I’m sitting under a palapa made of palm fronds and surrounded by Polynesian-inspired tiki totems and woven grass walls. The dim room carries a bit of intrigue, a good amount of history and a heaping dose of vintage kitsch. The dining tables surround an aqua lagoon, the décor incorporates a ship’s rigging and rolled up sails and the dance floor is made from salvaged wood from a lumber schooner called the S.S. Forester.
It’s the Tonga Room inside the Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill in San Francisco, and it’s been wowing patrons since 1945—and the hype is earned!
Every element seems designed to charm, even the wooden lazy susan serving vessel for the pupu platter. Maybe the rosy outlook has to do with the mai tais so potent that you’re tipsy halfway through just one (alas, the mai tais are no longer served in a fake coconut like they used to be). All of these contribute to a memorable evening, but the showstopper is the fact that it rains and thunders inside every half hour or so. The Tonga Room has Disneyland-level atmospherics and it’s a blast.
Floating in the lagoon is a vibrantly decorated boat which the band plays on. The boat sails forward a few feet and then reverses back, but we’re easily entertained in such a spectacular environment. The band, the Island Groove, is great and plays standards like “Girl from Ipanema” and Fleetwood Mac covers. Their version of “Everywhere” is fantastic. A fair percentage of people go to the Tonga Room for their birthday, as we learn from individual callouts from the band, whose leader urges, “Keep on drinking, because the more you drink the better we sound.” (Just note that there’s a $15 per person charge if you’re there when the band plays.)
Our pupu platter appetizer includes vegetarian springs rolls, Korean short ribs, coconut shrimp, citrus pepper chicken wings and edamame. This is a meal in itself, even when shared across three people. We go on to order the sweet onion beef with Maui onion and scallion, and the New York striploin with oyster sauce glaze. I love the charred purple yam on the side. Both entrees are delicious. The cocktail menu includes tiki standards like zombies and piña coladas.
(Historical side note: Tonga is an island nation in the South Pacific, and four-fifths of its 170 islands are uninhabited. Ruled by King Tupou VI, Tonga was never colonized. I’ll drink to that!)
So how did this marvel even come to be? The space used to just be the hotel’s pool, or “plunge,” installed in 1929. The hotel’s website says that in 1945, a leading set designer for Metro Goldwyn Mayer transformed the space into the S.S. Tonga, a restaurant and bar based around the concept of an Art Deco cruise ship. (I tried to research this designer, Mel Melvin—and sometimes confusingly referred to as Mel Levin—across many sources, but couldn’t track down anything definitive on him.) You could climb ship’s ladders to balconies where lifeboats were stored on their davits, the railings adorned with life preservers.
At some point thereafter, the theme shifted to tiki and it was renamed the Tonga Room. The thunderstorms were installed in the 1950s. The lagoon isn’t very deep (but it’s 75 feet long), and a posted sign warns that you’ll get a $1,000 fine if you try to go swimming. But I fervently hope that someone takes a little private swim after hours. In 1946, the San Francisco Women’s Chamber of Commerce held a fashion show at the space, and two spotlit swimmers wearing iridescent swimsuits dove into the pool from a diving board and swam its length, after which time the models floated on the barge to show off their couture rather than walking a runway.
You can enter the Tonga Room from California Street, but we went through the hotel’s main entrance on Mason Street (or, in that stretch, “Tony Bennett Way”—don’t miss the statue of him on the front lawn). We lingered to admire the lavish, gold-appointed lobby with wonderful art like this statue Purple Rain by George Monfils, made of more than 30,000 vinyl records that depicts Prince on his Hondamatic. The Tonga Room can then be reached by choosing “T” in the elevator (we thought it was for Tonga, but in retrospect I think it’s for the terrace level). Make sure to admire the historical photographs in the hallway. Christmas dinner at the hotel was $2 in 1941, and you can read the menu which included long-ago dishes of “cream of fowl, Margot” and “grapefruit supreme, Miami.” There’s even a Shining-esque photo of the ballroom packed with celebrants.
We can’t talk about the Tonga Room without mentioning the time the late, great Anthony Bourdain visited in 2012 for the Travel Channel show The Layover. In this clip, you can see him reacting to flashes of lightning when the storm starts. “It’s strangely scenic. You know, I hear the rain, I hear the thunder, I kinda need a hug, Chris,” he says to chef Chris Cosentino. He later adds in dazed overwhelm, “This is like the greatest place in the history of the world.” And he hadn’t even had a drink yet! We can all share in his sense of awe at this San Francisco legend that earns its reputation.
