Everything should last forever, especially a tiki bar in an art deco building in downtown Oakland

As David told Solomon on the day his elegant fusion and cocktails waterside place finally filed for bankruptcy, after nearly a year of post-pandemic doldrums (in which the after-lunch crowd never quite came back):

I go the way of all fine-dining establishments: be thou strong therefore, and shew thyself a savvy and flexible capitalist, and keep the charge of the Lord thy God, to shift your investments to more profitable endeavors, to go where more friendly regulatory environments are, and remember the first law of property, that thou mayest prosper in all that thou doest, and whithersoever thou turnest thyself: location, location, location.

“It’s enough to make a man wonder what profit he hath of his labor!” his dutiful son replied, who, remember, is Solomon: “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but only the doom loop abideth forever.”

Fuck that, in my opinion. Restaurants should never close, and people and dogs should live forever, as those of us who have not died, courageously, maintain. You say there is thus far a zero percent survival rate across all of human history, vanity of vanities, all is vanity? I say that is the nay which the naysayers say, the kind of can’t-do attitude of cowards who won’t spend two million a year to get plasma infusions from their sons, eat poopy sludge, and reduce their biological age by at least five years, as of about two years ago.

Anyway, when The Kon-Tiki announced its immanent closure, a cry went out across the land, as that which is always true was especially even more true than usual: Oakland is a bad place for business! Just look at all the establishments that have closed at this particular location: Before it was The Kon-Tiki for seven glorious years, it was Longitude for three, and before that it was Disco Volante for two and change. Imagine what bliss it would be to be alive if all three of those bars were still here.

According to folk tradition, too, the story of the world goes even farther back than 2011: “Old Oaklanders remember the building as having the biggest bra you’ve ever seen,” because in those days, breasts were so much larger. But the list of treacherously murdered victims of Oakland’s implacable hatred of commerce at only this single location beggers belief: along with a plus-sized women’s lingerie store, there was a bank, a Korean restaurant, and a New Orleans-themed restaurant, and probably even other things. Yet this is more than just a heinous list of crimes crying out to God for tax relief; it’s a vision of utopia, and invitation to imagine a better world whose businesses are cradled to the bosom of city leaders, where at the art deco-ed corner of 14^th and Webster, you could not only get drunk on a cocktail of racist-adjacent kitsch invented in the thirties, but you could get Korean food, beignets, make deposits, and purchase intimate garments for the generously endowed ladies in your life.

[EDIT: SOMEONE TELLS ME ALSO MAYBE IT WAS A FLOWER MARKET OR SOMETHING, WHICH ONLY PROVES MY POINT EVEN MORE]

All this could have been ours, but for woke. When The Kon-Tiki opened seven years ago, the brave entrepreneurs taking heroic sail were not, to be clear, being racist in one of the more obvious and dated ways one still can still find to be. That’s not what they were doing. “We’re not pretending to transport you to some ‘Oriental’ tropical escape,” they clarified, sensically; they merely “wanted to have a tiki bar that was really something from the past and was referencing Oakland. It’s all California.” And this is true! California invented mixing Pacific islander iconography with Caribbean rum drinks (and just enough indigenous stuff from the Americas to get weird with it), all served in container of Hollywood beach movies from a time when being racist was normal and wasn’t weird at all. One of the original inventors of drinking alcohol with umbrellas, Trader Vics, still squats in Emeryville, even if the establishment where the Mai-Tai was invented—the Hinky Dink, at 6500 San Pablo—is now a fenced-off lot full of weeds and nothing. What could be less racist than a tribute to an Oakland racist of the past? We use words like history, pride, tiki; as this once cherished tradition is obliterated from the earth, hounded from polite society, and purged from the permanent record in a way that would make literally Stalin blush, we use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline.

And so, though we defy the woke mob–whose dastardly conspiracy to not drink at The Kon-Tiki, whose campaign of sabotage making it “Super Fucking Slow” has reached its dread conclusion–we must admit, these are hard times. Left with only Trader Vics, Barbary, Kona Club, Forbidden Island, and Sand Bar, what will the East Bay do when the time comes to nostalgically embrace this proud and beautiful escapism born a time when Hawai’i being a state was still pretty weird? Go across the bridge to San Franciso where there is only the Luau Lounge, Bamboo Hut, Tonga Room, Pagan Idol, Zombie Village, Trad’r Sam, Last Rites, the Tiki Haven, and Smuggler’s Cove? Fuck you.