Kahiki Supper Club Read online

  Artificial rain forests weren’t common either, inside or outside zoos. Bill Spencer moved his family from Memphis to Columbus to take a job. According to his daughter, Candi, the first time they went to the Kahiki, he was startled by the rain streaming down the windows so he ran outside to put the top up on their convertible. Of course, it wasn’t truly raining; they were seated next to the artificial rain forest.

  Many nights when her parents were socializing with their friends in the Outrigger Bar, Candi slept upstairs in the offices of the Kahiki rather than being left with a babysitter. Having been imprinted on her at such an early age, she admits to having been a frequent patron herself when she was older and has the menu collection to prove it.

  The birds not only flit around inside the rain forest but were also on display elsewhere in the restaurant. Sam, a blue-and-gold macaw, “worked” at the restaurant from 1982 until it closed in 2000. He was a denizen of the Outrigger Bar, where he entertained patrons with his chatter. Jim Rush was the Kahiki’s animal caretaker, tending to the fish and the birds. He continues to be the keeper of Sam, who lives with him and his wife.

  Lee remembered that they bought items for the Kahiki from Tropic Trader and a half dozen other places in Florida. During one trip, they rented a car and drove to Joe’s Stone Crab. After they had eaten their fill, they bought some extra crabs. They then went about tracking down an eccentric carver who was living with a harem of a half dozen women. While talking to him, they forgot about the stone crabs in the car. By the time they returned to the car, the smell of the rotting crabs was so bad that they couldn’t get within fifty feet of it. The car had to be junked.

  One of the secrets to the restaurant’s success was Bill and Lee’s insistence on buying quality ingredients. For instance, they purchased produce from China Farms in Chicago. A local guy kept begging them to buy Thai leaves from him. He was so insistent, they finally told him to send them a carload. Naturally, he couldn’t deliver because he was growing them at home.

  Various websites provide numerous testimonials to the good times that were had at the Kahiki. One anonymous contributor said, “In 1969, my high school [in Chillicothe] put on a performance of ‘South Pacific’…One of the faculty called the Kahiki and got permission for the cast to come during the off-hours, to shoot publicity photos. What a great experience. We had the whole place to ourselves…fantastic. I still remember my amazement at the indoor rain forest that towered overhead.” Jon Foster, a former Columbus resident, exclaimed, “Man that place was so great. I remember being wowed as a kid when my mom took us there. I always got this big drink thing where they put dry ice in the punch glass and made it steam…it was like the volcano punch or something. And the food, to my very then untempered palate, was sensationally exotic.”

  Always emphasizing showmanship, Johnny Gim serves Marcy Sapp her dinner on a sword. Courtesy Sapp/Henry.

  “There’s something about the Kahiki,” Columbus Dispatch columnist Joe Blundo wrote, “that makes people want to get married.” For example, Laure Beeckner of Westerville was leaving for Chicago to become a flight attendant. The night before, her boyfriend, Chris, took her there for a farewell dinner. Because of her new hairstyle, he had nicknamed her Poodle Head. When she opened a fortune cookie after she had finished her meal, she found a message inside: “Poodle Head, I love you!! Will you marry me?” With the entire Kahiki staff looking on, she said, “Yes.”

  Sue Wellmerling of Dublin said that her boyfriend, Jack, popped the question to her by hiding a jewelry box with a ring in it on the bread plate. “I hadn’t even noticed the little tan box, since it was the same shape and color as my roll.” Blundo wrote that Jack finally had to ask, “How’s your bread?” to get her to spot the ring.

  It was only by chance that Dan Bringardner happened to find the following fortune in his cookie: “You soon will be engaged in a new business venture.” As he told Blundo, “Seizing the opportunity, I handed Barb [his future wife] the first half of the fortune. We celebrated our 20th anniversary last September.” Although Lee and Bill always tried to accommodate customer requests, they drew the line at allowing couples to get married in front of the fireplace moai.

