  An early matchbook cover from the Top Steakhouse. Courtesy Sapp/Henry.

  “Columbus had no supper clubs, just restaurants and night clubs,” Lee noted. “A supper club is a home away from home, where you can move from dinner to the piano bar and leave at 2:00 a.m.” Rather than starting from scratch, they sought out the cheapest place they could find that already had a D-5 liquor license. Otherwise, they would have to get on a waiting list to obtain one.

  The friends would often hang out at Tops, a bar on the far east side of Columbus, because, to quote Bill, “That’s where the girls were.” It had a spinning sign that resembled a child’s toy top. Impressed with how busy the place always seemed to be, they set their sights on buying it.

  Located at the corner of East Main Street and Chesterfield Avenue, Tops was a neighborhood (or “hillbilly,” to quote Lee) bar owned by Buddy DeLong and Roy Stingley. Bill and Lee borrowed the $
60,000 purchase price, installed a kitchen, built a piano bar and opened for business in April 1955. Bill claimed they had to “run off a bunch of hooligans,” but many of those same “hooligans” grew up to be regular customers. Their business also helped the partners to pay off their loan in one year.

  Then and now, the Top’s time-traveling décor wallowed in the 1950s with dark wood paneling, a fireplace, a copper-top bar and Naugahyde booths. Exuding a “Rat Pack” (or, in modern parlance, “Mad Men”) ambience, the restaurant immediately established itself as the place to go for surf, turf and martinis in the Midwest and, if Bexley native Bob Greene is to be believed, the entire country.

  It did not take long for the Top to become a hangout for businessmen, politicians and powerbrokers of all kinds. To facilitate deal making, phone jacks were installed at each of its sixty tables (it seats another thirty-two at the bar). Its dedicated fan base has kept it going strong for nearly sixty years and several changes of ownership, the first occurring in 1980, when Bill bought out Lee’s interest.10

  Although they owned the building outright, Bill and Lee leased the land from Tony Agiesti. Each year, when it came time to negotiate a new lease agreement, they would pay a visit to their landlord. During their negotiations, they would be invited to drink some of Tony’s homemade wine and did not feel they were in a position to turn him down. According to Lee, Bill would go in until he got drunk and then come out and say, “It’s your turn.”

  With three years of “charbroiled success” (as Doral Chenoweth put it) under their belts, Bill and Lee decided to explore the possibility of creating another destination restaurant. This time, however, they would own the land as well. They began traveling throughout the United States and even the South Pacific in search of inspiration. No matter where they went, they were struck by the fact that all the Polynesian restaurants they visited were thriving while many others weren’t. So they went looking for a piece of real estate—one that already had a liquor license, of course—to build their dream restaurant. On the east side of Columbus near Whitehall and not far from the Top, they found a barbecue rib joint that fit the bill.

  With the addition of various grasses to enhance the décor, they turned the restaurant into the Grass Shack, a tiki bar, and installed Sandro Conti as bar manager. It opened for business in June 1958 and quickly became a popular place for World War II veterans to meet and reminisce about their war experiences. According to Lee, Sandro would sleep until noon and then get up and begin mixing drinks and inventing new ones. When he wasn’t busy trying out new recipes for Polynesian dishes, Jerry, the Chinese chef, would walk around on his hands. He owned a car that had no heater, so he installed a coal stove inside it and cut a hole through the roof for a chimney. Jerry later opened his own restaurant on Oakland Park Avenue. Another employee was Alex Tsitouris, a Greek immigrant, who went on to become co-owner of Zorba’s and Alex’s Restaurant and Lounge.

  The Grass Shack resembled a typical grass shack found on many ocean beaches. From the start, it was intended as the pilot for a much grander enterprise. Using a house on the property as their office,11 Bill and Lee began planning a million-dollar Polynesian supper club. In creating the Grass Shack, they had employed many of the same materials (e.g., grasses, bamboo, thatch) they would later use in construction of the Kahiki by treating them with a fire retardant, Flame-Art, manufactured in California.

  Then on June 14, 1959, the day before the groundbreaking for the new venture was to take place, the Grass Shack burned down. It was Bill’s birthday. He had left the party at the Grass Shack while it was still in progress. Soon after he arrived home, he got a call from Sandro, who said, “Boss, we got a fire here.”

  Bill responded, “Well, put it out. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  A short time later, Sandro called back. “Hey, Boss, this thing’s getting pretty big.”

  Bill asked, “Sandro, are we going to open tomorrow?”

  The response was “Well, maybe.”

  An hour went by, and the bar manager called one more time. “Boss, we no open tomorrow.”

  Nevertheless, Bill and Lee pressed on. What they had in mind was a themed restaurant unlike any ever created anywhere. However, it was not the first themed dining and/or drinking establishment in Central Ohio. For a time, “America’s Most Unique Night Club” (as it was billed) could be found at Spring and High Streets. The Catacombs was located in the Chittenden Hotel and accessed by a small building that resembled a subway kiosk. Customers would descend a flight of stairs to enter an “elevator” car to continue their downward descent another three hundred feet. In actuality, the elevator traveled nowhere, and after its passengers had been shaken about a bit, the door in the rear of the car would open into the nightclub. Greeted by employees wearing skeleton costumes, the patrons made their way through the Chapel of a Thousand Skulls.

