Chen's Singapore - Above the Winter Garden Theatre - New York

Manhattan, New York, United States

Chen's Singapore ran from as early as 1946 through as late as 1957.

The Singapore was located in New York City, above the Winter Garden Theatre (Broadway at 50th), in the same spot earlier occupied by Monte Proser's Beachcomber (1939 - 1943) and later occupied by the Lanai (1961 - 1962) and the Hawaii Kai (1962 - 1989).

Although it is not a tiki bar in the strict sense, the Singapore deserves an honorable mention here. The Singapore is the missing link which kept the earlier clientele established by Monte Proser supplied with a VERY SIMILAR menu of tropical cocktails for over a decade and helped pave the way to make later establishments at this very same location, like the Lanai and Hawaii Kai, possible.

When I say a very similar menu to Monte Proser's, I don't mean just the list of tropical favorites. They also kept the Monte Proser beachcomber under a palm tree graphic at the bottom of the menu and added the "Three Virgins" mentioned in the self-same drink description next to it and on the cover. Those "virgins" included a stylized Hawaiian Hula girl, a Chinese girl, and presumably a Singapore girl in wrap and turban. Their salacious cocktail description states that the "Three Virgins" was "served with three broken cherries on a stick."

As though the menu wasn't bad enough, they actually hired white women to pose as Asians, to greet customers, and to tell them the specials of the week in a made up sing-song pidgin dialect. The act and the "yellow face" makeup seemed to go over well until the Sunday Mirror's Lee Mortimer wrote in an April 1946 op ed that the woman introduced to him originally as Singapore Sal was actually a model named Jane Bishop, and the proprietor, Carl Erbe, was forced to find a new "slant-eyed doll" to replace her.

Despite the racism and misogyny by the owners, the Singapore is probably one of the best examples of the "Hermit Crab" effect whereby a bar/restaurant slid into the shell of another similar business and kept it going, then off-loaded the shell later for other similar businesses to use.

*Ruby Foo's in Montreal shared the same menu cover design as the Singapore but did not offer the exotic "Three Virgins" cocktail inside. They did feature a "White Lady" (a classic cocktail made with gin, Cointreau or triple sec, fresh lemon juice and an optional egg white).