A Table Down the Street: Luau on the Potomac

Howie Southworth visits Hi-Tide Lounge Tiki Pop-Up Bar in Old Town Alexandria.

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Food & Dining

“A Table Down The Street” follows Howie Southworth, author of "A Taste of Alexandria," one local barstool at a time. No reviews. Only encounters. The bartender chasing perfection, the chef with a story, the regular who swears this place was better before you found it. Food and drink may be the excuse. People are the point. A corner seat can tell you everything.

I see leis strung around necks, that hits first. Then the glasses. Not the drinks. The glasses.

They float around the room and land in hands. Each cocktail has its own identity. And I notice it before anything else has a chance to speak louder. Carved, curved, intricate, slightly ridiculous, confident. The glasses offer the first handshake of the night. 

A woman says as much from two stools over, and she’s right. Before the grass skirts, before the tiki idols, before the low hum of whatever island we’ve agreed this is, you meet the glass. That’s the agreement for the night. One I make at Hi-Tide Lounge, tucked just behind Vola’s. It’s where the river usually does the talking. Now, it’s a tiki bar.

Alie’s already in place when I sit, tall enough to make the room adjust around her, known elsewhere as “sixfourunicorn.” Known to me as the woman with the better drink glass. Her “Saturn’s Daughter” arrives shaped like a warrior mask lifted from a forgotten cabinet in Waikiki circa 1968. Gin, passion fruit, citrus stand out. It fills the mask like they’ve bonded.

I order different, not defiantly but curios. The “Black Coral Old Fashioned.” Rum, demerara, bitters. Mine arrives in a crystal fish that feels like it might swim away if you grab it wrong. A cherry perched above and pineapple cut to look like the tail. A fish with an accent.

Alie and I tap glass to glass. Not cheers yet. Just seeing how fish meets mask. “This is the whole vibe,” she says and we agree, turning glasses in our hands. “If this works, everything works.” The room proves it. Around us, people hold their drinks the way you hold a toy you decided to raise to adulthood. A luau, after all, asks something of you. Not performance exactly. Playfulness.

You don’t sit still at a luau. You move. Threading the high-tops arranged for mingling. Scanning the grass-shirted windows that refuse to acknowledge the Potomac just behind them. Past the idol statuettes keeping their own counsel overhead. The kind that make you half expect Peter Brady to reach for one and regret it before the night is out.  

The room is dark on purpose. Sailor dark. Built for those who have had enough of horizons and open ocean sunlight and prefer their nights in deep shade. 

The barkeep slides another drink down to someone who commits to a second round of the same elixir. Reorders matter more than first impressions here. A good glass finds its way into the soul. The concoction inside may be good but wouldn’t anything coming out of here?  That’s the sign of a perfect glass.

I circle back to Alie. Turns out she’s also a content maker. We talk audiences. Why we create. Why anyone bothers to put words to something that disappears the moment you swallow it. Around us, plates move. Coconut shrimp passed between hands. Sweet soy wings slurped from bone. A pu-pu platter has its own party going on at a nearby table. Fire at the center. Appetizers fanned out like a memory of the 1970s that feels it deserves another run. It does.

I move again and I meet Shardul near the edge of the bar. One of the masterminds behind how a place like Hi-Tide meets the world wearing a Polynesian get up. We talk about cities that have no business being compared. Alexandria, Los Angeles, New York. Three different ideas of proximity, all summoned into a room that has invented a fourth.

“In this place, it should feel like you’ve gone somewhere,” he notes, though I admit I can’t hear every word over the luau. Have we gone somewhere? It depends. Because just beyond the walls, the river is doing what it always does. Slow. Certain. Unimpressed. Inside, no one is looking for it. Through the end of summer, Hi-Tide will run it this way. Brighter. Louder. Briefly elsewhere. 

I pass a table of regulars. You can spot them. They carry the tempo of Vola’s with them. They know the usual rhythm. Oysters, martinis, the quiet drift of a place that lets the water and the dock do the talking. Tonight, these folks have chosen otherwise. That’s the difference. A visitor may arrive into this and think it’s just Alexandria being itself. Regulars step in knowing it is not. Choice is the whole story.

Phil the manager catches me mid-luau-loop. He’s watching the room the way someone watches a tide they’ve helped turn. He tells me Vola’s next door has that cool vibe, nodding in the general direction of the river. “But this is somewhere past that.” Another thing entirely. Next door, the day slips off you. Here, the room insists on seizing it.

I settle briefly with a plate of crispy fish lettuce wraps. Clean crunch, a light hand with the sauce, something to hold onto while everything else floats. Food here doesn’t compete with te rest of the room. It flows with. Handheld, social, meant to move with you. I hear the ribs wow you and I believe it.

At the bar, someone orders the “Bamboo Swizzle,” a gang of rum, coconut, and triple sec spiked with habañero. A spicy cocktail gaining some buzz around the room. I consider revving up my usual rant against savory drinks. I let it go. The glass arrives in something shaped like a dare. The guy takes a sip. Winces, nods. Orders another for a friend or maybe his later self. Another sign of a perfect glass.

Back to Alie, because that’s how this works. Luau. You orbit. You return. She’s still with the same drink. Or maybe another of the same. Hard to tell. The glass hasn’t changed. “Cheers” we share, lifting glasses slightly and agree, we could be anywhere. For a moment, we’re right. Although “tiki” leans aquatic, the river is gone. Not hidden. Not disguised. Just unimportant.

A luau promises something far away. Sand where you can’t make footprints. Waves where you can’t get wet. It builds a version of far away and asks you to meet in the middle. And hula.

By the time the lei comes off, the agreement is complete. The fish glass is empty or nearly so. The totems still stare. The grass skirts in the window still insist on their illusion. Outside, the river is exactly where it left off.

Inside, the folks I bid “aloha” to linger just a little longer than they meant to. Because the best rooms don’t take you somewhere else. They just hand you a glass that makes you smirk and forget, briefly, where you are.

Howie Southworth is a seasoned denizen of Old Town Alexandria and the best-selling author behind "A Taste of Alexandria: Modern Restaurant Recipes That Echo Our City's Past," published by Alexandria Living Magazine.

Southworth is also the author of a new book, Hemingway’s Spanish Table (Insight Editions), released March 17. 

Past works include "Chinese Street Food," "One Pan to Rule Them All," "Kiss My Casserole!" and "How to Cook Anything in Your Dutch Oven." Howie is also a regular essayist for Salon.com.

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