Tiki Wanderlust

I originally found my way into the Tiki community through my love of Disney. As a Disney Parks fan and Disney travel agent, I always find myself drawn to Adventureland and WDW’s Polynesian Resort (I stayed there as a child, and think that may have created a subconscious connection to Polynesian culture and art. Several of my friends in the Disney community are also tiki aficionados and their shared social media posts pulled me into some of the different communities within.

Once I started diving in, I discovered a site called Critiki, where you could find tiki bars of past and present, along with reviews, ratings, and information. I would reference this site when I’d try to plan a trip to see if I would be passing near a tiki bar I could visit in my travels. Unfortunately, Critiki recently shut down their page, so my reference point was gone. I now mostly just rely on Google searches and the likes.

I recently took a road trip on Route 66 to Disneyland with my son who is a huge Cars fan, and while it mostly consisted of themed stops from the Cars films, I roped in a few “tiki” spots as well, (a couple of visits to Trader Sam’s, as well as an overnight at Caliente Tropics in Palm Springs, with a visit to the Reef, and a stop at Damon’s Steakhouse in Glendale, on the way back home).

After returning, I started eyeballing an adults only return trip, and built out an itinerary that included stops at as many as 19 tiki bars/restaurants, and figured others could probably use a site that puts out some of the information needed to plan such an expedition.

Tiki Wanderlust was created to help guide our visitors to all the tiki and tiki adjacent bars and restaurants, as well as mid-century modern/vintage hotels/motels along the way on their travels. I’ll try to build out pages for each of the locations, with as much pertinent information as I can. If there are any details that I seem to be leaving out, let me know, and I’ll try to see if I can get them added in. If you’ve been by one of the stops, please take the time to leave a comment with your rating and review to let other travelers know what to expect. At this time, I plan to limit Tiki Wanderlust to open establishments (rather than as a historical record), so if you find an entry that you think is no longer operating, please let me know, so I can remove them from the listings. If you’d like to support the project, please visit our Patreon. I have lots of ideas I’ll be working on to improve our Patron’s experiences in the community, from discounts to products, heck, maybe even group travel, so keep an eye out and join the community.