  Many rehearsal dinners were held at the Kahiki. Larry Rummell told Blundo that when his daughter held hers there, “The wedding party, mostly Katie and Jeff’s classmates from Miami U., ordered many Mystery Drinks. The drinks were so popular that the guests connected eight to ten straws end-on-end so that everyone at the far corners of the tables could sample them.” When another restaurant cancelled her daughter’s reservations at the last minute, Joan Miller of Worthington said of the Kahiki: “On very short notice they gave us a lovely room and served a scrumptious meal. My daughter sat in one of the peacock chairs, looking like a princess. The atmosphere was beautiful and what could have been a disaster turned into a thoroughly pleasant and memorable evening.”

  Then there were the proms. Jim Smith and Joe Francisco and their dates went to the Kahiki after the Bishop Watterson High School prom in 1962. “When the check came,” he told Blundo, “we were going to be short if we put much of a tip down. To impress the girls, Joe laid down a $10 bill for the tip. As he and the girls got up and moved away from the table I picked the tip back up to pay the bill.”

  Linda Rodichok’s memory of the Kahiki dated back to a night in 1961 when a “gorgeous male” asked her and a friend for directions to the newly opened supper club. Captivated by the young man, they decided to follow him there and even went inside when he did. “Having only $1.80 between them,” Blundo reported, “they ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, which turned out to be ice cream molds. They never did find the handsome stranger.”

  To drama teacher Susie Gehrisch, “It was like eating in a dream.” Someone calling himself Hodge wrote on an Internet chat board, “It was so over-the-top, it was basically a Mad Men set: aquarium walls, an Easter-Island-style fireplace, palm trees, and a freakin’ rainforest inside with storm effects.” Perhaps Elizabeth Gibson said it best: “No restaurant with a fire-breathing stone head has ever captured the hearts of Columbus quite like the Kahiki.”

  The Kahiki was a popular spot for lunch, providing customers with a break from the workaday world. Courtesy Candi Spencer.

  Michael Tsao’s son, Jeff, was three years old when they moved to Ohio. He grew up in the family business, first at the restaurant and then the frozen food division, rising to the position of director of research and development in the latter.

  “I started as a dishwasher when I was thirteen,” Jeff said. “I had no idea what I was doing, but everybody knew I was the boss’s son. I remember I was spraying down a plate and the food and water went all over [a co-worker]. I remember him giving me a glare like, ‘If you weren’t the boss’s son…’ Now, of course, we’re friends.”

  Jeff candidly admits that he had “a different experience. I could walk by the ice cream bin and have as much as I wanted, and I wasn’t allowed to drink. Well, there was the whole parent guilt thing, at least, but I snuck a little sip every now and then like the whole staff did.”

  There are many who will never forgive the Tsaos for closing the restaurant and then for not building another one. Jeff admits, “The last days were bittersweet at the Kahiki. It was great, but I think my father’s business is a more lasting legacy.” In his opinion, there were three factors that prevented his father from reopening the Kahiki: 1) the frozen food plant got too busy, 2) the political support was less than he needed and 3) he died before he really had the chance. What he left unmentioned was that Kahiki Frozen Foods had not turned a profit when his father died and would not do so for several more years. As much as Michael Tsao might have wanted to build a new restaurant, he couldn’t have done it alone.

  According to Lee, the Kahiki served over two thousand dinners on one day. “It wouldn’t be possible to duplicate the drinks today because too many ingredients were from Mexico and South America. Lot of rum goes down like soda pop. Sandro made the Navy Grog
mix twice a year. Only one or two bartenders knew how to make it.” He went on to observe, “I don’t know how restaurants survive today. If we didn’t have them lined up on Tuesday, we were worried.”

  14

  TROUBLE IN TAHITI27

  The most difficult crime to track is the one which is purposeless.

  —Arthur Conan Doyle

  For most people, the Kahiki was an oasis away from the problems of the outside world. Even now, it conjures up many pleasant memories: high school proms, birthday parties, weddings, graduations and other celebrations. However, there are some who cannot think of it without recalling certain tragic events that occurred there—the dark side of paradise.

