Issue 10 · July 29, 2026

The Tikis Nobody Straightened

A 1964 motel on the south end of Palm Springs, 105 degrees, and nothing on the walls to explain any of it.

The one bar at the Palm Springs airport had no air conditioning the day we arrived. An HVAC problem, somebody said. I had two hours to wait there for Lori's flight, because we had booked separately, because the trip was being paid for in miles. By the time she landed I had sweated through a shirt without going anywhere or doing anything.

The ride from the airport takes ten minutes, which is not enough time to prepare for what is waiting past the terminal doors. It was 105 when we checked in. One hundred and five in Palm Springs is hotter than one hundred and five in the high desert, and anybody who has lived at elevation will explain why for as long as they are allowed to.

We left the bags in the room and walked to the bar, past a line of tikis standing outside the doors. Most of them came out of Oceanic Arts in Whittier, the shop that supplied half the Polynesian pop era and now supplies Disney worldwide. Nobody has straightened them in sixty years. They lean the way things lean after enough summers.

Aloha came from behind the bar before we were through the door, in the register people use for someone they have known a while.

It was the same bartender as last year. The same host working the floor, the same waitress. Three people, one year on, in a resort town in July.

The waiter used our names.

We had spent one weekend in that room, twelve months earlier.

I have spent a long time now walking into places for a living and writing down what happens in the first ninety seconds. Most rooms handle arrival with a greeting calibrated to what the guest appears to be worth. A smaller number have a system for it, a notes field somebody fills in after service, a flag on a reservation. What no system produces is the thing that happened here, because the thing that happened here requires the same person to still be standing there a year later.

The Room

The Reef sits on the pool with windows down its whole length, so it does not hide from the daylight the way tiki bars usually insist on doing. Late in the afternoon the light comes up off the water and moves across the ceiling. There were eight or nine people in there and none of them were in a hurry.

I ordered a piña colada because I wanted something cold. It came cold and built from fresh fruit, which is not what a piña colada has been in an American bar since roughly 1978. Lori ordered a Zombie and got an actual one. It arrived in one of the house mugs the Reef fires in small runs and never mentions. We kept water going alongside at the same rate as the rum, which at 105 is less a choice than an instruction.

Above the bar the screens ran on a loop nobody acknowledged. Hawaii Five-O, then Magnum P.I., then Lloyd Bridges in Sea Hunt, black and white, silent under the music, a man breathing through a hose. Sea Hunt went off the air in 1961, three years before the motel opened. Nobody looked up. Nobody turned it off.

Number Thirty-Eight

The motel opened in 1964. Ken Kimes Sr. built it, number thirty-eight of forty-five he put up around the country, and only five of those were Polynesian. The others went to Indio, Modesto, Blythe, and Rosemead. Nothing on that list suggests anyone expected this one to outlive the others.

For a decade it was the south end of town's answer to the Racquet Club. The Rat Pack came, which is documented. The rest is lore the hotel repeats about itself and cannot prove: Elvis at the pool, Nancy Sinatra beside him, Victor Mature with his own table in the Congo Room steakhouse.

His table. Not a good table. His.

Then Palm Springs went out of style and the motel went with it. Through the eighties it was a spring break property in the worst sense, the kind that turns up in police logs. It became a Hyatt Lodge, then a Best Western, then a Days Inn, then a Rodeway Inn, each name a little further down, and eventually it was thrown out of the Rodeway system and off the visitor center's list and out of the convention bureau entirely. By the mid-nineties the plan was the wrecking ball.

What saved it was that nobody with money ever loved it enough to modernize it properly. The tikis stayed because replacing them cost more than leaving them. Nobody with money ever loved it enough to modernize it properly. The tikis stayed because replacing them cost more than removing them, and that is the reason there is anything here to walk through.

The turn came from a shift in taste nobody at the property engineered. Mid-century modern stopped being dated furniture and became a movement, Palm Springs built a week around it, and tiki came back up alongside. New owners took the place in 2000 and spent $2.2 million putting back what four chain brands had spent thirty years covering over. By 2009 the resort was hosting tiki events on the grounds every year.

Four Different Rooms

The bar had a harder time of it than the motel did. The Congo Room closed in 1971 and the room became the Reef. In 2006 it went to independent owners and reopened as Hawaiian Bill's. In 2009 somebody stripped out every piece of tiki in it, and the space sat empty with a lease sign in the window.

The current owners bought the motel in 2014 and made the only decision that mattered, which was to not turn it into anything. Sanchos went in where the Sambos pancake house had been. A seventies fern bar called Le Fern went in beside it and has since closed. The Reef came back as the Reef.

