A Dowager’s Downfall
The Myth and Meaning Behind Victoria’s Bengal Lounge
A dowager never tells her age, but then, a gentleman never asks. Not even when he’s trying to save her from the clutches of some nouveau riche carpetbagger from the Big City.
This simple, polite conceit in that politest of nations, Canada, inadvertently and embarrassingly led to quite a kerfuffle earlier this year in Victoria, British Columbia, the unofficial world capital of quaint Anglophilia. From the landau carriages on the Inner Harbour to the half-timbered mansions of Oak Bay; from the tea rooms of James Bay to the palatial gardens on the grounds of the former Butchart estate; from the pubs that speckle the city the way Starbucks speckle Seattle to the prime piece of downtown land dedicated to the Lawn Bowling Club, Victoria truly is that cousin of yours who went to London for a semester 10 years ago and still cultivates the accent.
At the center of the controversy is the historic Fairmont Empress Hotel, a stately and imposing structure that’s dominated the Inner Harbour ever since it opened in 1908. Specifically, its Raj-themed Bengal Lounge, famous for its curry buffet and its decidedly un-PC accoutrements. That room itself is said to have opened in 1916, although it appears that, like many dowagers, the Bengal Lounge was playing fast and loose with her birthdate. Or perhaps I should say the late Bengal Lounge, as befits a lady now deceased (more on that in a moment).
The stage opens on our dowager, hog-tied to railroad tracks as a lumbering locomotive called The Future rumbles inexorably toward her, steered by a Nat Bosa, a big-money real-estate baron (not an actual baron) from said Big City.
After changing hands several times over the years, in 2014 The Empress was sold to Bosa, a Vancouver developer, for $100,000,000, or roughly the equivalent of 25 Vancouver bungalows. The Empress remains under the Fairmont umbrella; though it’s undergone something of a makeover, it will remain the dominant upscale hotel on the Inner Harbour. The hotel is beloved by the city, and, as is typical for beloved architectural landmarks of a certain age, the citizens felt a sense of ownership, even if they didn’t, you know, own it. Many looked askance at this interloper from across the Georgia Strait.
Bosa said he would sink $30 million into renovations, and, true to his word, he has long since blown past that spending limit. The money has gone in part to extensive renovations, and in significant part to the building of a tented ice rink on the front lawn, where locals could skate to music in winter. (It was great while it lasted, but winter never lasts long in Victoria.) But the transfer of power was not without cost. In January of this year, The Empress announced that the Bengal Lounge would be closing forever.
No more cocktails with your mistress behind the palm fronds. No more ritualistic first (legal) Martini at the same place Dad drank his. No more post-wedding drinks, anniversary celebrations, or landmark birthday dinners. No more tweetups, business lunches, or see-and-be-seen fund-raisers. No more “history” to show the tourists.
Victoria clutched its pearls, smelled its salts, and basically lost its shit.
As numerous photos attest, the Bengal Lounge was, in its prime in the ’80s and early ’90s, a Nehru-jacketed, punkah-fanned, curry-scented extravaganza of retro-“Indian” décor that would have made a Bollywood producer stop and think, “You know, this is a little over the top.” A 2011 Yelp review described it as “an old fashioned men’s smoking room from the 1900s with a tiger pelt on the wall, live jazz band and 100 year old leather couches that were as soft as silk.”
Nostalgia and razzle-dazzle were what the Bengal Lounge really sold, and generations of Victorians and tourists bought at the top of the market.
Thing is, only the tiger pelt and the jazz band in that description were ever real, and the latter only on weekends. The place was never a smoking room, and the couches dated to the late 1990s — and, frankly, were beaten down and bum-sprung like your worst pair of jeans. Nostalgia and razzle-dazzle were what the Bengal Lounge really sold, and generations of Victorians and tourists bought at the top of the market. The room suffered during the Great Recession, often sparsely inhabited and taken for granted by locals, who would occasionally trot a visiting friend in for drinks and then leave again, not to return for months or years.
It had its charms, though. I will never forget a meeting there with friends, during which the pianist asked us for requests and obligingly played a medley of Monkees songs. We were the only ones in the place.
“It’s one of those institutions that remains the same throughout your life,” said visual artist Shelley Wuitchik to the local paper, the Times-Colonist. In fact, at the turn of the (21st) century, changing tastes meant that much of the ratty rattan was removed, various knickknacks and tchotchkes were retired, and most of the palms were clear-cut, or at least zealously thinned out. Some things, however, would not be budged: Since the lounge’s opening day, over the jade and marble fireplace has hung a tiger skin, reportedly a gift from the King of Siam (now Thailand) back in 1930 (or 1916, depending on which version you believe), along with the two wooden elephants that flank the entrance.
But God only knows what the Empress did with that tiger skin for 40 to 54 years, because once the chivalrous and loyal Victorians sprang into action to save their prized watering hole from impending closure, they found out that the Bengal Lounge was more contemporary with Austin Powers than with Rudyard Kipling. Victoria’s most famous historic room actually opened in 1970.
