Imagine walking into a Houston hotel, ordering a drink involving several varieties of rum, eating something vaguely Polynesian and spending the evening surrounded by carved tikis and bamboo. No airport. No passport. No 14-hour flight. Just Main and Holcombe. Well, back in the day you could do that at Trader Vic’s—right there in the glorious Shamrock Hotel. 

American tiki culture began in the 1930s, when Donn Beach opened Hollywood’s Don the Beachcomber, combining elaborate rum cocktails with bamboo, tropical plants and a romanticized fantasy of the South Pacific; Trader Vic’s soon helped popularize the formula. Tiki truly exploded after World War II, fueled by returning Pacific servicemen, postwar prosperity, the Kon-Tiki craze, Hollywood’s South Pacific, growing tourism to Hawaii and Hawaii’s 1959 statehood. By the 1950s and ’60s, tiki had spread far beyond bars into restaurants, motels, backyard luaus, music, clothing and home décor. It offered normal, middle-class Americans an elaborate, if highly fictionalized and culturally appropriated, tropical escape from everyday suburban life.

Trader Vic’s began in Oakland, California, in 1934, as Victor “Trader Vic” Bergeron’s modest bar, Hinky Dink’s, before evolving into an elaborate Polynesian-themed restaurant famous for exotic food, theatrical décor and rum cocktails—including the Mai Tai, which Bergeron claimed to have invented in 1944. By the 1950s and ’60s, partnerships with Hilton and other major hotels helped turn Trader Vic’s into an international phenomenon, eventually reaching about 25 locations worldwide and becoming a symbol of glamorous mid-century tiki culture. Which brings us to this restaurant. 

Trader Vic’s brought America’s great mid-century tiki fantasy to the Shamrock Hilton beginning in the 1960s. The Shamrock opened in 1949 as oilman Glenn McCarthy’s $21 million monument to Texas ambition. The 18-story hotel had 1,100 rooms, interiors decorated in 63 shades of green and a grand opening attended by thousands, including Hollywood stars. The swimming pool was famous for being so big that it could accommodate water skiing, which it often did. 

That means, for a while, Houston had Peak Tiki operating inside Peak Oil Boom. Beautiful. This original black Trader Vic’s matchbook comes from that Shamrock Hotel location. You ordered another Mai Tai. Somebody told an increasingly unbelievable oilfield story, probably involving what would today be an egregious HSE violation. Eventually the check arrived and this little book went into a jacket pocket—to be smoked on the drive home in someone’s boat-sized Cadillac Fleetwood.

As American tastes changed, however, tiki increasingly came to seem dated, and locations began disappearing rapidly during the 1980s and ’90s. Trader Vic’s never vanished entirely: the company survives today, particularly overseas, while its original Emeryville flagship and a handful of other restaurants preserve what remains of one of America’s most influential themed-restaurant empires. But the Shamrock is gone. Houston’s Trader Vic’s is gone. And Tiki culture is down to its last bit of rum punch. 

But, somehow, this matchbook made it! The item is in good condition, with some noticeable white wear along the edges of the black book—expected after around a half a century rattling around the world. The front cover features Trader Vic’s distinctive logo with its stylized red, black and white illustration of a Polynesian tribal mask and shield with crossed oar and spear. 

The back features a Polynesian-influenced tribal pattern with “The Shamrock Hilton Houston, Texas” and the intersection/phone number. There is some minor rubbing on the strike surface. The inside cover showcases the following quote: 

Where those merry souls
who make drinking a pleasure;
Who achieve contentedness
long before capacity;
And who, whenever they drink,
prove able to carry it, enjoy it;
And remain gentlemen. 

–Trader Vic 

The item is stamped “Universal Match Los Angeles” at the bottom. 

Details

• Original Trader Vic’s matchbook from the Shamrock Hotel/Hilton in Houston

• All matches present 

• Black cover with age-related wear

• Approximate era: late 1960s–early 1970s

• Original Trader Vic’s branding

• Manufactured by Universal Match Los Angeles 

• Mai Tai, tiny umbrella and morning-after regrets not included

The Shamrock was demolished in 1987. Trader Vic’s vanished with another era of Houston nightlife. But you can still hold this little black matchbook and imagine the bamboo, the cocktails and the possibility that somebody at the next table was making a million-dollar oil lease deal while drinking something fruity sporting a tiny bamboo umbrella.