April’s Careless Navigator Night at the Tiki Lounge and Bar is a ripper…AND ON THE BIG SCREEN…The Australian Premier of Duda Leite’s TIKIMENTARY… A Tiki road trip that takes you to most Tiki locations in the USA and introduces you to the Tiki community.

ENTRY IS FREE.

Duda has sent over a limited amount of dvd’s that will be for sale on the night.
As an added bonus, Brad Parker has signed some of his new HAWAII TIKI TOWELS also for sale on the night.
Yes it’s a THURSDAY this month ….but what better way to kick off Easter than watching TIKIMENTARY, talkin’ Tiki and having a Cocktail or two.

A good friend of the bar and local Tiki connoisseur known as the “Careless Navigator” is organising a get-together for Melbournian Tikiphiles and Polynesiacs at none other than our humble bar in Richmond. If you’re one of the Clan, we’d like to extend the invitation on Careless Navigator’s behalf to join these good folk for a Mai Tai or two!

The details are -
Time: 7pm onwards
Date: Saturday May 8th 2010
Attire: Beachcomber casual (aloha-wear optional)

Here’s a handy Facebook Event link!

The Navigator is one of Australia’s movers and shakers when it comes to Tiki Culture and runs a fantabulous Tiki website with an Australian flavour at www.carelessnavigator.com. One need only spend a few moments on his site to see CN’s hardcore Tiki credentials – He’s in with Tiki luminaries such as Marcus Thorn, Martin Cate, Our mate Koop Kooper from the Cocktail Nation Podcast, Beachbum Berry and the good folk from Tiki Farm. The site is full of awesome Tiki stuff and well worth a bookmark or RSS subscription!

Hope to see heaps of fellow Tiki tragics turn up – we know you’re out there…

My day job has recently taken me out into the wilderness that is Ballarat (about 1.5 hours out of Melbourne for any visitors who might read this).  On one of my jaunts to check out the local lunching establishments I found myself drawn to a very colourful looking cafe, complete with a row of pink flamingos out the front.  Upon peering through the window I KNEW I had to stop in to investigate.

The Krooze in Cafe is on Main Road in Ballarat right near the University and IBM’s fancy new data centre.  It’s filled to the brim with absolutly wonderful 50s retro diner-style furniture, and the colours are garish (in a good way) with pinups and 50’s throwback posters in every direction.  There is a distinct Tiki flavour to the place too – a good sized bamboo shrine to the Tiki Gods grabs your attention as soon as you enter which is adorned with orignal exotica albums – Martin Denny and Les Baxter are on proud display.

The people here are salt-of-the-earth friendly kinda folk – while I was there  I spent some time chatting with one of the owners, Alan, about Tiki, hotrodding, burlesque and pin-ups (part of your complete breakfast of retro-cool pop culture!).  This place should definitely form a key part of any road trip for retro/tiki/hotrod types venturing out into the wilds of Victoria.  It’s a place where you can curl up and relax with a retro book or magazine under a beautiful SHAG print on some incredibly comfortable 50s couches and sip away on a coffee or hot chocolate with some nice, tasty and honest diner-style food.  This place is definitely worth a bit of a look-in.

Cheers,

Kev

Tiki Lounge and Bar will be engulfed by the smokey, risque and exotic burlesque-inspired cabaret stylings of Mz Josephine Fisher (http://www.josephinefisher.com/) as accompanied by the laidback lounge/exotica sounds of the Kahuna Daddies.  We’ve been lucky enough to host the Kahuna Daddies before at our humble bar, and Mz Josephine’s reputation preceeds her… just look at her website and try to tell me that this doesn’t sound compelling:

“Mz Josephine’s tendency to reveal more than absolutely necessary has made her a popular entertainer with her customers. Regaling them with saucy songs, anecdotes, dildo dancing, striptease, fabulist story telling and tales of love gone kinky. Mz Josephine was invented to explore the politics of pleasure and to encourage her audiences to be curious about their own.”

We’d love to see you there!  Show should kick off around 9:30pm.  No cover charge! (woo!)

Cheers,

Tiki Lounge and Bar

The Facebook group for the Shuffle can be found here.

As strong supporters of Zombie rights, the Tiki Bar will be offering Zombie related cultural entertainment all night (movies on the projector, maybe some Resident Evil or Left 4 Dead… depends on whether Kev is up for donating his Xbox for the evening…).   We’ll  offering drink specials on the night ($4 off Zombie cocktails) to those who attend as Zombies (more out of fear than anything else), so please feel free to dress up!

