The Tiki Bar Review Pages: Tiki Bob's, Indianapolis, Indiana

This is a selection of favorite writings and images from the now-defunct TBRP,
which was very active from 1995 to 2003, and sort of half-active from 2003 to 2007.
Now it is gone.

The Tiki Bar Review Pages site was replaced by the book Tiki Road Trip (in 2003).
The second edition of TRT (2007) is available NOW.

This is an archive - these pages are no longer updated!

Some information will be out of date. Some of this writing goes back to 1995.
See Tiki Road Trip (2007 edition) for the most up-to-date information.

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Tiki Bob's Cantina
Indianapolis, Indiana

(also: Seattle Washington, Norfolk, Virginia, Richmond, Virginia, Pontiac, Michigan,
Greenville, South Carolina,and elsewhere)

Summer, 2003

I am getting really tired of griping about how all of the new so-called Tiki Bars sprouting up over the course of the past few years up seem to be the same sort of miserable college dance club type of place.

But they all are.

Okay, not all of them, but enough of them are that I am already tired of complaining about it.

The Tiki Bob's chain, which has at least six locations (and I am not really motivated to be as thorough as I usually am in trying to find out how many there are), just sort of sucks.

It sucks for all of the same reasons that all of the other neo-Tiki bars I have described as 'suck' have sucked.

It is a loud place geared towards letting college-aged people drink as much as possible while listening to dance music at high volume. The whole place feels sticky, as if too much beer and chicken wing sauce has been spilled, and there is no hope of ever completely cleaning it all up. The floor is concrete, for easy hosing-down. There are some booths along one side, and some stools at the bar, but for the most part, it is a big and wide open space so as to be able to cram as many bodies in as possible. A DJ booth dominates the corner, and the monkey boy inside will play the same tired Aerosmith songs and the latest 50 Cent hip hop hits over and over. The dance floor has a few tiers on it, so drunk girls away from home at college for the first time can get up on the stage and show off their breasteses before puking in the corner. These are the same gals who scream "wooooooo" as loud as possible before drinking a shot with a vulgar name, containing fruit juce with a dollop of some 10 proof liqueur. This same shot had a different vulgar name last year, but the bartenders won't ever admit that it's all the same thing.

Sure, there's an almost-Tiki decor to the place, and I was actually very impressed by one thing: an extremly accurate and lifelike Moai in the corner, at about 7 feet tall. When this dump closes, I want it. I also spotted some vintage surfing photos in the booths... each of which also sports it's own private TV.

All of this, and we also have to contend with the dickhead who masterminded this place having the audacity to name his McTikibar chain after a legendary bona-fide 'real' Tiki Bar of yore. Granted, Tiki Bob's in San Francisco was always seen as a second-rate Trader Vic's imitator, but their legendary mascot figure (which still stands in front of the original location at the corner of Taylor and Post streets in San Francisco) and similar Tiki mug have become icons of Polynesian Pop. This pretender to the sacred name Tiki Bob's will perish, forgotten, and hopefully as soon as possible.