Tonga Room

You're about to walk into a tiki bar built around a seventy-five-foot indoor lagoon that used to be the Fairmont Hotel's swimming pool. And every thirty minutes, it rains inside. This is the Tonga Room, and it might be the most gloriously absurd bar in America.

The Fairmont built its swimming pool in nineteen twenty-nine, a grand affair befitting one of the city's finest hotels. But by the nineteen forties, the pool wasn't pulling its weight, and someone had the inspired idea to convert the basement natatorium into a Polynesian-themed restaurant and bar. They brought in an MGM set designer — someone who literally built movie fantasy worlds for a living — to transform the space.

The pool became a lagoon. They built a floating barge in the middle of it and put a band on the barge. The band plays on the water while you eat and drink. And then there's the rain. The ceiling is rigged with a system that produces an indoor tropical rainstorm every thirty minutes, complete with thunder and lightning effects. Water pours down around the lagoon while the band keeps playing. It's dinner theater by way of a theme park by way of a fever dream.

Anthony Bourdain called the Tonga Room the "greatest place in the history of the world." That might be hyperbole, but when you're sitting in a Nob Hill hotel basement watching rain fall on a floating band while sipping a drink served in a ceramic volcano, hyperbole feels appropriate.

The tiki bar format itself is a mid-century American invention — a fantasy of the South Pacific filtered through Hollywood — and the Tonga Room is one of the last great survivors of the era. Most tiki bars were demolished or converted decades ago. This one endures, still raining, still floating, still completely out of its mind.