HOLLYWOOD — The carved tiki that guards the door has watched over three generations of one family and six years of dust, and as of last week it is back to watching over customers.
The Lagoon Room, a tiki lounge that opened on a side street off Hollywood Boulevard in 1962 and closed in 2020, reopened this month under Elias Moana, 35, the grandson of the bartender who built it. Moana grew up in the place, did his homework in a corner booth, and inherited it in a will along with a lease his relatives urged him to sell. He kept it instead, spent two years and most of his savings restoring the room, and reopened with a menu his grandfather would recognize and a few decisions his grandfather would have argued about.
“He carved half these tikis himself in the garage. I wasn’t going to strip that out and put in exposed brick and Edison bulbs like every other bar,” Moana said, standing under a ceiling of fishing floats and rattan he had cleaned by hand. “But I did throw out the fog machine, and I’d throw it out again. The room is supposed to feel like a dream, not a haunted house.”
The restoration was less renovation than rescue. The bamboo had dried and split, the vinyl booths had cracked, and a slow roof leak had warped a mural of a lagoon that Moana’s grandfather commissioned from a scenic painter who worked the studios by day. Moana tracked down a retired set decorator to repair the mural rather than repaint it, a choice that cost more and took longer and that he defends without hesitation. The rum list, by contrast, he expanded well past what his grandfather stocked, on the theory that the drinks could evolve even if the room could not.
Longtime patrons have found their way back, some of them startled the place exists again at all. A retired librarian named Frances Adeyemi, 78, who came to the Lagoon Room on dates in the 1960s, returned opening week and sat at the same end of the bar. “I told the young man his grandfather used to make my husband a drink that was mostly a warning,” she said. “He made me one just like it. I only had the one.”
The economics are less romantic than the room. Moana is candid that a themed cocktail bar is an expensive thing to run, that the buildout ran over budget, and that he is betting a family inheritance on the idea that people will pay for a room made with care. He has kept prices lower than the neighborhood’s newer lounges, a decision his accountant questions and he does not.
He works most nights behind the bar himself, in an aloha shirt that was his grandfather’s, learning the drinks from a stained recipe book he found in a drawer. On the reopening’s closing night, after the last customer left, Moana said he poured one more of the old man’s drinks, set it on the bar, and did not drink it.