Moai statue from Columbus' legendary Kahiki Supper Club may see new life with restoration

A 16-foot-tall piece of fire-spouting nostalgia from one of Columbus' most iconic restaurants stands guard these days on the back patio of a tiki bar in Powell. It's a figurative, not literal shell of its former self, because its shell of concrete and stucco has long since worn away.

"He is but a skeleton of rebar," Rick Ryan said of the moai head — or what's left of it — that stood with an identical twin outside the doors of the Kahiki Supper Club from 1961 until it was closed and razed in 2000.

Ryan is the manager of Huli Huli Tiki Lounge, 26 W. Olentangy St. in Powell, one of four Ohio tiki bars that surfs a continuing wave of nostalgia for the Polynesian-themed restaurants like Kahiki that flourished across the country in the 1950s and '60s. Huli Huli bought the Kahiki's moai about 1½ years ago from a private collector.

It was the one on the left side of the Kahiki's entrance, Ryan said.

The 5-year-old Powell bar, whose specialty is cocktails served in ceramic mugs, will host an April 27 fundraiser to jumpstart a restoration of the statue that Ryan estimates could run from $15,000 to $20,000. The fundraiser will feature tropical food and drinks (some revived from the Kahiki's own menu), DJs, performances by a Columbus-based Polynesian dance company, and vendors selling tiki memorabilia.

It's a hefty price for a project that requires welders to strengthen the rebar, masons and sculptors to recreate the body of the statue, painters to reapply finer details and historians to ensure all the work hews as closely as possible to the original.

But Ryan is confident enough to share plans for any money raised over and above what it takes to restore the moai statue. It will help create a Kahiki trust fund to restore other items from the old restaurant, he said.

One of them still sits on the South Side at Tork Collaborative, where Tony Ball and a team of sculptors specialize in creating large-scale pieces. They were enlisted in 2019 to restore an 8-foot, 1,500-pound concrete monkey named George that had been inside Kahiki and outside the Grass Skirt Tiki Room, which operated Downtown on Grant Avenue from 2012 to 2019.

More: Saving George, the Kahiki's iconic tiki statue

The project has been on hold for a while, though, Ball said.

The moai heads and George were created for Kahiki by Columbus artist Philip E. Kientz, who also created Mr. Tree at Lazarus and the original COSI’s Street of Yesteryear. Both were made with a shell of rebar and iron mesh, a body of concrete and surface of textured stucco made to look like lava.

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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Kahiki moai statue is targeted for restoration by Columbus tiki bar