Tonga Hut | North Hollywood, CA
3/10

No matter how bad the experience, I did learn a valuable lesson: don’t ever stop at a bar just because the moai head outside the door is cool.

So it’s eight o’clock on a Tuesday night. We stop at a quaint little establishment on Victory which boasts the aforementioned moai, thinking that at worst it would be an interesting experience.

In that, at least, we were not wrong.

Entering the bar, we were met by another giant tiki head standing guard just inside. The interior is both interesting and perplexing: electronic dartboards, a jukebox, a classic mid-century kidney-shaped drop ceiling edged in bamboo and—my favorite feature—the lily-pad shaped three-tier fountain behind the bar. We were also met with almost complete silence, the only sounds in the bar being the conversations of the patrons.

Friendly.

We perused the island-themed drink menu on our table and, confronted with an array of incredibly silly names, opted for two very basic selections: I went down the easy road—a Mai Tai—while The Boyfriend was feeling daring and ordered a Zombie.

This is the point at which, if we were smart people, we would have noticed that the remainder of the customers were all nursing beers and just gone with the flow. Instead, I was busy observing the behavior of the other people in the bar: what looked to be a father and his adult son having a very stilted conversation; two men having a fairly heated debate (about what, I’m still not sure, but I think it involved a woman); the boisterous semi-drunk in the back who got tired of the quiet and put Van Halen on the jukebox; the guy in the eye patch.

Yes, dear readers, there was an eye patch, and not in an ironic way. Somehow, we had managed to transcend the laws of physics and had walked not into a bar in North Hollywood, but had strolled straight onto Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland.

About ten minutes into waiting for The Boyfriend to return from the bar with our drinks, I turned my attention to the bartender. She appeared to be having quite a time actually making our drinks, which was confirmed when TB returned, bearing two tiki mugs sporting little cocktail umbrellas. He looked perturbed and not a little annoyed by the bartender, who had confided to him that she didn’t know what she was doing and had, despite the drink menu’s boasting, never made a Mai Tai or a Zombie before.

At this point, my sense of adventure began to wane.

Fearing that we were about to meet complete mediocrity, you can imagine my surprise when I was met not with a mediocre drink, but instead something that tasted remarkably like paint thinner. It even burned on the way down!

Being the genius that I am, TB and I swapped cups and sampled, hoping that the diagnosis would improve with a second opinion. Sadly, the lighter fluid-esque monstrosity was my “Mai Tai,” as far as we could discern. (In the end we could only tell the two apart by the fact that the “Zombie” appeared to have been made almost completely of a substance not unlike Hawaiian Punch.)

Disappointed but resigned to our fate, we hunkered down to suffer through our twin glasses of fruity turpentine and turned to the jukebox for amusement. I am something of a jukebox fiend; I love nothing more than ferreting out obscure gems from dive bar jukeboxes, and this particular jukebox was a treasure trove.

There was barely a whiff of anything that you would expect in a tiki establishment, but where else would you find Herb Alpert, Frank, Dino, Dave Brubeck and Esquivel next to Metallica, The Cult, Van Halen, Donovan, The Arctic Monkeys, The White Stripes, David Bowie and Tom Jones? My drink may have sucked, but damn it, I managed to time our exit with The Animals’ “We’ve Got to Get Out of This Place.” Beautiful.

Though the bar rated at least a seven on the weird-and-awkward scale, it will take a thunderbolt from Mount Olympus to coerce me to pass through the door again. I’m giving it a rating of three out of ten mostly for the jukebox—but even that only gives the Tonga Hut a two-point advantage over the one it would have received for being closed.

Ed. Note: I should really carry a laptop with me at all times, as I would have seen this before I ever set foot in the place and been properly warned.