As far as tradition goes, well, it had been Victoria’s first cocktail bar, back in 1954, when it was known as the Coronet Room and its décor leaned heavily on Tudor roses and Renaissance carvings. In a way, nostalgia itself is authentic to the room. Before that, from 1916 to 1954, it served as the hotel’s gentlemen’s reading room. In 1969, the Coronet Room closed, The Empress handed it off to a fancy New York designer, and a few months later the Bengal Lounge opened, now proudly sporting the allegedly Siamese, possibly Bengali, tiger skin, and murals of quotidian life in the Subcontinent under the White Rani Empress Victoria.
So much for the attempt to gain the protections of historic heritage designation (the hotel already has such a designation, but the Bengal Lounge is noticeably absent from the list of relevant features). But true preservationists don’t know the meaning of the word “defeat,” even if they’ve been a bit fuzzy on the word “historic,” and the Change.org petition to save the Bengal Lounge by getting it heritage status was hastily rejiggered toward simply saving the lounge, full stop. The hotel is safe, protected by federal law around heritage structures, but that still leaves the owners with plenty of leeway over the interiors, including the Bengal Lounge. If you’ve seen anything starring Maggie Smith, you’ll know that there’s one thing stuffy Victorians hate above all, and that’s new money moving in on their beloved dowager.
Though the petition had racked up 6,500 signatures by the time its creators declared victory, that turned out to be rather an arbitrary declaration, as the room did indeed close. But, for now at least, they have a promise from the owner to maintain the furnishings in their current pared-down, Raj-lite iteration.
Daromir Rudnyckyj and Lincoln Shlensky, two professors at the University of Victoria, denounced the colonialist overtones of the faux-Indian theme in the local op-ed pages, saying: “The regressive symbolism of the lounge is a disquieting throwback to an era when the South Asians were subjected to the harsh imperial rule of the British Raj…. The Orientalist fantasy of an empire upon which the sun never sets evoked in the clichéd imagery of the Bengal Lounge might remind us, in another way, of the colonial links between Canada, India and other spaces and peoples subjected to Pax Brittanica [sic].”
On Facebook, others posted similar anticolonialist responses, while many more interpreted the tiger skin as a gruesome relic of sport-hunting for now-critically endangered animals. “The Bengal Lounge was an overpriced tribute to British colonialism and the trophy killing of endangered species. Good riddance to an incredibly destructive era!” said Geneva Hagen in the comments on the closing-party event page. She was far from alone. But she was also far from unopposed.
Merna Kidd commented, “They are just digging a bigger grave by continuing to shut down the very things that folks like to visit at The Empress. If people don’t like the Bengal Tiger on the wall then protest to have it removed No biggie! But, the Bengal Lounge is famous for the food not the stupid Tiger skin on the wall.” (It is fair to note that the Bengal Lounge was never actually famous for the food, which I have eaten, though the butter chicken poutine, the ultimate in Indo-Canadian fusion, had its fans.)
Nat Bosa himself told the Times-Colonist, “Nobody is going to touch the ceiling in there or the columns. Whether it stays as food and beverage or something else, we’re not touching the heritage. That’s what I bought the hotel for.” Later, he said to the Globe and Mail, “You know, a lot of people don’t think it’s good to have that sort of [un-PC] place. They’re just going to have to trust that we’re doing the right thing.”
Angela Rafuse-Tahir, former director of sales and marketing at The Empress, told the Times-Colonist, “The Empress is a special place, and we love that people are passionately in love with the Empress…. What I love about this is you have this historic icon with great bones and you can treasure and preserve them, but bring in some modern appeal. We’ve worked hard to cherish and respect the heritage and architectural detail of the hotel while bringing a modern elegance and luxury to it.” Kerry Duff, a public relations representative for The Empress, explained to me in an email: “The Bengal will retain its name, murals, and architectural features; however it will be used for prominent social events.”
The lounge’s last day, April 30, was marked by the aforementioned good-bye event: 643 invitees said they were Going, to a party held in a 150-capacity room. In fact, ironically, business at the Bengal Lounge had never been stronger than after the announcement of its closure. Duff effused that sales in the last several months “certainly surpassed expectations and all previous records during the few months leading up to its closure.” I can verify its sudden popularity from personal experience. When I visited with a group of six friends, the only way they could squeeze us in was at three separate tables, and only if we left by 7 p.m. In true Canadian form, the staff did apologize countless times.
Victorians apparently loved their dowager, but did so too often from a distance. The most vociferously outraged about the Bengal’s demise were also frequently the first to admit that the last time they’d set foot in it was, say, a wedding dinner years before. It had become legendary, and, in the way that legends do, had faded from consciousness.
