Trader Vic's

The story

Step into the lobby of the Hilton Atlanta, pass the glass elevators and conference crowds, and take the lift down to the windowless basement. You are dropping straight into April 1976. When Victor 'Trader Vic' Bergeron helped design this subterranean outpost, burying it on the lowest level wasn't a design compromise—it was the whole ploy. Bergeron intentionally sank his Polynesian pop sanctuaries underground so that once you crossed the threshold, there were no windows, no daylight, and no earthly clue what city you were in.

While 24 of the chain's 26 U.S. locations eventually closed or were stripped by corporate redesigns, Atlanta's location remained frozen in time. It stands as the last U.S. location that Bergeron personally touched before his death in 1984, and the last American branch still anchored inside a Hilton. Around you, giant tikis carved by legendary sculptor Barney West guard the entrances, while bamboo-lined walls are hung with blowfish lamps, taxidermied sea turtles, and outrigger canoe oars in the exact spots installers placed them nearly 50 years ago.

Then there is the smell that hits you before you even sit down: subtle, smoky hardwood drifting from the glass-walled kitchen. The space revolves around massive, brick Chinese wood-fired ovens that roast meats using indirect heat. Order a Cosmo Tidbits pupu platter and a Mai Tai—the rum-and-lime invention Bergeron concocted back in 1944—and you can comfortably pretend for two hours that downtown Atlanta doesn't exist outside.