Last night my companions and I were the only people who were dining at Trader Vic’s ironically. Or were we? Certainly when my partner requested we spend his birthday at the new tiki hut he did so with an eye on the kitsch, not the food. But after 90 minutes of downing drinks in the lobby, and then another drink or so at our table while we waited for our food to arrive, the experience wavered from mock appreciation to sincere enjoyment, and it kept going back and forth throughout the night.

For this I blame and thank the alcohol.

Because it was no mistake that the experience went this way: Vic’s makes it very clear that its clients’ inebriation is its main concern. There are cocktails on the menu that are commended for their “great alcoholic strength,” and when we asked our server for his cocktail recommendations he just assumed we were asking for the strongest ones. “If you like alcohol, get that one,” he said about one particular concoction. The look on his face made it seem as if an IV of Everclear would be a tamer choice.

But this is not necessarily a complaint. Had I been sober, who knows how much of the tuna poke I would have been able to put down before realizing it was kind of mushy (a realization that didn’t hit me until the next groggy morning)? And how many mu shu pancakes would I have filled with crispy duck and hoison sauce? (Honestly, if my sense memory serves me, probably just as many—that stuff was pretty tasty.) And if I had stopped at just one Mai Tai, would I have walked out of the place, passing all those wicker chairs and bartenders in Hawaiian shirts, passing all those tables going down on crab rangoon, thinking that I had just dined at one of Chicago’s finest establishments? Wondering how I’d survived in the few years it wasn’t around?

Absolutely, positively not. But then, Trader Vic’s knew that the right thing to do was to get me drunk enough to fall in love. And now that I’m hooked—how about you and I meet there for a drink?