The bare-bones, narrow space on Lowest Greenville Avenue that formerly housed Dallas Beer Kitchen and Rocko’s Lounge has recently been transformed into a tropical staycation destination called Swizzle, an all-out tiki lounge serving Polynesian-inspired fare with Hawaiian and Filipino samplings and options for vegans, too.
After five years of popping up at clubs and bars like Green Door Public House, the Nines and Parker Barrow’s, service industry veterans Marty and Jen Reyes opened the doors to their dreamy restaurant hideaway on Nov. 4.
Aside from the Pilikia tiki bar that was shut down by the city of Dallas two years ago for zoning violations, Dallas hasn’t had a venue devoted to tiki culture since the closure of Trader Vic’s in 2010.
Jen arrived in Dallas soon after the Trader Vic’s closure to continue a relationship with Marty, whom she had haphazardly met when she was visiting from California on business related to her pinup modeling career.
Once she moved to Dallas, Jen waited for a Trader Vic’s replacement, until 2015 when she and Marty decided to take up the tiki torch themselves. After they started Swizzle Luau Lounge with pop-ups around town, the Reyeses soon realized they weren’t the only ones in Dallas who were “tiki-starved,” as Jen calls it.
Jen’s fascination with tiki art and Hawaiian culture began with her childhood in the Bay Area, where she regularly attended luaus with her mother, who was a professional hula dancer. She made frequent visits to Disneyland’s Enchanted Tiki Room, her favorite place in the park, and she started ordering mugs from Tiki Farm in high school, a result of her very first keyword search on the internet — “tiki.” Jen’s grandfather, Johnie Adviento, was a mechanic who moved from the Philippines to Oahu in 1929, and he aided American troops during the attack on Pearl Harbor, she says. Her regard for island culture isn’t a mere passing fancy.
Whereas Jen’s hook into tiki is the art, Marty’s primary interest is the food. Besides the lumpia recipe that comes from Jen’s mother, Marty, a 30-year Dallas service industry professional, developed much of Swizzle’s initial COVID-era menu.
The menu will expand in the future to include items such as a proper pu pu platter, but for now there’s edamame dip with taro chips, sweet Spam stir-fry, and smoky kalua pork sliders on King’s Hawaiian rolls. Also on the main plates menu are a beef and pork loco moco and a tofu loco moco. The rice, hamburger, fried egg and gravy dish was purportedly created in 1949 at the Lincoln Grill in Hilo, Hawaii, for teenage boys requesting a filling yet inexpensive meal.
Also classically Hawaiian and appetite-sating is the dark-meat shoyu chicken with better-than-average macaroni salad. It’s perfect for balancing out drinks like the Q.B. Cooler, a tribute to its creator and the founding father of tiki culture, Donn Beach, born near Waco, Texas, as Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt. His blend of rums and fruit juices is said to be the original mai tai recipe, but an out-of-court settlement gave Victor Bergeron (aka Trader Vic) the naming rights. In keeping with the history of the drink and the Reyeses’ desire to be a friendly neighborhood addition, there’s a two-drink limit on the Q.B. Cooler, the same rule Beach instituted at his Don the Beachcomber restaurants.
The 19 drinks on the cocktail menu at Swizzle have a strength rating denoted by a number of swizzle sticks, which were originally small branches from the West Indian Quararibea turbinata tree used for stirring rum. A one-swizzle drink says, “Welcome aboard!” A three-swizzle drink is: “Rough seas ahead. Do not text your ex.” And a four-swizzle drink means you need to have your Lyft app ready.
“Our drinks are strong,” Marty says, “so we wanted to balance it out with good food.”
For kids, who are allowed, nondrinkers, or for those gearing up for a Dry January, fruity and tart mocktails are options to keep everyone feeling included.
Dessert for now is frozen Dole Whip, which originated in Disneyland’s tiki bar. Whether opting for a pineapple juice or rum float, it’s an irresistible treat.
Out of concern for their staff and family, the Reyeses are taking COVID-19 precautions seriously. Reservations are required after 6 p.m., and Swizzle is one of the few restaurants in Dallas doing temperature checks at the door, taken with a wrist thermometer. Guests are asked to wear cloth or surgical face masks, not bandannas. Disposable surgical face masks are available at the host stand for those who need one.
Jen says she and Marty have had doubts about opening a restaurant in the middle of a pandemic, but on the restaurant’s first day, a guest entered and immediately exclaimed, “This is exactly what we needed!” The couple holds firm to the belief that there is a bigger purpose to their restaurant at this time because, after all, “escapism is what tiki is all about,” Jen says.
It’s true that tiki was created as a way to find oasis during troubled times. When Donn Beach and Trader Vic started the movement in California, it was during the Great Depression. Tiki later experienced a resurgence during the financial crisis of 2008, when tiki bars sprouted up throughout the country, according to a recent New York Times article, “Reclaiming the Tiki Bar.”
The article also brings up tiki’s problematic, exploitative past, citing current beverage industry professionals who are “shining a light on the genre’s history of racial inequity and cultural appropriation, which has long been ignored because it clashes with the carefree aesthetic.” And in a 2019 Los Angeles Times article “Tiki bars are built on cultural appropriation and colonial nostalgia. Where’s the reckoning?,” John Birdsall writes that tiki “certainly hasn’t included voices of Pacific Islanders.”
Jen says she has been paying careful attention to the conversation that continued this summer after an article in the online magazine, Punch. She has put careful consideration into Swizzle’s decor as a result of it. Ships and shipwreck adornments that are suggestive of colonialism were avoided to focus on an artist-driven interior. The hanging lamps made from inverted papasan chairs were created by Dallas tiki lamp maker Jesse Magers. Art by editorial cartoonist William “Bubba” Flint hangs from bamboo-covered walls in the entryway. Jen’s swizzle stick collection that she started at age 8 is also on display.
In addition, the Reyeses give back to cultures represented in tiki. Money earned from pop-ups in the past has been donated to nonprofits working to protect women in Papua New Guinea, hurricane victims of Puerto Rico, and Hawaiians displaced by the Big Island’s last volcano eruption. Part of Swizzle’s long-term plan is to continue that nonprofit support and to provide educational classes on island anthropology and the history of rum. “We plan to tell the good story and the bad story,” Jen says.
When the annual Dallas Tiki Week returns in late 2021 or 2022, the Reyeses plan to include all the current voices in tiki — both those who question it as well as those who want to preserve it, whether it be from a love of retro kitsch decor, island art, rum, Disney, Oceanian culture, or simply escapism.
“Dallas has become a national culinary and libation center,” Jen says. “What we’re doing is harnessing that creativity from the service industry. We want to provide an escape to a tropical world, where our guests can be transported without having to go anywhere.”
