When I was growing up, there was a Polynesian Supper Club ten minutes from my house called The Kahiki. It was a 2,000 square meter, black and red painted A-frame building that resembled a battle canoe and was surrounded by a moat. At the entrance were two fake stone Easter Island moai with flaming heads and the interior was decorated like a supposed village meeting houses in Papua New Guinea and was filled with rainforest plants and aquariums. If someone ordered the 4-person mystery drink, a punch bowl, a gong would ring out and a woman in a grass skirt would serve it, then sacrifice herself in a smoking volcano. The menu was mostly Cantonese, with more pineapple than usual, and had nothing to do with the actual cooking of the islands of the South Pacific. Still, at that moment in time, it was wonderful.

In booming midsized cities and expanding suburbs around the United States, from the 1930s through the 1980s, places that didn’t have a dining culture like New York or Chicago, these strange supper clubs were the equivalent of fine dining. They were mostly owned by World War II veterans that had caught a glimpse of the South Pacific and wanted to be transported to another place, even a ridiculously idealized one, to realign their memories of the horrors of war. In a bizarre provincial context, it was a celebration of luxury, not entirely unlike Ottoman Palace food or Bistecca alla Fiorentina.

Like the tiki bar concept, which was popularized by the bars within these restaurants, the tiki¹ theme grew stale. There was an Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland, surfers wearing necklaces with tiki pendants and a proliferation of Hawaiian shirts. Tiki, which had come from a very real place, became uncool. By the 1980s, when I encountered The Kahiki, one of the grandest Polynesian supper clubs ever built, tiki culture was already going the way of the vinyl record.

Tiki culture became kitsch, a parody of itself, though it will never go away.

Tiki cocktails come and go even as they test the limits of modern political correctness. Rather than technique and ingredients, it is a concept built on theatrics. Instead of focusing solely on the extraction of maximum flavor from a set of ingredients, it is an expression of the idea of a place, of a concept. It’s just like fine dining.

Visiting a fine dining restaurant is an experience that goes beyond just putting food in your mouth to sustain yourself or tasting something delicious. Langue de boeuf with madeira sauce at a two-star restaurant in Paris is not all that different from a taco de lengua from a street cart in Mexico in terms of how your mouth reacts. Both are considered delicious to anyone, at least anyone with a reasonable sense of flavor, though we expect one to cost a lot more than the other. That’s because of all the other things that come with the food. All the ornamentations and presentations. The white tablecloths, dress codes and wines chilling in silver buckets. The access to be seated amongst other people from similar or higher economic backgrounds.

Fine dining, the kind that arose in Paris in the late 1700s and eventually expanded across Western Europe and the world, the kind that Michelin seems to favor, has long been in decline. It is decadence on its way to kitsch. It is not dead, as many have claimed, and like tiki it will never die. There will always be a demand for restaurants that provide more than just a meal. Places for anniversaries and affairs. Yet, tastes have changed.