Tiki tour: No Bones Beach Club

Turn back the clock a couple of months and imagine we're still on vacation. We've completed our road trip along the Oregon coast and are spending the last two days in Portland. Got it? Great! Following out early excursion to the Tiki Putt, we planned to take the whole family for lunch at the legendary Alibi. The food there was reputed to be good, and since it's a vintage tiki location, I expected it to be open to all ages for lunch. All the classic tiki venues offered all-ages dining, right? At the very least, I figured they'd allow under 21 patrons until 6 p.m. or so, as many bars that offer food service in Texas do. Certainly, The Alibi's website gave no hint they were "21 and older" 24/7, with no exceptions. Alas, once we got there, we discovered that to be the case. Which really came as a disappointment, as The Wife and I wanted to share some cool vintage tiki experience with our kids. Our lunch plans scuppered, we went with Plan B: Lunch at the No Bones Beach Club.

Now, the No Bones Beach Club isn't exactly tiki, per se. It's pseudo-tiki. I learned about it from Humuhumu's writeup on Critiki. It's not a bar, but rather a restaurant with a beachy, tiki theme that has a limited menu of tropical cocktails. And get this--it's a vegan restaurant. I wanted to go here, in part, because my eldest daughter's been a vegetarian for more than a decade and I thought she'd appreciate it. The restaurant reviews were generally positive, and I seek out new experiences, so we gave it a try.

I ordered jackfruit flautas. I like jackfruit, and am planning on making an infused rum with which to invent new cocktails for my home bar, but I'd never had green, unripe jackfruit, which is reputed to have a neutral flavor and tears apart with a consistency not unlike shredded pork. In many parts of the tropics it's used as a meat substitute. I was skeptical, but wow, these flautas won me over. The taste simply exploded in my mouth. I'm not sure what spices they used, but it was a citrus-infused tomatillo and cilantro party in my mouth. The flavors were bright and crisp. The plate was filling, but it tasted so good I would've happily eaten another plate full, even if it made me miserable. Seriously, it was that good.

The Wife ordered beer-battered avocado tacos. She reports they were quite good as well. She didn't share any with me, so I can't report first-hand. They looked like better-quality fish tacos, and smelled fantastic.

My son refused to eat any of the "weird stuff" on the menu, but the girls got some Northwest nachos. They gobbled them up, but there were a few chips left for me to sample. Instead of cheese, they used a cashew sauce with smoked poblano. Texturally, it wasn't queso, obviously, but it had a spicy, savory flavor that was not inappropriate. Add to that black bean and corn salsa, charred tomato salsa, scallions and cilantro crema, and you've got a winning combination. I cannot stress this enough--the food is very, very good and the textures are such that unless you start off with the knowledge this was a vegan restaurant, you'd never notice from the actual dishes. Highly recommended.

Alas, the same cannot be said of their drinks. The Wife ordered a Mai Tai, having decided that would be her barometer of a bar's quality on this trip. The No Bones Mai Tai is not a real Mai Tai by historical standards--their menu lists it as a blend of light and dark rums, Saliza amaretto (no orgeat, but at least they made a gesture with the almond-flavored liqueur, right?), orange juice (what?), pineapple (no!) and fresh lime. The resulting cocktail wasn't great. It wasn't awful. Know what else it wasn't? It wasn't a Mai Tai, although I will allow that it looked very pretty.

I ordered a guava paloma. I'm not a big fan of grapefruit juice, which is the primary ingredient in a paloma, but I can take it in cocktails. And I am a fan of guava, which, next to passion fruit, is just about the definitive flavor of the tropics. Foolish me. When the paloma arrived, I tasted no guava. None. What did I taste? Bitterness. Bitter, bitter, bitter with a side of bitter. I don't know what they put in this thing, but I tasted no tequila, and even the grapefruit juice was overpowered by the bitterness. I let the ice melt to dilute it some, but that only improved it marginally.

As for the decor, well, again, it's not tiki. It was bright and airy and full of bamboo and matting and other things one would find in a tiki bar--up to and including tiki mugs--but the theme and vibe was more "tropical beach" than anything else. As such, it was pretty cool, except for the loud rap they had playing over the speakers. That did nothing for the ambience. After a few F-bombs, The Wife asked if they could play something else. Naturally, this annoyed the staff, who grudgingly changed the station to some generic contemporary techno-pop channel. That was still inappropriate music selection for the decor, but at least we weren't being bombarded with lyrics about "bangin' the bitches" or whatever. I don't understand why it's so difficult to grasp that some types of music are appropriate for certain situations and other types aren't.

Ultimately, No Bones Beach Club was a mixed bag. The food was fantastic, if a bit on the pricey side. I'd happily eat there again. I won't, though, because 1) the drinks were terrible, 2) the music selection was worse and 3) the atmosphere was completely lacking. It's not a tiki bar and shouldn't pretend to be one, but at the same time should embrace the tropical beach aesthetic and run with it. That, they're not doing. Pity, because this place is so close to being something special.

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