Drinking Scorpions at Trader Vic’s: Polynesian Parties, Caribbean Rum, Chinese Cooks, and American Tourists

This paper examines the remarkable popularity of so-called Polynesian food and tropical themed restaurants in the 1950s and 1960s, the era of Asian nationalism and decolonization. The career of Victor Bergeron, his Trader Vic Restaurants (then some of the highest grossing restaurants in the world), and their relationship to Hilton Hotels, reveal the contours of a Cold War vision of touristic leisure that linked Asia and the Caribbean. Trader Vic’s grew with the spread of postwar tourism. Trader Vic, with his focus on Polynesian idylls and Caribbean pirate tall tales invented a fantasy perfect for the Cold War, even as he set up shop in colonial capitals and former colonies, he substituted the tiki cocktail craze for colonial clubs. As rum concoctions superseded gin mixes, he presented a Asian, Pacific, and Caribbean tropics free of the immediate colonial past, yet dependent on Chinese labor. Like the postwar American empire, itself, Trader Vic’s blended the Caribbean with the Pacific in food cooked exclusively by Chinese cooks based on recipes lifted from Chinese-American restaurants. Hotels and Trader Vic’s were the perfect pair. The tourism promoted by the hotels opened up Americans to a postcolonial, non-Communist Asia and the Pacific.