ChicagoMost tiki bars are a decision. Someone sources the rum, commissions the carved masts, picks a font for the menu, and opens a place built, top to bottom, to feel like an escape. Hala Kahiki wasn't a decision. It was a repair job that got out of hand.
In 1952, Rose and Stanley Sacharski left the funeral home business and opened a plain neighborhood tavern on Chicago's West Side, calling it the Lucky Start. Then a wall started falling apart. Instead of drywall and paint, they covered the damage with tropical matting and bamboo — a patch job, nothing more. The tiki theme it created took on a life of its own, and the Lucky Start stopped being a plain tavern.
Three Generations, One Room
The whole operation moved to River Grove in 1964, and it's been there ever since. Grandson Jim Oppedisano, the third generation of the family, runs it today — over 100 tropical drinks on the menu, a reservable outdoor patio, and a room that never got the memo that tiki bars are supposed to be a downtown-only, reservation-required event. This is a suburb. There's a parking lot. It's still one of the most transporting rooms in the Chicago area.
That's the whole appeal of a Find like this one: nobody built Hala Kahiki to be Instagrammable. It became that way by accident, seventy-some years ago, and then three generations of one family kept it running instead of cashing out or modernizing it into something else. The bamboo is original in spirit even where it isn't original in fact.
The move: Closed Sundays, so don't show up expecting it. Book the patio if you're coming with a group — it's reservable, and this isn't a bar built for waiting around by the door.
This is the first entry in Finds — the spots that don't announce themselves, the ones you have to already know about or stumble into. Know a Chicago-area place that belongs on the next one?
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