Victor Jules “Trader Vic” Bergeron was born in San Francisco in 1903, the son of a French Canadian waiter and grocery-store operator. Before he was six he had survived the great earthquake of 1906 and a ravaging bout of tuberculosis that claimed his left leg. While his father waited tables at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel and owned a grocery store on San Pablo Avenue in Oakland, Victor grew up loving the food business.
In 1934, with a nest egg of $700 and carpentry help from his wife’s brothers – plus his mother’s pot-bellied stove and oven – the ebullient Victor built a cozy pub across the street from the store and called it Hinky Dink’s. His pungent vocabulary and ribald air made him a popular host, as did his potent tropical cocktail concoctions and delicious Americanized adaptations of Polynesian food.
Soon one of the most popular watering holes in Northern California’s Bay Area, the place attracted sophisticated urbanites like writers Herb Caen and Lucius Beebe. By 1936, when Caen wittily wrote that the “best restaurant in San Francisco is in Oakland,” Vic had become “The Trader” and Hinky Dink’s had become “Trader Vic’s,” complete with a showpiece Chinese oven. Its South Pacific theme “intrigues everyone. You think of beaches and moonlight and pretty girls. It is complete escape,” Vic said at the time. Among Trader Vic’s more tantalizing legacies is the original Mai Tai, the bracingly refreshing rum cocktail he created at the restaurant in 1944 and introduced to the Hawaiian islands in the 1950s. Tahitian for “the very best,” Mai Tai became the slogan for his entire operation.
In creating his new cocktail, Trader Vic employed what was becoming the ever-present hallmark of all his food and beverage recipes: a light touch, meant to enhance but never disguise nor overpower the fine original taste of his main ingredients. All of his recipes reflect the man’s own personality: distinctive, lighthearted and memorable.
This was not without controversy. “There has been a lot of conversation over the beginning of the mai tai, and I want to get the record straight,” said Bergeron. “I originated the mai tai. Anybody who says I didn’t create this drink is a stinker.”
By 1946, the world had beaten a path to Vic’s door, prompting Lucius Beebe to write in an introduction to Trader Vic’s Book of Food and Drink published by Doubleday that year: “Trader Vic’s is … more than an Oakland institution. Its influence is as wide as the Pacific and as deep as a Myrtle Bank punch. Vic’s trading post is long on atmosphere, and it is possible for the ambitious patron with a talent for chaos to get into more trouble with obsolete anchors, coiled hausers of boa-constrictor dimensions, fish nets, stuffed sharks… Hawaiian ceremonial costumes, tribal drums, boathooks and small bore cannon than the waiters can drag him out of in a week.”
In 1955, Trader Vic’s opened in Beverly Hills followed by branches in Chicago in 1957, London in 1963, and numerous other foreign and domestic locales. Subsequent openings, along with the closings of several domestic branches in recent decades, resulted in a 25-year hiatus in domestic openings.
The chain’s next domestic opening, in 2004, was in the San Francisco space that formerly housed Jeremiah Tower’s famed Stars. That more visible real estate in the city replaced the former Cosmo Alley site, whose long history included first lady Nancy Reagan’s 1983 hosting of Queen Elizabeth II at her first luncheon in an American restaurant. By the end of 2004, 22 Trader Vic’s had opened worldwide.
The Trader eventually opened 25 Polynesian-style restaurants around the world. Trader Vic’s Restaurant Group now includes an expanding collection of upscale, company-owned and franchised restaurants steeped in island-style service and atmosphere, stretching from the United States to Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Incorporating different cultures from around the world, Trader Vic’s brand of hospitality has garnered international acclaim for introducing unique foods, careful preparations and welcoming service, as well as for inventing exotic, crowd-pleasing drinks such as the world-famous Mai Tai.
His son, Lynn Bergeron, eventually took over the restaurant operation and remains Chairman Emeritus of Trader Vic’s Restaurant Company. The Trader’s eldest daughter, Jeanne B. Hittell, is retired, having served for many years on the Board of Directors and as Secretary/Treasurer of the Trader’s companies. Daughter Yvonne E. Seely, is also retired after decades of dedication to charity work on behalf of Trader Vic’s.
Trader Vic’s both tapped into the zeitgeist and helped shape it. South Pacific culture had a small but growing hold on the American pop imagination in the 1930s, as the middle class began to embrace a bowdlerized version of an old avant-garde favorite. Primitive art from the South Seas had fascinated the cultural elite since at least the paintings by Paul Gauguin in the late nineteenth century, and through a sort of obscure cultural alchemy, these primitive forms became popularized and marketed in the form of the tiki statue—an oversized carved wooden figure of a human form, often grotesquely exaggerated.