If there were a Mount Rushmore of long-gone restaurants of Hollywood’s golden age, Trader Vic’s would undoubtedly be on it, with Chasen’s, Ciro’s, The Brown Derby, and Cocoanut Grove. The restaurant not only played a major role in shaping tiki culture at large — Trader Vic, according to lore, invented the mai tai and crab rangoon — it was also an essential part of the city’s food landscape. Its LA location in the Beverly Hilton, a fixture since 1955, closed in 2007. (A poolside lounge limped along until 2017, but it wasn’t the same.) 

Trader Vic’s is returning to LA, with a just-announced 2025 reopening in West Hollywood. We’ve been working on this for a few months and trying to figure out the right time to talk about it and the right way to do it,” Trader Vic’s CEO Rhett Rosen told LA Weekly. 

Some people who don’t know what they do assume [Chain] is like chain restaurant, just chain food and chain things,” he added. But I think they create experiences. It’s just like what we do. It goes beyond what you’re eating or drinking. It’s a full experiential event.”

Courtesy Chain

To launch the news, the seminal restaurant is collaborating with Chain on a cocktail event, the first time that Trader Vic’s original mai tai will be available in the city in years. 

This is our first only cocktail experience,” Chain Chief Creative Officer Nicholas Kraft told LA Weekly. When you come, you get a little treasure map that has all the drinks. We want folks to be able to sort of go at their own pace. It’s a little choose your adventure.” 

The experience offers five cocktails and light bar snacks, with classic Trader Vic’s recipes and Chain’s takes on tiki in collaboration with Echo Park cocktail bar Thunderbolt. During the tasting, guests get an original Trader Vic’s mai tai and an individual scorpion bowl, and Chain’s milk punch scorpion bowl and frozen mai tai slushie with a Malibu Rum sidecar. The fifth cocktail of the night is a canned original, called the Malibu Dreamhouse. It’s served inside Thunderbolt’s Tiki Mirage, a secret tiki bar in the back of a box truck, which is at Chain House for the event. (Tiki Mirage’s slogan: Paradise is where you least expect it.”) 

This past weekend sold out so quickly that Chain is bringing the pop-up back for a second weekend, with seatings on Dec. 13 and Dec. 14. 

Courtesy Julie Tremaine

Chain started in 2022 as a pop-up restaurant concept founded by a group of investors including Kraft, actor B.J. Novak, Michelin-starred chef Tim Hollingsworth, producer Jack Davis and talent manager Byron Ashley. At first, it started with pop-up events serving upscaled versions of nostalgic chain foods like Taco Bell-inspired wagyu beef crunch wraps and riffs on Pizza Hut personal pan pizzas that included ingredients like truffle ricotta. Now, there’s a permanent Chain House in Virgil Village that houses events (except for the enormous ChainFest in DTLA and New York), including the Trader Vic’s cocktail experience. 

Chain is all about homage and celebration and trying to put our own spin on these things that people know and love,” Kraft said. It’s shared nostalgia, these things that people discover generation after generation.” 

Trader Vic’s has 25 locations around the globe, so it’s technically a chain, but the collaboration with Chain feels less like a foray into shared culinary nostalgia, and much more like a journey into a bygone era of Los Angeles. Trader Vic’s is an experience,” Kraft said. Vic was such a pioneer of the idea of the experience.” 

Courtesy Trader Vic’s

The restaurant, when it opens next year, will also have a full food menu. He was at the forefront of the food scene for a long time,” Rosen said. It was such a place for celebrations that the food was a big part of the history of the city.” 

For this event, the fast food decorations of Chain House — think Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders statues, 1980s arcade games like Tron and Paperboy — get a tiki overlay. Inside the space, there are also Trader Vic’s artifacts, including hand-blown glass floats from Japan and jade tiles from Thailand, some of which came from the Beverly Hilton. 

When I visited on Saturday night, when I sipped the original Trader Vic’s scorpion bowl, I found myself imagining how exciting that drink must have been to people in the new” location in 1955 and how exciting it would be to see it revived next year.  

The West Hollywood building where Trader Vic’s will reopen has been vacant for decades. It’s the first address in West Hollywood when you cross over from Beverly Hills,” Rosen said. You can see the old Beverly Hilton from the rooftop. You’re kind of looking from the past into the present.”