Bob & Jack Thornton

The Mai-Kai exists because two boys from the Chicago suburbs could not forget a restaurant. Jack Thornton was born in Wilmette on May 2, 1929; his brother Bob followed about two years later, and somewhere in their childhood the family took them to Don the Beachcomber on Chicago's Near North Side. At Stanford they found Trader Vic's, and the boyhood memory hardened into a plan. Both served in the armed forces afterward — Jack spent 1953 to 1955 in Germany with the U.S. Army, teaching English — and a leave spent in South Florida decided the rest. They settled in Fort Lauderdale in 1955, neither of them yet thirty, and set about opening a Polynesian restaurant on a sleepy stretch of Federal Highway on $100,000 borrowed from the Pan American bank and $300,000 borrowed from their mother.

What they built was not an homage. It was an escalation. Charles F. McKirahan Sr. drew them a forty-foot open-air A-frame; Wayne Davidson dressed it; water ran from the gardens through the building and back out again. What the finished building cost is genuinely unsettled — the retellings say $350,000, while the restaurant’s own National Register nomination says it cost nearly a million dollars to complete and Esquire called it a million-dollar project in 1959 — but every version agrees it was reportedly the most expensive restaurant built anywhere in America that year. To staff it the Thorntons drove straight back to the room that had started the whole thing and took its people: general manager Robert Van Dorpe, bar director Mariano Licudine, chef Lin Ark "Kenny" Lee and maître d' Andy Tanato all left Don the Beachcomber Chicago for Oakland Park. The Mai-Kai opened on December 28, 1956, named with the Hawaiian for the best, and grossed more than a million dollars in its first year. By every telling that has come down, the building had earned back its construction cost before its first anniversary.

The brothers divided the work along a seam you can still see in the room. Jack was the one who obsessed — the menu, the drinks, the architecture, the planting. He is said to have set nearly every plant in the gardens himself, designed the waterfall, and insisted that each of the fifty-odd cocktails arrive in a glass of its own. The staff called him Mr. Intense. Bob ran the business: daily operations, the payroll, the expansions that took the place from a couple of hundred seats to six hundred, and a way of dealing with the people who worked for him that former employees still talk about — profit-sharing and health benefits in a mid-century restaurant, down payments on houses, tuition for staff kids, and a handshake that made no distinction about who was holding the other end of it.

It ended for Jack in 1969, when a cerebral aneurysm left him unable to work as he had; his doctors told him to stop, and he sold his half to his brother. He lived nearly four more decades in Fort Lauderdale — a traveler, a wine hunter, by his family's account a bon vivant to the end — and died of a stroke on February 22, 2008, at seventy-eight. Bob went first and much younger: cancer took him on April 4, 1989, at fifty-seven, and his widow Mireille and their children carried the restaurant forward. Nearly every American tiki palace of that scale is now a parking lot or a memory. The one the Thornton brothers built is on the National Register, and it is still open.