The Tonga Restaurant & Hurricane Bar
Fairmont Hotel
950 Mason Street
Tel: (415) 772-5278
The gilded head of a three-faced goddess. Electric tiki torches. Thatched roofs over the tables. Acres of plastic orchids hanging along the walls. And every thirty minutes, an in-door rainstorm, complete with thunder and a cooling breeze.
Welcome to the Tonga Room, in all its faded glory.
The best time to visit is happy hour, 5-7pm weekdays, when the drinks are a little cheaper. Who can resist the citrusy charms of the Tonga Tart, the somber overtones of the Bora Bora Horror, or the glamour of the Blue Hawaii, made famous (so the menu in-forms) by Elvis himself? Each of them comes topped by big chunk of pineapple, a mara-schino cherry, and an obligatory paper umbrella. For $6 a person you can partake of the buffet, which features potstickers, spring rolls, Buffalo wings, and ribs. I think I saw a cucumber slice in there somewhere, but that was about it for vegetables.
But it's the rainstorm that really takes the cake. The rain falls in vertical streams from the ceiling onto a lagoon in the middle of the room, so you need not fear getting wet. It's arti-ficial as hell, from the piped-in thunderstorm soundtrack to the too-regularly-spaced sheets of water falling straight from pipes in the ceiling into the pool below. But it's defi-nitely the high point of a Tonga evening.
There's live music after 8pm most evenings, with a band playing from a stage that floats out into the middle of the lagoon during the sets, then floats back to shore during breaks.
You can even eat dinner here, though I have never dared to. For me, the Tonga Room has always been a little bit of tacky tiki romance tucked away in the opulence of Nob Hill. I love taking out-of-town friends here for drinks. Somehow, there's just something so in-congruously amusing and San Franciscan about sitting in deep wicker chairs, sipping out-rageously colored tropical cocktails, listening to the rumbling of a Pacific island thunder-storm, while tucked away deep in the bowels of a fusty old luxury hotel.
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