Need a vacation? It’s always island time at Tacoma’s hidden tiki bar

The ‘60s-era building on Sixth Ave, home since 2014 to a Hawaiian restaurant called Da Tiki Hut, stands out for its distinct architectural traits, uncharacteristic of the area. It looks like stucco, but it’s not, and it looks like an office, because part of it is. A short tower announces the analog time, and it seems to be fairly accurate. Through the middle doorway, the thatched-roof ordering counter with a window into the kitchen doesn’t really intimate a more involved tropical escape, but past a sort-of secret door, it’s always island time — if you know where to find it.

Upon entering Da Tiki Hut, you might feel compelled to simply order your plate lunch and haul it to-go, not an unusual premise for the Hawaiian staple. Where would you even sit? A clear plastic pastry case further cements the call to grab and go. Behold the squares of pineapple cake sopping with rum, ube mochi cake and macadamia nut cookies! You make a spur-of-the-moment decision to add dessert for later. Then, amid your internal tussle over whether you need that musubi, out of the corner of your eye, you catch the wooden wall to your left move. People emerge from this mysterious abyss and you say: “Never mind, I want to go there.”

The host guides you into the darkness, where an atrium holds green foliage (faux, but the effect is genuine) and a treasure chest of gems and pearls, and seats you and your party in a wooden booth surrounded by adventure maps, or photos of waterfalls and sunsets, mermaid statues or beach trinkets. Bright spotlights shine only on the tables, scattered with paper plates mounded with white rice, tender brown gravy and a fried egg, the yolk spilling into creamy elbows accented by shaved carrot. The proper approach to that loco moco, according to co-owner Steve Lerma: “You have to get the rice, the gravy, the egg, the mac all in one bite.”

The savviest of guests are also sipping out of tiki mugs and tall hurricane glasses because around another corner is one of the region’s best cocktail bars.

On a recent Thursday afternoon around 5 p.m., Cheryl and Rob Nay perched at two of just a few bar stools with mai tais in hand, the rocks glass chilled to the rim from pebble ice with a sprig of mint next to the straw. They don’t always visit bartender Rob Canavan at the same time or on the same day, and sometimes they eat and sometimes they don’t, but for the months of the year when they don’t live on Maui, they pay respects to Da Tiki Hut once a week.

Rob’s mai tai, they said, “is the best we’ve ever had.”

Da Tiki Hut’s new era

The tailwinds did not always blow so at Da Tiki Hut.

“I wish I had this foresight at the beginning,” said Steve from the chicken-themed booth in July. “I had no vision.”

In reality, he admitted, he was just trying to navigate pandemic-era restrictions in the breezy, cafeteria-style dining room of the restaurant he inadvertently opened with his wife Tamara 12 years ago. He replaced the rattan chairs and big tables with distinct, handmade booths. He hoped that adding plexiglass partitions would alleviate the six-foot rule, but the health department declined those proposed solutions here and elsewhere.

“Steve said, ‘Fine! I’m gonna keep building these huts,’” recalled Tamara.

They pictured rattan roofs but couldn’t track down a source amid supply-chain chaos, so they pivoted. Tamara mused that “every booth should have a theme,” said Steve. They picked up wood from a local mill for new tables and custom benches and drove to Kent for bamboo poles. The couple compromised on her disdain for clutter and his desire to “put a bunch of stuff on the walls.”

With six kids of their own, all now grown, they worried the transformation into tiki-bar territory made the space unwelcoming to families, but families keep coming. When the treasure chest disappeared for some recent maintenance, Tamara told the curious youth, “The pirates took it!”

The restaurant’s new look has remained a kind of insider secret, the definition of a hidden gem. Not so for adventurous barhoppers and tiki fiends, who know that Tacoma — also home to Devil’s Reef — is a veritable destination for the drinks that Canavan describes as “the truly built cocktails.”

From truck to tiki bar

At first Da Tiki Hut was just a side hustle to Steve’s primary career in construction, interspersed with many hours on the line in restaurant kitchens from Alaska to California.

“He was a mean cook,” recalled Tamara. “Happy, but mean. And very fast.”

Steve had acquired a tuk-tuk, a petite rickshaw-style truck, with plans to park on a dirt patch at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. But he needed a commissary kitchen. He’s not from Hawaii, he sheepishly admitted, nor has he spent an inordinate amount of time on the islands, but he and Tamara — whose siblings brought them together in Alaska almost 50 years ago — have some family there. Steve grew up in California, in a Mexican-American family, but he felt the area had enough in the way of tacos and menudo even in the early 2010s. Da Tiki Hut was largely born of just a few family recipes for tiki chicken and mac salad.

They leased the unusual structure in Central Tacoma, previously a Taco Time and before that a Chinese restaurant, and set up an ordering counter and some tables. The early days were slow and sometimes painful, said Steve.

“We were dying. Then people started showing up. They’d say, ‘We read an article.’ It just started building from there,” he said.

In 2018, the restaurant closed for several months after a kitchen fire. Steve continued to run the truck, often by himself and sometimes with family help, until just last year.

I had my own confession for the Lermas: I have only seen pictures of the original layout, and I thought you just went there for plate lunches and loco mocos. But a few years ago, I journeyed to the other side of the moving wall.

Steve, who I had never met at the time, stopped at our table and offered us a sample of each of the house meats: chicken in the style of tiki, katsu and mochiko, as well as Kalua pork smoked and slow-roasted.

“All first-timers get a sample of meats,” he told me this summer, because they tend to ask, “What’s the difference?” His verbal response — “it’s the flavor!” — doesn’t work as well as your own palate.

The paper plates might feel incongruous to the intricate surrounds (and proper glassware for the drinks), but it matches the theme, I thought.

“That’s our only defense!” laughed Steve. The real reason is the kitchen doesn’t have room for a dishwasher — they use a three-compartment sink for cooking equipment. When they refashioned the interior, he wanted to switch to an exclusive dine-in menu, but regulars implored him to stay the course.

“It’s actually made here. It’s not bubble-wrapped and squeezed out of a bag,” said Steve, who views freshness and consistency as food’s greatest power. Just say yes to your musubi inclinations: They sit not in a hot-holding case but are made by hand, to order, in a fascinating feat of ingenuity with a custom-made shaper, layered with the classic Spam or another house protein. Chef Abraham Zalapa said he forms around 500 every week.

What really carries the experience overboard are the drinks, expanded since Canavan, who for more than two decades worked for the late Pomodoro, took over the bar program almost four years ago. I didn’t expect to imbibe a perfect mai tai mixed with rhum agricole, a grassy version of the cane spirit distilled in Martinique, or a painkiller for the ages, or a banana-yellow Three Dots and a Dash with three maraschino cherries on top.

Yet another reason to take that vacation.

Da Tiki Hut

• 4427 6th Ave., Tacoma, 253-625-7690, datikihut.com
• Tuesday-Wednesday 3-9 p.m., Thursday-Saturday 11 a.m.-9 p.m.
• Details: Hawaiian plates in a hidden tiki cocktail bar, family-friendly; most dishes $14.50-$22.75, made-to-order musubis $4.50-$5, drinks $12-$15