‘Now I kind of understand how Walt Disney did it’: Inside the Mai-Kai Restaurant’s $15 million facelift — and when it reopens

Nearly four years after the Mai-Kai Restaurant and Polynesian Show closed, the rum-soaked landmark is finally expected to reopen this summer, newly garnished with Orlando theme-park magic.

Over the past year, a crew composed of Universal Orlando and Disney designers — call them an Ocean’s Eleven of imagineers — have brought every nook, lamp and bamboo panel of this Oakland Park tiki time capsule back to its original glory, while adding a fresh raft of design upgrades.

The $15 million Mai-Kai facelift is on target to soft-open this September, with a grand-opening set for sometime in October, developer Bill Fuller told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

“We’re rebuilding the Mai-Kai for the next 60 years, and we didn’t cut corners on anything,” Fuller said. “It’s one huge collaboration. It’s like developing a movie or a huge Broadway show.”

Crews have replaced and rethatched the Mai-Kai’s A-frame roof, rebuilt the dark and stormy Molokai Bar, and razed the old, hurricane-damaged Bora Bora building, a former banquet space. In the meantime, the project’s price tag, originally projected to be $8.5 million, has nearly doubled, Fuller confirmed.

He said roughly 95% of the Mai-Kai’s interiors are finished, and over the next two weeks workers plan to pour concrete connecting the restaurant to Federal Highway. Additionally, later this summer, the 2.7-acre grounds will be decked out in tropical landscaping.

Here’s a rundown of some Mai-Kai Restaurant upgrades:

• A poured concrete driveway, painted to resemble what Fuller called a “dirt backroad in Hawaii,” will feed from Federal Highway over a new wooden bridge to a roundabout, where rideshare and valet drop-offs and pickups will happen. The traffic circle is designed to erase an old, persistent problem: vehicles bottlenecking onto Federal Highway.
• Over the bridge, lined in coconut palms, clusia plants and a waterfall, is the new roundabout’s centerpiece: a volcano caldera sculpture. Built from steel and concrete, the volcano will be framed in tiki torches, red lighting and other special effects. “It’s wild theme-park madness,” Fuller said.
• Jade terrazzo tile — a reference to Maori tribal jewelry from New Zealand — will line the entrance walkway, and the pavement will be stamped in geometric triangle patterns inspired by Polynesian tapa bark.
• A 220-space parking lot will be framed by 8-foot-high privacy walls lined with bamboo plants to block visibility from the Mai-Kai to the next-door Oakland Park neighborhood on Northeast 20th Avenue.
• A new outdoor patio bar beneath the Mai-Kai’s porte-cochere will be adorned with crates, barrels, nautical netting and faux flotsam and jetsam, a sister to the Molokai, its shipwreck-inspired saloon indoors.
• More than 250 Polynesian and Tahitian lamps have been restored and retrofitted with LED lights inside the dining room, Molokai Bar, private rooms and gift shop, now called the Mai-Kai Trading Post. The gift shop is lined in California-imported gold tile. Through a gift-shop window, customers will be able to watch bartenders making cocktails at a new, 25-foot-long, bamboo-carved service bar with five stations.

Mai-Kai, then and now

The sweeping redesign caps three years of construction, permitting roadblocks and social-media restlessness that began after a burst pipe ripped a hole over the Mai-Kai kitchen in October 2020.

Widespread water damage forced owners to reckon with a repair bill they couldn’t afford, a cost that grew more expensive after the city of Oakland Park required that the rest of the 26,000-square-foot historical landmark be brought up to modern building codes.

Wealthy developers instantly came knocking, some eager to tear it down, but only one — Fuller’s Barlington Group (Miami nightclub Ball & Chain) — suggested they preserve the Mai-Kai as it was while also making upgrades. He was tapped by the Thornton family, which has operated the rummy tropical haven since brothers Bob and Jack Thornton opened it on an empty stretch of Federal Highway on Dec. 28, 1956.

Fuller’s ambitious plans went deeper still. The sprawling tiki compound, restaurant and time-warp dinner theater — known for its pulsing drums, fire dancers and pu pu platters — needed a coat of Orlando theme-park polish.