  As can be expected wherever large sums of cash are exchanged, the Kahiki was robbed on several occasions. No less than four times between 1963 and 1969, thieves struck the supper club. The earliest incident occurred in April 1963. Some rather sloppy burglars broke out a side window after business hours. After ransacking an office on the second floor, they managed to get the safe open. In their haste, they left a large amount of money scattered on the floor of the accounting room. Perhaps, this was the incident that Mike Ballen was referencing when he posted the following on a tikichat board:

  My brother Gary and I were walking to school one morning when we noticed some loose change in the street in front of our house…a whole lot of it. We picked it up as fast as we could, and when we counted it, it added up to $86. What a score. Later that night, we found out that the Kahiki was robbed and the robbers threw some of the money (bags of change) as they sped down Napoleon. Our father, after a lot of arguing, convinced us to turn the money into the Kahiki, which we did.

  The next robbery was a little more serious. At about 10:45 p.m. on October 3, 1965, Bill Sapp, then thirty-seven, was taken hostage by two thugs he caught going through a filing cabinet safe after closing. He described them as clean-cut white men in their twenties.

  I’d been playing in a golf tournament in Dayton, and I came back. There was a back stairs on the Kahiki that leads to the offices. So I came up the stairs, walked in the back door and walked into my office, and there’s two guys in there. I thought they were working on the fish tank over my safe in the office. Then all of a sudden, I’m looking at a gun. They said, “We need you to open the safe.” I said, “Hell, I can’t open the safe; I don’t even know the combination.” They said, “Well, who does.” I said, “The only one I know that does is the secretary, and she’s not here.” So he says, “You get her on the phone and get that combination or something’s going to happen to you like the guy last night.” There was a robbery the night before and they shot the guy. I didn’t know that at the time, so it didn’t bother me. Anyway, I called the secretary up; and she gave me the combination, and I opened the safe for them. There was a couple thousand dollars in it. So when they left they wired me up, and as an afterthought, they took the money I had on me, which pissed me off. I had won a money clip in that tournament over there. I said, “Hey, leave me that money clip. I just won it in a golf tournament.” He said, “OK” and gave it back to me.

  Having been tied up with electrical cords ripped from office appliances, Bill managed to free his legs after about thirty minutes. He hopped downstairs, out the door and to the Ranch Drive-In restaurant next door, where he was able to call the police.

  According to Lee Henry, his Mynah bird saved his friend’s life. Both of them had offices, and each had a Mynah bird. Lee’s bird would often whistle and say, “Hi, baby.” When the two crooks were arguing over whether to kill Sapp, the bird whistled and said, “Hi, baby” from the adjoining office, frightening them away.

  Either late Sunday or early Monday, February 16–17, 1969, someone broke into a side door with a screwdriver. They used a cutting torch to open the safe and collect the weekend receipts. Reports indicated that the restaurant’s losses were “very small.” Nine months later, on Monday, November 10, 1969, a single gunman got away with $10,000. He came in through the kitchen door, dressed in a nice gray suit with black gloves and carrying a black briefcase. He went upstairs and took the money from two women working in an office. Although the restaurant was open, no one else knew that the robbery was taking place until the assailant had left. Due to his manner of dress, the “bandit” (as the Columbus Dispatch called him) was able to blend in with the regular crowd of businessmen who dined in the restaurant and slip away unnoticed.

  A horticulturalist by trade, Tilly was the birdman of the Kahiki. Courtesy Sapp/Henry.

  A former employee, Todd A. Pahel, age nineteen, was arrested in November 1978, for breaking into the restaurant. Twenty-five years later, Pahel made the news again when he and a friend decided “it would be funny” to shoot a BB gun at the house of an acquaintance. In the early morning darkness, the teenage resident of the house returned fire with a shotgun, and both men were wounded. Pahel subsequently died; the shooting was ruled self-defense.

