The Strip Mall Slurp
Jade Island Polynesian Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge
718-761-8080
Remember when chow mein was haute cuisine and Hawaiians couldn't vote? From Eisenhower to Carter, a tiki craze swept America like a hallucinatory wind: CEOs power-lunched on pineapple beef. A Mai Tai was mommy's little helper. Suburbanites felt worldly and well traveled. By Reagan's inauguration, the fad's tread was bare: Polynesia was passé, and informed men no longer got sloppy on coconut rum.
American culture endlessly chews its cud; bellbottoms yesterday, William Shatner tomorrow. In tiki's ashes we find, well, tiki. In New York City, Otto's Shrunken Head, Waikiki Wally's and Zombie Hut traffic in second-wave tiki. But like a Chinatown purse, they're cheap knockoffs. While the originals were like sincere Disneylands, these new-schoolers wear kitsch with a wink and a nod. They're as phony as a Jew for Jesus.
With that in mind, I board the Staten Island ferry one sunny evening. Upon docking, a bus winds me past mansions, gas stations and car lots before reaching the line's end: a Kmart strip mall. Next to Golden's-a Jewish deli with windows populated by cartoon cutouts of sitcom stars-sits a survivor: the Jade Island Polynesian Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge.
It was built in 1972 and feels like it. In the dining room, waiters wearing acid-freak-out Hawaiian shirts saunter past bubbling waterfalls (aside a faux volcano, of course), a sandy beach mural oblivious to potential tsunamis, and wrinkled old couples eating fried meats kept warm through Sterno's magic. Bypassing the PuPu platter, my girlfriend, Adrianne, and a friend, Alex, head to the lounge.
Behind the thatched-hut bar, blenders whir loud enough to drown out the tv showing Jeopardy. The radio is tuned to silence. A muted tv monitor is synced to quick-draw lotto (a betting booth sits near the front door), and doughy men and women with makeup as garish as Hawaiian shirts groan, "Damn it, 53. Damn you," as they shred another losing ticket.
"Welcome, welcome," says a man introducing himself as Johnny. He has a tie and a permanent squint. He hands us Sunday newspaper-size menus. Laminated pages advertise the Pineapple Paradise ($6.95), Coconut Kiss ($6.95), Navy Grog ($6.15, featuring a "pimento dram") and the namesake Jade Island ($6.15)-"an exotic all year-round drink and only we know how to make it."
"What's good?" I ask.
"Try the Headhunter," Johnny says with a used-car salesman's smile. "We sell lots of them every night."
The Headhunter, I learn, is "two drinks in one." If first one doesn't get you, second one will. Tempting, but we stick to pineapples, coconuts and the mysterious Jade. The blender blends. Paper umbrellas unfurl. Cherries are skewered. Our drinks arrive as the liquid equivalent of Paris Hilton: style over substance, and best in teardropper doses.
Alex's hollowed-out pineapple-festooned with a paper fan-is a perfect hot-day sipper: It's addictively sweet, though drinking it draws question marks around one's sexuality. Adrianne's ceramic coconut shell contains equals parts sugar, strong rum and coco milk-a cup-licking concoction. My Jade is pinker than a pureed Hello Kitty doll, and tastes like one too. I gulp it quickly, which takes five minutes; it's a triple-sized mixer.
"I don't think I'm drunk," Adrianne says, slurping her Kiss.
"The Headhunter ($6.35), please," I tell the bartender wearing a blue flowered shirt. "Is it good?"
"Yeah, it's good."
"Why?"
"Ha ha."
He combines ice and liquors the hue of polyester disco duds. Minutes later, I'm cradling a green tiki head filled with melted orange Creamsicle married to Alka-Seltzer. A straw bobs like a life preserver. I suck. Sweetened orange TheraFlu, yet peculiarly delicious. Adrianne and I down the drink. It leaves us bloated, sugar-high and perplexed by the anachronistic dinner menu. Lo mein? The flaming pina? Volcano beef?
Original tiki menus offered edible otherworldliness. Chefs borrowed from the fried-rice school of Chinese cooking and, in a stroke of invention, married pineapple to meat, then set them ablaze. Back then, as today, a little razzle-dazzle serves well to trick the palate.
In 2005, culinary Frankensteins and flamboyant drinks are relics of a simpler time. Sea bass with saffron infusion and mango martinis are now common dining lingo. Still, tikis like Jade chug along, trafficking in utopian escapist nostalgia. There may be asphalt outside, but in here, after a couple Headhunters, the island breeze is easily imagined.