North Shore Lagoon

The decor is amazing, 10+ there. Good service and it's fun that it has a view of the pool. Very popular with families which is nice to see as a parent, there seemed to be a lot of people have celebration dinners. The Hawaii 5-0 burger didn't agree with me and I had a very icy pina colada. Had to go to the gift shop across the parking lot to get a mug, which was annoying and they didn't honour the discount the waitstaff said I'd get for buying a drink. I'm glad to have seen it and the decor is amazing. If I lived in the immediate area I'd give it another try, but I don't know if I'll go out of my way on my next trip to WA.

McMenamins is a company that reclaims historical buildings in danger of being demolished, saves them by repurposing them filling them with restaurants, bars, theatres and other family friendly gathering places. It even has an Olympic sized pool. The community reached out to them hoping to have it saved. Saved it they did! North Shore Lagoon has a bit more of a multi cultural twist on a tiki bar while still maintaining the tiki mood that you’d want in a tiki bar, right down to surf rock/exotica music, dim lighting and repurposed woods and bamboos as far as the eye can see from all over the world. They offer a great menu of quality food. But most importantly the cocktails- FABULOUS. My Zombie was wonderful and they have a HUGE rum selection. Noah offered me tremendous service and even gave me an oral tour though the bar telling me where all the woods and sculptures came from. I could not be more happy I drove an hour round trip out of my way to check this off of my Critiki list.

My wife and I have been talking about coming here since the place opened but were put off by the negative Yelp reviews, however, tonight we decided to give the place a try and were definitely not disappointed. The decor is first rate, from the live banana trees out front to the subtle details that you will miss if you are not specifically looking for them.

We started off with two classic tiki cocktails, the Jungle Bird and the Mau Tai, both were, large, excellent and at $11 each pretty reasonable. We then proceeded to dinner, Dragon Boat appetizers (spiced pork meatballs, pickled daikon and carrot, cilantro, fried shallots and sriracha mayo all in a lettuce leaf), followed by the Thai Chop salad with chicken for my wife and the Hawaii Five-O burger for me. The burger was great, cooked exactly the way I like it, and topped with grilled pineapple, ham and mango-habanero sauce. The salad was epic, being based on cabbage rather then lettuce and was large enough that my wife could not finish it all.

After dinner was finished, we moved on to desert, I had the Kahlua Creme Brulee and my wife had the pineapple upside down cake. Both were pretty good, but the creme Brulee was not fully or properly caramelized on top so the shell was kind of chewy rather than the crisp, crunchy sugar shell on generally expects on a creme brulee.

In general we had a really great time, there were, however, a couple of negatives. The first is that it took a long time to get dessert even though the place was adequately staffed and not that busy. Secondly, my wife, who had an excellent view into the kitchen did not like that the kitchen staff were not wearing uniforms and were not using hair restraints. Finally, one of the waiters who helped us had terrible B.O. which is something I absolutely detest.

I would also like to say that Jacob the bartender was ultra-great and really worked hard to make sure we had a great time.