Here are some scenes from last year’s shuffle…

Just a quick note to let y’all know that the bar will be closed this weekend due to the ANZAC day public holiday along with licensing hoo-haa.

To make up for that, please accept these YouTube videos of the recent Mondo-a-Go-Go event held at the Tiki Bar as a gesture of thanks for your continued support.

Hi All!

Those crazies from Tiki Robot are holding another amazing 60’s themed Mondo-a-Go-Go evening at Tiki Lounge and Bar this Saturday night (April 4th)!  Be on hand for all the beats, boots and ‘bots (robots that is) starting from around 8pm!

Here’s the low-down:

Mondo-a-Go-Go is on again at the Tiki Lounge and Bar, 327 Swan Street Richmond 8pm $8 – Amazing visuals, Yuri the Robot, Bagadelic DJ, Cage Dancers and the best music to Go-Go by. Oh and fabulous cocktails in the amazing experience that is the Tiki Bar and Lounge.

You may have noticed that we’ve recently been referring to Tiki Lounge and Bar as “TikiLAB”.   At the time we though this was a cute contraction of the full name of the bar and that, we thought was that.   It has just come to our attention, however, that there was already a site at http://tikilab.com which is home to the Deborah Harry and Blondie Internet Service!  Now we have no desire here at Tiki Lounge and Bar to upset or confuse Blondie fans (we’re quite partial to spinning the Nouvelle Vague version of “Heart of Glass” every now and then down at Tiki), so we’d like to apologise to Louis (who’s a great guy who runs tikilab.com and contacted us to let us know we were inadvertantly stepping on some digital toes).

Now that’s all sorted and all is well for the Internet community.

Cheers,

Tiki Lounge and Bar

Tiki Lounge and Bar reopens following the Christmas/New Year break on Friday January 9th and we’re straight back into the swing of things!

The incredibly scary yet stylish and alluring girls from the Victorian Roller Derby League will be holding a Trivia night down at TikiLAB on January 9th.  Doors open at 6pm and there is a $6 Cover charge to participate.

Details in the flyer below or at http://www.myspace.com/melbournegrindgirls.

Hope to see you there!

Cheers,
TikiLAB Crew

It’s come to the end of another great year for Tiki Lounge and Bar.  We’d like to thank you all for your support during the year, and invite you all to join us for an awesome 2009!   We’ll be shutting down for Christmas with our last night tonight (Dec 20th) and reopening again on January 9th.   In the new year expect some great new stuff from us – we’ve got loads of events in the pipeworks with our all new menu (which we will announce properly soon) and some great bands as well as more of the quirky cabaret you’ve come to expect from TikiLAB (someone at the bar may have even rediscovered the joy of firetwirling, so be forewarned!).

Things to look forward to in the new year include our new menu, a Bettie Page Tribute night some time in the early part of the new year (Rest in Peace) our great new air-conditioner (tropical drinks without the tropical climate), an excellent bar food menu currently being developed in the laboratory, and our new bar service night on a Thursday when we will be putting on some great events for locals and loyal regulars.

Of course we’ve had some great highlights from this year in no particular order:

Inviting a bunch of Zombies from the Melbourne Zombie Shuffle back to the bar for Cocktails and Brains

Filling the venue with Mini-skirted, knee-high-booted GoGo dancers in Cages for Mondo-a-Go-Go

The drink that “The Boss” would drink – our very own Bruce Mangosteen cocktail.

Our hilarious tribute to particle physics – the Large Hadron Colada

The schlock horror stylings of Cinema Exotica

All the great bands who played at TikiLAB throughout the year (special mention to Mariachi Los Romanticos for their efforts on Day of the Dead – both with the music they played and the lovely ladies they danced the night away with after their show!)

And who can forget Purplo’s (the honey cocktail sausage) and our short lived attempt at Cocktails and Snags.

If you have any photos of any misspent nights at the bar, please feel free to email them to photos@tikiloungeandbar.com and we’ll put them up in our gallery.

Once again we’ve all had a ball with all our customers this year and we hope to be able to see some old (and new) faces in the new year!

Merry Christmas,

The Crew at TikiLAB.

Image stolen from picture-book.com