Kon Tiki Restaurant & Safari Bar - Oslo

Oslo, Norway

Opened in 1962.

The Kon Tiki restaurant in the convention center Norway Trade Fairs was the country's first exotic - or overall "foreign" restaurant - and made quite a colourful splash in the bleak, still rather poor post-war country. The Kon Tiki museum had just opened in the same area of Oslo and Thor Heyerdahl had generously given his blessing to use the name on the new eatery.

The design for the interior was done by Erik Hesselberg, artist, navigator and crew member on the expedition. Hesselberg was the one that had created the famous mask for the big sail on the raft and thus created one of Tiki's most famous logos.

The walls were covered in bamboo. There were peacock chairs by every table. A palm was brought into the room and an artificial stream ran through it. Adjacent to the restaurant there was the Safari Bar, serving cocktails in "an African environment".

The menu consisted of rather traditional Norwegian plates, spiffed up with exotic juices and tastes: Duck marinated roasted in peanut oil with plum sauce. Flounder served with grapes, bananas, oranges, and pineapple.

Norway had not seen anything quite like it. "The Kon Tiki is alone worth the whole convention center", Aftenposten wrote the day after the opening.

It lasted until around 1970, when the bar sort of devoured the restaurant and turned into a disco called the Safari Club. Some of the original interior was kept, but all was lost during a fire in 1984.