Cocktail ranger: Trader Vic's Scottsdale

The original Trader Vic’s in Scottsdale, Arizona, opened in 1962 on West Fifth Avenue, just six years after the luxe midcentury modern Valley Ho Hotel up the street. It was axis of swank. Then it became the forgotten zone. The Trader Vic's closed. The Valley Ho closed and there was talk of demolition.

Time passed. Now the Valley Ho has been made over top to bottom respecting its midcentury roots, and a new Trader Vic’s opened adjacent to the hotel a year ago. I was in Arizona last week, and made a detour to check it out, spending a night at the hotel and being drawn by a curious gravitational pull to Trader Vic’s.

The redone hotel is impressive — I’ve always thought that to capture the midcentury sensibility you had to not just recreate the past, but to recreate the future, a far trickier proposition. Fifty years ago, stepping into a sharply angled, plate glass building was to glimpse an open, airy, bright sense of tomorrow. Of course to replicate that “wow” factor today, you need more than just plate glass and boomerang fabrics.

And Valley Ho pulls it off with a great melding of past and future. it’s got the FLW-inspired balcony railings, the mod fabrics, the white brick walls, and the almost perfect two-story scale of a “classy motel.” But it’s not slavishly retro — my bathroom was tucked behind Lever-House like slabs of blue translucent glass that glowed beautifully; the carpet was a lovely black and white textured houndstooth, and the stationery (which of course, I swiped), was dotted with faded olive-on-a-toothpick abstractions. It all worked wonderfully.

And the Trader Vic’s? The lounge/restaurant is similarly a mod adaptation of the old Trader Vic’s. It stands across a parking lot, which somehow made it seemed small and removed. Longtime tiki fans will be horrified by the amount of light allowed to enter — it’s got more in common with a Googie coffee shop than a dusky faux-Polynesian haunt of yore. I have to admit, it’s strikingly beautiful. But the more intimate scale, the cars passing by outside, the TV in the bar…. it seems to have more in common with Applebee’s than one of the old Trader Vic’s. The place doesn’t transport you so much as give you a poke in the ribs and a wink.

The drink menu beats that at Applebee’s, of course — you can get a fine Suffering Bastard — but even here I was pained by some missteps. A “rhum cosmo” made with Barbados rum? A “vodka mai tai”? That'll snap you out of a reverie.

Overall, the hotel is well worth a trip — it’s a great adaptation of the sort of place you’d expect to run into Frank Sinatra at the bar. (You might want to pack some hipster repellent, though.) And the Scottsdale Trader Vic’s is worth stopping by if you’re already there. But I wouldn't suggest a lengthy detour to check it out.

Link: Hotel Valley Ho