Shawn Soole, a renowned local bartender and owner of S/Squared Hospitality, offers a historic perspective: “The closing of the Bengal was definitely the end of an era, but that era ended a long time ago.” He explained that when the Bengal Lounge was the only lounge in town (as it had once been the only cocktail bar), it was the top choice, but the resurgence of cocktail culture over the past decade left it in the dust. “The Bengal was the place to go, but unfortunately it didn’t evolve like the city did. Our demographics have changed, our sectors and industries have changed and what a lot of the guests are looking for has changed.” Soole added, “I will miss that little piece of the Empress.”
Tourism Victoria’s president and CEO, Paul Nursey, explained the official, more practical reason for the closure: lowering costs by having all the restaurants in the hotel use one central kitchen. The outlier in the South Wing for the exclusive use of the Bengal Lounge pushed it over the edge into unprofitability, particularly given what locals described as the last few years’ meager receipts. “When all of your competition is more efficient than you,” he said, “a business must find ways to compete.”
“Do you really want to defend a dead endangered species on the wall for the next 40 years?”
Scott McDonald, former online marketing specialist at local tourist hot spot The Butchart Gardens, was never a Bengal loyalist, saying that he lived in Victoria for two years before visiting it. “I thought it cluttered and utterly without sensitivity, but good friends of mine like it for that very reason. That’s all well and good if one can ignore the brutal history of British colonial rule. But I guess we do that all the time, me included.”
“As for the regulars — I think they were smart enough to know the Bengal’s time was done,” McDonald continued. “I think the new owners saw that, too. I mean, do you really want to defend a dead endangered species on the wall for the next 40 years?”
Considering the future of the space, he envisions something uniquely Victorian — as in, representative of the city as it exists now, rather than of the dead queen or her era. “I hope they don’t try anything historical, and for God’s sake, let’s try to be who we are…and that’s not Seattle, Vancouver or Portland.” Victoria has won international prizes for its contemporary cocktail culture, McDonald pointed out. It also has more restaurants per capita than most cities in North America, with an average of one for every 146 residents. “Victoria has history, but we are experimenters!” McDonald said.
French transplant Janis La Couvée, a theater arts advocate and community organizer in Victoria, honeymooned at the hotel and had wedding photos taken in the Bengal Lounge. In a Facebook chat, she told me, “My personal opinion about closing the Bengal is this — everyone wants places that are unique. If you go to London you go to Claridge’s, if you go to Singapore you go to Raffles [also a Fairmont property].” But, as for many Victorians, it was never a place on the tip of her tongue. “For me, it was a treat.”
“[Back in the day] it was a power place to be, like the Union Club [the local equivalent of the stuffy British gentlemen’s club]. With the advent of all the special events, it then opened up to a different set of folks…. As a ‘room’ it had an ambiance that is hard to describe — traditional (the sense of years of excellent service) yet not stuffy either. I think the staff in particular worked very hard to make it an approachable place.”
La Couvée considers the nostalgia around the ersatz-historic, British Empire–themed Bengal Lounge to be a benign form of roleplay, but one that bears examining as we move into the future. “There is, generally speaking, an attempt locally to revise the history of the city — to make amends for all the awful things our forefathers did,” she continued. “I think the re-imagining of the Bengal is a result — whether people are truly aware of their motivations or not. It doesn’t suit any longer to have this ‘reminder’ of how colonial we were. Whether it’s nostalgia or authentic — hmmm. Some people are always going to love the glory that rubs off by being in a place — it’s why we still visit castles and historic houses — whether they are authentic or not, we can role-play and imagine ourselves, for a moment, in a different time or place. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”
Soole adds: “What is Victoria now? We shouldn’t be pigeon holed the way people have always tried to. We can be whatever we want going forward. We are at a crossroads in our city where we have a lot of ‘Old Victoria money’ trying to keep the ‘Little Britain’ mentality clashing with the new progressive culture that is bringing with it vibrancy. We will find equilibrium between the two styles but it will take time.”
For now, the Bengal Lounge remains frozen in time, locked behind a blank wall painted in glossy cream, guarded by those storied teak elephants and a brass plaque proclaiming “The Bengal Lounge.” There is no door. In time, it will reopen as a special-event space, a role it had slid into, unintentionally, over the past several years. In some sense, the nostalgia for the Bengal Lounge, fraught as it is with polite dissension, claim-staking, and dodgy yet charming mythology, is itself the perfect expression of Victoria as a city. Once a frontier town and gold rush stopover masquerading as a prim and proper outpost of Empire, now a vibrant center of locavore, craft beer, and cocktail culture struggling to manage the hobble skirt she inherited, she’s always had more going on under that bonnet, and perhaps that skirt, than she’s been given credit for.
If you really cannot go on without a little bit of that imperialist pastiche in your life, the Bengal Lounge’s regular saxophonist, Chris Millington, has a CD for you: “Boppin’ at the Bengal.” The liner notes include recipes for the lounge’s Bengal Curry (though not the famous butter chicken) and Bengal Tiger Cocktail — no longer endangered, but now truly extinct.