The fern bar is a lost idea worth knowing about. They came up in the early seventies, when women earning their own money started going out without a man attached, and the rooms were built for someone walking in alone: plants, soft light, sweeter drinks, sandwiches, nothing that required knowing the bartender first. The entire design brief was who feels comfortable coming through the door. Which is the same question the Reef answers, sixty years later, with the same people behind the bar a year on.

Rory Snyder, who runs the Reef and put Le Fern in, said something to a desert magazine a few years back about all of it. He said a person has to know the history of tiki firsthand before doing anything campy with it, and has to know what they are doing. That is a strange sentence to find attached to a room with a plastic pufferfish lamp over the till, and it is also the only explanation of this property that exists anywhere, and it is not on the property. It is in a magazine.

Not Hardcore

Steve has thrown this party twice. Last year was the first and the theme was yacht rock. This year leaned tiki, which suits the building considerably better, and suits Steve, who holds his end of it at about the level Lori and I hold ours as Parrot Heads. Committed. Not doctrinal.

It is a private thing, his own, unconnected to the Tiki Caliente weekends Snyder runs on the same grounds, though the two of them are friends and the distinction matters more to me than to anyone standing at the bar. Last year's crowd ran mostly Chico State, alumni and hospitality people who already knew each other's stories and had been telling them to each other a while. This year had some of those faces and a lot of new ones.

We are not hardcore. We look for these rooms anyway, wherever we land. The Tonga Room at the Fairmont in San Francisco we have been to more times than I can account for, where the rain comes down on the indoor lagoon on a schedule and the band plays from a barge floating in the middle of it. They play yacht rock. Pele Utu in Reno runs a yacht rock night on Sundays. Steve's first party was yacht rock. None of that is coordinated.

Pele Utu opened in 2024 in the old Gateway Lounge on Stardust Street. Dr. Shocker and Rosie Raddish run it and one or both of them is behind the bar most nights. Their seventeen-year-old painted the mural. The fourteen-year-old carved the lava rock. The two youngest did the tapa cloth on the walls. ʻOhana gets thrown around loosely in tiki, and in that room it is a description of the labor.

The Wall by the Banquette

The wall by the banquette holds nine small photographs in bamboo frames, most of them signed, arranged around a carved mask. They are Don Ho photographs. Nothing next to them says so.

Steve's father knew him.

Ho played Waikiki for something close to forty years, singing the version of Hawaii the mainland had settled on well before he got to it. He was born in Honolulu. He spent a career performing somebody else's idea of the place he was actually from, and did it long enough and warmly enough that the idea turned into a thing of its own with him at the middle of it. The signatures are still legible on most of them.

Three Nights

We went out over the weekend. Palm Springs has no shortage of bars and we worked through a fair number of them, rooms with better lighting and newer everything.

We ended back at the Reef every night.

The greeting was the same each time. It was also the same greeting the people ahead of us in the door got, and the ones behind, which is the part that took me until the third night to notice.

On the last afternoon the light came off the pool and onto the ceiling the way it had the first time, and a man on a black-and-white screen went on breathing through a hose with the sound off. The tikis were still leaning when we pulled out.

The Story Behind the Pour

The Zombie. Don the Beachcomber, Hollywood, 1934.

Ernest Gantt built it, later renamed himself Donn Beach, and spent the rest of his life keeping it from getting out. He wrote his recipes in code and lined the back bar with numbered bottles carrying no other label, so the men mixing the drink every night had no idea what was in it. That was the point. Rivals were trying to steal his drinks by hiring his bartenders away, and a bartender who cannot name an ingredient is a bartender not worth poaching. The house held guests to two, which given three rums and a float of 151 was less mystique than sound policy.

It worked, and it nearly killed the drink. Every other bar improvised its own Zombie, the improvisations became the norm, and the original was lost for seventy years. It came back in 2005, when the daughter of a Don the Beachcomber waiter named Dick Santiago turned up with a notebook her father had kept in his shirt pocket. Jeff Berry spent more than a decade running down the rest of it and published the recipe in 2007.

Palm Springs had a Don the Beachcomber of its own downtown for years, which is some of why any of this washed up on Palm Canyon in the first place.

The piña colada came cold and built from fresh fruit, which is not what a piña colada has been in an American bar since about 1978.

The Palm Springs Punch is the house signature: Blackheart spiced rum, triple sec, crème de noyaux, pineapple. We did not order it. There is always next year.