“You can’t exactly source old wood carvings from Tahiti anymore like Bob and Jack did,” said Fuller, describing the Mai-Kai’s throwback decor as “irreplaceable.” “If they were around today, what would they have relied on? Well, Florida’s got a lot of theme parks.”

In 2022, he hired a half-dozen artistic designers — painters, moldmakers, faux-flower specialists, all longtime Mai-Kai addicts — with experience building projects like Diagon Alley at Universal Orlando’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter as well as tiki bars around the country. And last spring, he hired Orlando landscape architect Perry-Becker Design (Disney World’s Polynesian Village Resort, Toy Story Land in Disney’s Hollywood Studios) to morph the grounds into a lush sprawl of tropical gardens.

“Now I kind of understand how Walt Disney did it,” Fuller said. “The renovation is one big immersive art project the moment you step from Federal Highway onto the property. We relied on fanatics who could steep their minds in the history of Polynesia, the imagery, the lighting, what the show’s like, how the food tastes, the garnish of the drinks, and how it’s still relevant today.”

Mai-Kai’s longtime manager Kern Mattei, a cousin of Bob Thornton’s daughter, Kulani Thornton Gelardi, said there’s a comical irony with the Mai-Kai relying on theme-park magic. A decade ago, he said, the opposite happened: Disney came to the Mai-Kai.

He recalled that a Disney designer wanting to build a tiki bar named Trader Sam’s visited the restaurant for inspiration. “He wanted to pay homage to the Mai-Kai, so I gave him a tour,” Mattei said. “It’s all full circle now.”

Mattei said he watches every day with astonishment as designers distress hand-carved wood and hardened foam with paint flourishes and blowtorches.

“I never thought it would come back this massive,” Mattei said. “It’s like magic. They sourced all these materials we didn’t even know existed. They made new wood look old, and it’s amazing stuff. Everything looks the same, and if they did their jobs right, normal folks won’t even know the difference.”

In the back-of-house, the Mai-Kai’s new kitchen is stocked with a convection oven and steamer, new refrigerators, freezers and dishwashers. Meanwhile, a new rum wall in the banquet room will display vintage rum bottles and tiki mugs.

‘A magical blur’

Creative director “Typhoon” Tommy Allsmiller, a longtime tikiholic, counts himself among the Mai-Kai’s devoted admirers. He proposed to his future wife at Disney’s Polynesian Village Resort, and they exchanged vows on the Mai-Kai stage on February 8, 2020, one of the final weddings before pandemic lockdowns — and the roof cave-in — closed the restaurant.

He remembers the intoxicating perfume of rum and citrus and roasted pork, and friends dressed in Aloha shirts as fire dancers performed at his banquet table, while a surf-rock band played in the Molokai. “My wedding was kind of a blur, but it was a magical blur,” he recalled with a laugh.

Allsmiller, who’s designed props for Disney’s Trader Sam’s tiki bar and for Universal Orlando’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter, said he was “astounded” to receive a job offer to help rebuild the Mai-Kai.

“To work on mecca, the queen of all tiki bars, is a huge, daunting undertaking, but I love it,” Allsmiller said.

Some of the restaurant’s most-difficult projects, he said, involved restoring 250-plus vintage lamps, many of which suspend from the rafters and sustained damage from age and Florida heat, especially when the restaurant was shut for a year without air conditioning.

Most interior upgrades look subtle and cosmetic, but aren’t. For example, the seagrass carpeting in the New Guinea dining room is tinged with yellow, faux-nicotine stains, a nod to when the Mai-Kai allowed indoor smoking.

Another of his favorite additions involved theming the employee locker rooms, service bars and back-of-house areas, spaces that are “usually hidden from the guest experience,” he said.

“All of the woven matting and bamboo planks on the walls had to be scoured and aged,” he said. “Which is the whole point: It’s supposed to look like it was always at the Mai-Kai, and that I was never there.”

Staff writer Phillip Valys can be reached at pvalys@sunsentinel.com. Follow on Instagram @p.v.guide and X/Twitter @PhilValys.