The short-lived psychedelic “theme” did not become popular in restaurants to the same degree that it did in the music world. But when you think about it, that’s not too surprising. [Trident menu, ca.1969]
As decor, a psychedelic interior made generous use of strobe lights and brightly colored paint. The decor was most likely to turn up in a teen club or a nightclub, such as Mother’s in San Francisco in 1969. Just reading a one-sentence description of Mother’s interior “with walls that modulate, colors that pulsate to music, hallucinatory lights . . .” is enough to make me queasy. Scarcely an environment for dining!
Interiors were meant to mimic the effects of LSD without the aid of drugs. This makes sense for music clubs, but it’s hard to see what it might lend to a café’s ambience.
Nevertheless there were a scattering of restaurants and cafes throughout the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s that were referred to in the press as being psychedelic in some sense. It was not always clear what that meant other than having psychedelic decor with bright colors or swirls.
The psychedelic Uptown Café in Madison WI, for instance, was decorated with fist-sized rocks “handpainted psychedelically [with] pop swirls.” But surely it took more than that to categorize the café as psychedelic. What that might have been is unknown.
Like the “Uptown Café,” some so-called psychedelic eating places had names that weren’t at all suggestive of grooviness, such as Dino’s in Tampa FL, the Great Society in Minneapolis, and the Feed Store in Chicago. In 1969 the Feed Store was firebombed, with police assuming that the perpetrator was someone in the neighborhood who disliked hippies and their psychedelic decor.
Although the natural food movement emerged at the same time as the interest in exploring consciousness via drugs, it would seem that not all psychedelic restaurants embraced it. Haight-Ashbury’s main gathering spot for the area’s hippies was The Drogstore, so named to avoid the obligation to fill prescriptions. Tabletops there may have featured “psychedelic linoleum” but the menu was centered on ordinary hamburgers, minestrone, and soft drinks.
Other eating places shown on a Haight-Ashbury tourist map of the late 1960s could have been just about anywhere judging from their commonplace designations, such as Mexican Restaurant, Pizza Joint, and Grinder Joint.
Outside of San Francisco, the 1969 Temptations’ hit pop song Psychedelic Shack inspired several places to adopt that name, one in Belle Glades FL and another in Salt Lake City. Like so many psychedelically inspired eating places and clubs, they were aimed at young people.
A bit later, after the Haight-Ashbury scene had dispersed, mainstream commerce discovered psychedelics – and it was odd. Burger King’s “Love” postcards and Mattel’s Barbie embraced a watered-down version evidently acceptable to the majority of Americans in a way that hippies were not. The “vibe” was detached from all meaning other than swirling color and made its appearance slightly after the movement had lost its center in San Francisco. Yet it was undoubtedly an attempt to appeal to teens. Burger King gave away its postcards for patrons to send on Valentines Day, 1972.
The best known psychedelic restaurant was Sausalito’s Trident, owned for a number of years by the Kingston Trio. It had a swirling ceiling and wild-looking menus. The early menu shown above listed natural foods but later ones featured many conventional items such as steak, plus alcoholic beverages said to be generally rejected by hippies. By 1970 it had become a favorite of tourists, and reportedly entertained “the hip and many society names trying to be hip.”
The Trident’s early menus were filled with cosmic advice in tiny type, dispensing such pseudo wisdom as “One must rise by that which one falls,” and “You can’t know what is in if you’re never off.” However, the messages at the menu’s bottom brought the patron back to earth with a thud, advising, “Sorry we do not accept checks,” and “When necessary, table service minimum of $3 per person.” [Click to see later Trident menus]
Nonetheless, another message from the Trident menu contains a wish for 2024: “May all our offerings please you. Peace within you.”
© Jan Whitaker, 2024
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Restaurant-ing through history 