The Golden Tiki

The Golden Tiki opened in July 2015 in a strip mall deep in the Spring Mountain Road corridor of Las Vegas Chinatown, the work of Branden Powers, a longtime figure in Las Vegas nightlife who had been creative director at the Hard Rock Hotel and a tiki devotee for far longer than that. What he built is less a bar than an indoor theme park for adults: a Polynesian-pop fantasy crossed with pirate mythology, divided into named zones including Headhunter Village, Mermaid Cove, Pirates' Lair and the Golden Tiki Lounge, with a seashell waterfall, animatronics that include a talking skeleton, and a collection of more than forty shrunken heads mounted around the room. Those heads are the bar's signature: miniature celebrity likenesses sculpted by Terry Barr, among them Marky Ramone, Carrot Top and Robin Leach. The bar is 21 and over, it has been open twenty-four hours a day since the day it opened, and by its own account it has never once closed since. In 2025 Las Vegas Weekly readers voted it Best Chinatown Bar.

The cocktail list is rum-forward and classicist, running through Navy Grogs and the rest of the tiki canon, but the reason it earns a place in a non-alcoholic directory is a standing Virgin Cocktails section that gets the same treatment as the rest of the menu rather than being three sodas listed as an afterthought. The lineup includes Tropical Vertigo (Kalinago Caribbean tea, cream of coconut, pineapple, lime, vanilla and grated cinnamon), the Coconut Pick-Me-Up (espresso, cream of coconut, vanilla and club soda), and an N/A Painkiller built on Dole soft serve with creamy coconut and grated nutmeg. The standout is the No-Groni, a zero-proof Negroni riff built from Lyre's Rose botanical spirit, Giffard aperitif, Lucano N/A, lemon and Fee Brothers orange bitters. Combined with the twenty-four-hour licence, that makes The Golden Tiki one of the very few rooms in the city where a properly built zero-proof tiki drink is available at four in the morning.