Former Vegas tiki titan returns with new downtown bar

He was once the Big Kahuna at the Golden Tiki in Chinatown Vegas, reimagining the tiki tradition of sweet tropical drinks with technique, top-notch ingredients and a splash of manic verve, while also celebrating classic tiki kitsch — itself a hectic design style — with a horror vacui, stuffed-to-the-trusses profusion of fixtures, furnishings and decor, most famously shrunken heads honoring celebrities, Las Vegas worthies and other friends of the house.

He later opened Evel Pie, an East Fremont Street pizzeria that did double duty as a fanboy fever dream, one filled with Evel Knievel memorabilia like images of the famed 1967 jump at Caesars Palace and a Knievel-branded kids bike from the 1970s hanging from the ceiling. This homage to the motorcycle stuntman could easily have been a stunt — except that Evel Pie turned out to be one of the best pizzerias in the city.

Now, three years after leaving these Las Vegas institutions he founded, Branden Powers has a new downtown project: Pachi-Pachi. The cocktail bar and listening lounge, opening Friday on South Las Vegas Boulevard at East Carson Avenue, draws inspiration from Japanese mixology, food and pop culture — offering a reverie (musically ecumenical, sometimes hallucinatory, replete with images) of “a back alley in Tokyo with your coolest weirdest friends,” as Powers put it.

“When I get to bat, I need to hit a home run,” he said of his return to hospitality with Pachi-Pachi. “I don’t have trust funds. I’m just me, myself and I. There is a lot of pressure. I’m constantly tweaking, trying to make it better. This is a living, breathing thing.”

Play of images

Pachi-Pachi (ilovepachipachi.com) occupies 211 Las Vegas Blvd. South, Suite 120. The name, Powers said, onomatopoeically refers (in Japanese) to balls clinking through a pachinko machine (like upright pinball) and to the spark or crackle of electricity.

Developer J Dapper of the Dapper Companies, owner of the building and Pachi-Pachi, brought Powers aboard to conjure the look and feel of the bar and lounge. Powers is the principal of Strange Magic, a branding and marketing agency.

The visual culture of the 80-person space — “a small little room, very tight and very right,” Powers said — mingles graphic design from Mauricio Coturier (“retro Gucci collides with psychedelic jungle future”), scenic installations by Jen Stiling (cred: Electric Daisy Carnival), wall images by muralist Nico Roussin, sacred symbols, bits of Bacon and Basquiat and, from arts collective Kids in the Attic, six-story banners enrobing the building, for now in place of a sign.

Powers described the banners as the calm (if that’s the right word) before the storm. “For the sign, we’re actually thinking about going full Tokyo, massive neon meltdown. The neon will descend soon enough.”

A mythical muse named Aya, as imagined by illustrations that nod to surrealism and Japanese prints, provides design inspiration for Pachi-Pachi. Aya reveals gateways to willing explorers.

“We didn’t want to just open another bar,” Powers said. “We wanted to open a portal.”

Big in Japan

That portal comes with eats and drinks.

Pachi-Pachi chefs Mike Boyle and Gilleum Marcoux are joining with restaurateur Mark Evensvold and chef Dan Coughlin of Le Thai to send out a Japanese-inspired menu. World Famous Ghost Noodles — chopsticks seemingly held by an invisible hand above a snarl of egg noodles provisioned with shrimp, chicken katsu or steak — fittingly leads off the menu, a collision of cool and culinary crazy.

Also touching down at the table: cucumber tataki salad, ahi hand rolls, classic gyoza, a heap of garlic chicken karaage, a steak sando with soft, thick bread, and a burger built with a wagyu patty and Japanese beer cheese that arrives in a hot skillet laced with fondue.

Mixologists Tony Gadachy and Aria Mathar are helming the wet work, abetted by top-drawer barkeeps from across the city. On the cocktail menu, a Sakura Collins with cherry blossom syrup keeps company with a fat-washed Suntory Old Fashioned, an Oni Spicy Margarita (gochujang agave, cucumber jalapeño kimchi) hobnobs with a Blue Twilight Reverie (Japanese gin, maraschino liqueur, blue spirulina extract).

Sounds like …

The Pachi-Pachi team calls the bar and lounge a sonic organism, a room where Balearic house in the late morning moves into the sounds of happy hour that slip into the audio acumen of a Japanese listening lounge in the evening. Late nights belong to DJs. Call it the music of the spheres.

Pachi-Pachi will be open from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. this Friday and Saturday. Regular hours begin Monday and will run from 11 a.m. to 3 a.m. Mondays through Thursdays and 11 a.m. to 4 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays. “And eventually, yes, sunrise and beyond,” Powers said.

Pachi-Pachi, it seems, also sounds like the day, the night and the day after.

Contact Johnathan L. Wright at jwright@reviewjournal.com. Follow @JLWTaste on Instagram.