Bourdain Took One Look & Cried "Cowabunga!"

“Only one word can sum up this experience,” said Anthony Bourdain on his first visit to San Francisco's Tonga Room. “Cowabunga!”

​​Did you do anything loony during the pandemic lockdown? Of course you did, but don’t worry, I’m not asking you to reveal details. (Unless you really want to — in which case, I’m all ears.)
 
Europeans under strict lockdown, allowed outside only to fetch groceries and walk pets, took to strolling around with their cats, birds, even goldfish. Not all at the same time, but still.

My sister-in-law and her sister entertained themselves carving famous faces into potatoes.

​

And one evening in 2020, I took Rich “out” for drinks by recreating San Francisco’s famous Tonga Room and Hurricane Bar in our Seville apartment. ​The Tonga Room is one of the city’s goofier watering holes, hidden in the lower depths of the luxurious Fairmont Hotel on top of posh Nob Hill.

​It started out as a 75-foot indoor swimming pool where celebrity guests could show off 1929’s newfangled form-fitting swimsuits. In 1945, when the tiki bar craze was in high gear, the Fairmont hired MGM’s leading set designer to transform the pool into a lagoon surrounded by thatched huts where celebrity guests could drink rum from ceramic coconut mugs. Every fifteen minutes a “hurricane” swept the room with dramatic booms of thunder and heavy “rain” falling into the lagoon.
​

Musicians play in a thatch-roofed barge floating in the lagoon.

Rich took me there on one of our earliest dates, and I hope you won’t think I’m totally shallow and tasteless for saying I loved it; it was the most hilarious and romantic bit of kitsch I’d ever seen. In 2020, I did my best to recreate the ambiance in our apartment. Sadly my shower nozzle didn’t reach far enough to recreate the downpour; upon reflection that was probably fortunate for our security deposit and our neighbors.

​It's been forty years since we visited the actual Tonga Room, and this week, we decided to go back. They don’t open until 5:00 pm, so we took a later ferry, lingered over lunch, and visited a few other landmarks along the way.

The Old Ship Saloon sits at Pacific and Battery streets, once the city's shoreline.

​Our first port of call was the Old Ship Saloon, once an actual ship called the Arkansas that ran aground during a storm off Bird Island — now Alcatraz — in 1849. She was towed to the city, and while passengers and crew rushed off to pan for gold, a savvy entrepreneur turned her into a saloon.
 
The Arkansas served as a seaman’s bar, boarding house, and bordello before sinking and becoming part of the landfill that expanded San Francisco’s shoreline. The Old Ship Saloon stands proudly over her remains, providing a warm welcome and first-rate food. My quesadilla ($16) was a marvelously creamy mix of Jack cheese and lime-accented guacamole inside a crispy-seared tortilla.

The quesadillas at the Old Ship Saloon are irresistible.

​Next we visited the Cable Car Museum, an extraordinarily LOUD space where you get to watch (AND HEAR) the winding wheels pulling the steel cables to haul the cars uphill.

​Our ears were still ringing as we climbed Nob Hill and stepped into the vast silence of Grace Cathedral.

Founded in 1849, Grace Church attracted miners who often dropped little envelopes of gold dust into the collection basket. That building burned down in 1906, paving the way for an upgrade that wasn’t completed until 1965. The Episcopalian diocese took its time creating an oddball blend of European tradition and San Franciscan what's-happening-now.
 
Grace is built of modern concrete in French Gothic style patterned on Notre Dame de Paris. The front doors are reproductions cast from the original Ghiberti doors on the Florence Baptistry. The stained glass windows portray 1100 figures from Adam to Einstein (with his famous formula). The floor of the nave, copied from the medieval labyrinth in the cathedral in Chartres, France, is used for everything from candlelight meditation to yoga classes. 

The formal signing of the UN Charter happened at the Veteran’s War Memorial a mile away, but much of the heavy negotiating took place in meeting rooms at the Fairmont Hotel, just a block from the cathedral.

While the hotel is clearly proud of its supporting role in re-defining world order, its most cherished bragging rights come from being the place where, in 1961, Tony Bennet first sang his iconic I Left My Heart in San Francisco. Shortly after his 90th birthday in 2016, Tony returned to the Fairmont to watch the city put up a statue of him and rename that block of Mason Street “Tony Bennet Avenue.”

Two crooners with a lotta heart

After paying his respects to Tony, Rich said, “Hey, it’s nearly five. Come on. The entrance to the Tonga Room is around the side.” We turned onto California Street and trotted downhill. 

We found the sign, but not the bar; there was nothing but an unassuming side door into a gymnasium.
 
I said, “You don’t think they’ve turn the lagoon back into a swimming pool?”
 
We trudged all around the outside of the enormous hotel complex, but aside from the old sign, there was no indication the Tonga Room — or the big awning we remembered — had ever existed. 
​

This awning had apparently vanished, taking the Tonga room with it.

Returning to the lobby, we were given elaborate instructions that led us through a maze of hotel corridors to the gym. Just past that we found the Tonga Room entrance, where people were being separated into the haves — as in “I have a reservation and can walk right in” — and the have nots — which would be us.
 
“You need a reservation just to have a drink here?” I asked incredulously. I realize customs change over four decades, but hey…
 
I went to find the bouncer. “We just want a quick drink,” I explained. “You see, we came here —"
 
He didn’t even look at me as he snapped, “You can go in IF you stand at the bar. You can ONLY order drinks. NO food.”
 
Yikes! In we went.

The Tonga Room’s thatched huts and phony hurricanes were as kitsch as ever. The bartender, who had clearly gone to the same charm school as the bouncer, pushed a plastic price list in our direction without looking up. “Yeah?”

Last time we were there, drinks at the Tonga Room looked like this.

​Rich ordered a Mai Tai and the bartender reached for a plain glass. I’d heard that just this year they’d stopped using ceramic mugs shaped like coconuts and tiki gods, but I spotted a few on an upper shelf. “Any chance we could get it in one of those?”
 
He looked at me as if I’d asked him to strip naked and perform a fan dance on the bar. “No.”

Nowadays, this is what a Mai Tai ($23.90) at the Tonga Room looks like.

​“I have to tell you,” Rich said as he took the first sip, standing awkwardly near the bar, “I prefer the Tonga Room you made at home during the pandemic.”

My version of the Tonga Room, Seville, April, 2020

I remembered how much fun we’d had in our version of the Tonga Room, listening to The Lion Sleeps Tonight and laughing as we recalled all the goofiest bars we knew — a remarkably long and varied list, as you can imagine — and watching the sun slowly set over the rooftops of Seville. 

​“I have to agree,” I said. “And you want to know something else? It’s going to be at least another forty years before I come back here again.”

The Old Ship Saloon is at Pacific and Battery, several blocks from the waterfront. The others places I visited are all on Nob Hill — a steep climb, so wear good walking shoes or consider an Uber or Waymo driverless taxi!

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​This post is part of my ongoing series
OUT TO LUNCH IN
CHEAP & CHEERFUL SAN FRANCISCO

My goal is to discover some of San Francisco's most colorful neighborhoods so I can check out what's really going on in this zany town. Are we in a doom loop? Already on the rebound? Still fabulous? And where should we eat afterwards? These and other questions will be explored in upcoming posts.
BROWSE PREVIOUS POSTS HERE

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