If you've ever wondered what the story was behind places like Don The Beachcomber and Trader Vic's, the LA Times published a good but short article on Donn Beach, father of the Polynesian-themed restaurant and a subculture of people called tiki-philes.
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The article will not be news to those Hawaiian-shirted, mai-tai-and-zombie connoisseurs who already flock in droves to revel in the tropical-island-kitsch of Huntington Beach's Don The Beachcomber, but it presents a
neat and tidy primer on how a bootlegger and speakeasy proprietor named
Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt became Donn Beach-Comber and started the
whole craze.
Huntington Beach's restaurant, the story points out, is one of only two left anywhere. The other is in Hawaii.
To read the LA Times story, click here. To read a review of it, click here.
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Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.