  The employees themselves were sometimes the targets of crimes. The restaurant had been open little more than six months when, on September 11, 1961, twenty-two-year-old Alice Taylor, a hostess at the Kahiki, was leaving work with her sisters Andriana, age nineteen, and Wilma Lambropoulos, eleven, and her two-year-old son, Billy, when her estranged husband, Allen Taylor Jr., rode a motor scooter up to the car. He fired three shots into the driver’s side window. Both Alice and Andriana were hit with flying glass. They were taken to Saint Anthony Hospital and later released. Alice had filed for divorce from Allen on May 15 of that year. The same day, Allen set fire to his mother-in-law’s house at 1448 Deshler Avenue. He was indicted by a grand jury for arson in August and was released on a $1,000 bond for setting the fire and a $50 bond for assault and battery when he shot the car his wife was driving.

  Another “employee” crime victim was Sam, the Macaw. He was known for his big and sometimes saucy mouth (he knew about ten different phrases, not all acceptable in polite company). In the early 1990s, Sam was kidnapped by a disgruntled employee. He was missing for several days before being found in a Short North pet store. Before returning to the bar, he was implanted with a pet-tracking chip so that he could never be stolen again. After the closing of the restaurant, Sam retired to the Powell home of friend and keeper Jim Rush. Jim says Sam misses the patrons. In domestic life, he rarely has the opportunity to say another one of his favorite lines, “What, no tip?”

  The most tragic loss suffered by the extended “Kahiki family” was the death of fifty-five-year-old Yung Mo Yang. A beloved employee of seventeen years, “Uncle” Yung was shot to death behind the restaurant on Monday, May 28, 1990. The headwaiter, he was alone when he closed the restaurant and set the alarm at 2:00 a.m. Police were called to the scene at 8:00 a.m. after concerned family members went looking for him when he failed to return home. Yung was shot two times in the head in an apparent robbery. A former member of the South Korean Marine Corps, Uncle Yang loved his job. He began as a bus boy, after getting help from his sister, Bong Im, who was a waitress at the time, and rose through the ranks. He left behind a wife and four children.

  Two days after his death, someone tried to return his wallet to the restaurant. After asking to see the manager and learning he was not immediately available, the man quickly left, saying he would come back another day. Later, the wallet was mailed to Uncle Yang’s family with a signed letter from the man who found it. He claimed he had stumbled upon it in the grass near an apartment complex on Hamilton and Refugee Roads. The wallet contained Yung’s driver’s license, social security card and family pictures but no money. A different man also tried to return it. Neither one was believed to be a suspect. A $10,000 reward was offered, but no one has ever been arrested for his death. It remains a “cold case” in the Columbus Police Department files.

  The parking lot was a particularly dangerous spot for some Kahiki patrons, even when they were themselves law enforcement. John Daily, a used car dealer from Dayton, and his friend Detective Kenneth P. Jones of the Dayton Police Depa
rtment were held at gunpoint at 1:12 a.m. the day after Independence Day in 1966. They had just left the restaurant and were sitting in John’s car, a new model Cadillac, when the six-foot-tall, thirty-something assailant came up to the driver’s side window and pointed a gun at them. In what must have been a fantastic night for the gunman, he got away with $2,140 in cash ($2,100 from John and $40 from Kenneth) and more than $42,000 in jewelry composed of John’s diamond set in white gold ring and diamond tie tack. Luckily for Daily, both items were ensured with Lloyds of London. He later told the Columbus Dispatch, “I always carry a couple of thousand on me.” Detective Jones had come to Columbus unarmed.

  In another parking lot incident, Joyce E. Finke was killed in 1998 when she was hit by a car while riding her bicycle out of the Kahiki parking lot. While the driver of the car was known, no charges were filed.

  Many Mystery Girls came and went before the Kahiki closed in August 2000, but a real mystery girl made her first and last appearance a year earlier on November 28, 1999. A white woman, believed to be about twenty years old with short brown-red hair and blue eyes, was found dead in the parking lot. Standing at five feet, seven inches and weighing approximately 140 pounds, her ears were pierced one time on the left ear and twice on the right. She also had small scars on the left side of her face and nose. This mystery girl wore overalls, a blue coat and a straw hat. Her identity remains a mystery, and she is known only as Case 185 in the Ohio attorney general’s unidentified remains directory.

  A cutaway illustration of the main dining floor showing the layout of the “village.” Courtesy Sapp/Henry.

  15

  ALL IN THE OHANA