  An article in Life magazine stated that the Catacombs was opened by Illinois hotel magnate Albert Pick in the fall of 1940. It was an instant hit, although at least one reader of the magazine found it quite distasteful.12 The nightclub used a folded, coffin-shaped postcard as an advertising mailer: “Thrills and Spills for Jacks and Jills. Enjoy an unforgettable evening…Be insulted and like it.”

  After passing down a hallway lined with caskets and plaster skeletons dressed in monks’ habits, customers entered the Nut House Bar. The bar eschewed the macabre décor, replacing it with the madcap antics of a magician, Dr. Marcus, who would cut the sleeve off an unsuspecting customer’s shirt and waitresses who would throw peanuts in their faces, all in the name of good fun. Former vaudevillian Mary Brant enjoyed a long engagement at the nightclub with her “dead-pan waitress” routine.

  Using the Catacombs as the yardstick, other themed-venues in the region didn’t quite measure up. For example, Nick Albanese, whose résumé included stints as a circus executive, fight promoter and celebrity publicist, operated several east side night spots during the 1930s–’50s. Around 1935, he, along with his partner, Tom Worlen, transformed the Broad-Manor nightclub at Norton Field into the Arabian Gardens. This upscale club featured entertainment ranging from Duke Ellington and his Orchestra to Zorine and her Nudist Colony in a vaguely Middle Eastern setting. However, the real attraction was the gambling casino, which “had the blessing of Sheriff Jacob Sandusky.”

  According to Nick’s daughter, Donna Newman, the roulette wheels, slot machines and gaming tables either flipped over or retracted into secret compartments when there was a raid, just like in the 1973 movie The Sting. Across East Broad Street from the Gardens, Nick built another “swanky” club: the Showboat (4500 East Broad Street). Although it looked like a cruise ship on the outside, “in the main bar, a colorful circus train with carved animals circled continuously around the room’s ceiling.” In Bexley, you could also patronize the Glass Bowl. This eatery was built like an upside-down champagne glass and sat only twelve folks inside, requiring most patrons to order via drive-in service.

  The Catacombs, a themed restaurant once featured in Life magazine, was also known as the Tombs, as this matchbook cover shows. Authors’ collection.

  Among the many dining spots housed in the downtown Lazarus Department Store was the Colonial Room. Modeled after the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg, it opened in 1926 and had a nearly seventy-year run before closing in 1995. While the surroundings were evocative, little effort was put into re-creating an eighteenth-century dining experience. It wouldn’t be until a couple decades after the Kahiki debuted that such themed restaurants as Baby Doe’s Matchless Mine, the 94th Aero Squadron, the WaterWorks (where you could have dinner in a claw-foot bathtub and order from a menu shaped like a manhole cover!) and JoAnn’s Chili Bordello began dotting the Columbus landscape. Other eateries, such as Max & Erma’s, tried novelty approaches by installing closed-circuit telephones at each table so you could make dinner plans and a date all at the same time. Most of these restaurants, however, quickly died as a result of placing more emphasis on the concept than the food. Ove
r the years, Planet Hollywood, Dick Clark’s American Bandstand Grill, Made in America, the Buckeye Hall of Fame Café and similar efforts to use pop cultural artifacts as a lure for diners cycled through the city.

  Columbus acquired its own Playboy Club on December 7, 1982, when the latest bunny hutch opened in the old Desert Inn, directly across the street from the Kahiki. Thirty-four women were hired and provided with six weeks of training to augment the décor. Bill Sapp was one of the first people to buy a Playboy Key (at twenty-five dollars each). Syndicated columnist Bob Greene’s ninety-six-year-old grandmother was another. But despite widespread support across generations, it closed four years later.

  None of these establishments, however, approached the Kahiki in terms of total commitment to a theme, which is why it remains the gold standard.

  3

  SAIL TO TAHITI

  The ultimate goal of the architect…is to create a paradise. Every house, every product of architecture…should be a fruit of our endeavour to build an earthly paradise for people.

  —Alvar Aalto

  The loss of the Grass Shack did not deter Bill and Lee from moving forward with their original plan, which, according to Bill, was simply to “build a nice Polynesian restaurant.” They were not thinking in terms of constructing the most magnificent Polynesian supper club in the country and, perhaps, the world, although few would argue that the result was anything less.

  The local restaurant scene had not changed appreciably since the Top opened in 1954. There were now roughly 840 dining establishments listed in the city directory. Most of the major ones were still thriving. However, there was still very little variety—meat and potatoes or Italian were the options. The few “oriental” or Asian restaurants to be found were Aloha Restaurant, Far East Restaurant, Ho Toy Restaurant, Jong Mea, Mandarin Restaurant, Ming’s Chop Suey, Lem’s, New China Restaurant, Olentangy Village Tavern, Oriental Restaurant, Tropics East Restaurant and Tropics North Restaurant. Columbus was clearly ripe for something new.