After 57 years, the East Bay’s top tiki hostess is retiring.
Being greeted by Claudette Lum in the entryway of Trader Vic’s in Emeryville is not just a pleasure. It’s a rite customers demand.
On one busy Friday night, a family of four stood at the edge of the lounge, peering into the dining room expectantly, until Lum rushed over to dispense hugs. Another woman lingered at the host station for five minutes before allowing the other hosts to show her to a table. The moment Lum returned to the podium, she jumped up and zoomed in for an embrace. “I don’t know if you remember me,” she said. “Of course I do,” Lum replied. A few minutes afterward, co-worker Angie Haller assured a reporter that Lum really would. “I call her the magician,” Haller said. To a one, Lum’s co-workers — waiters, banquet captains, the vice president of the company, the valet — expressed their awe.
Lum turned 80 this year. Her movements still retain the fluid lines of a dancer, and her voice has matured into a craggy contralto that penetrates the audio haze of a busy bar, but never farther than a few feet. Or perhaps she’s always just speaking at a half-croon. Talking to her often feels like an intimate conversation, as thousands of Trader Vic’s regulars will assure you.
At the end of this year, Lum will retire after 57 years with the restaurant: 35 years at its location near San Francisco’s Union Square, and another 22 on the Emeryville Wharf.
In those years, Lum has befriended most of the owners of the major sports teams. The list of celebrities she has greeted at her station spans 100 years of pop culture — from Bing Crosby and Jackie Gleason to John McEnroe, whom she forced into a tie, and the Bee Gees, whom she turned away.
But the most memorable guest, she proclaims, was Queen Elizabeth, who dropped in with just a few hours’ notice on March 2, 1983, with then First Lady Nancy Reagan and other luminaries. Lum was called in on her day off — she didn’t believe her boss until she arrived to find machine gunners on the roof of the building and Secret Service looming in the hallways. She had just a few hours to practice curtseying in the mirror in order to present the Queen of England with a gift.
“I did curtsey, and did well. In a Chinese dress,” she says. “Good thing those slits were so high.”
About that slitted dress: At the age of 23, newly divorced and a single mother with three children, a former co-worker from her job at the Tonga Room invited her to apply at his new employer. She’d never heard of “Trader” Vic Bergeron, despite the fact that his restaurants had been gathering places for the Bay Area’s bon ton since 1934, but the job sounded right.
Bergeron interviewed in a manner that may have been common in the 1960s but would never fly in the 21st century. “Trader told me to take my coat off and walk over to there. That was the longest walk I ever had,” she says now. “He had this little smile on his face. And he says, well, kid — he always called his employees ‘kid’ — we’re going to hire you.”
She didn’t know what the walk was for until her first day of work, when she was presented with her uniform, a skintight Chinese dress with high slits along either flank. Lum wore the dress until her late 60s, when she switched to business suits or more flowing dresses, though she, like her fellow hostesses, still wears a flower behind her ear.
It was a different time, she says, of that interview, that dress. Then she leaps in to talk about how good Bergeron was to his employees. “He was loved by all of his employees, as tough as he was,” she adds. “That heart always came out of him.”
Back then, she says, the atmosphere at Trader Vic’s in San Francisco was fun — more fun than the Tonga Room — but it also adhered to a formality that would now seem incompatible with its tiki theme. Men had to wear jackets and ties (and did, until the San Francisco branch closed in 1994). The maître d’ and the wait captains knew regulars so well that they’d greet them with their drinks orders.
Lum never waited tables. She ran the host stand and the gift shop at first, eventually taking on staffing large banquets. Although she still calls herself a hostess, she graduated up to a role more akin to the maître d’s of old. She says it took her about a decade to figure out how to manage guests in a restaurant where the competition for a coveted table could incite San Francisco’s most powerful men and women to tantrums.
She learned how to pamper them, even at their most insulting. “I never went to college, but working at Trader Vic’s for
“I never went to college, but working at Trader Vic’s for 57 years to me was better than any college in this world.” — Claudette Lum
57 years to me was better than any college in this world,” she says. “I learned so many things about everything.” Once she’d figured out that most essential task, the love flowed both ways. “I made my job fun. I love it. I love people. And I love to make them happy.” The love, she emphasizes more than once, is real.
In her sixth decade of work, Lum has gotten to know her customers’ children, and grandchildren, as well as their parents and grandparents, too. “This guy came in with his kid the other day, and he tells his little boy, ‘Claudette knew me when I was your age.’ It was heartwarming.”
After 57 years, she has seen the original location of Trader Vic’s on San Pablo Avenue move to the Emeryville Marina. She has seen the San Francisco location on Union Square shut down, seen Trader Vic Bergeron die, seen jackets and ties disappear from diners (but not from the waiters), and has seen Trader Vic’s grow into an international chain with locations in Dubai and Tokyo.
But she has seen it all while remaining in motion. Lum steamrolled past 65, too passionate about her job to consider retiring, and only recently has she reduced her shifts to three 6-hour days a week. The age of 80 feels like a good stopping point. She feels it in her heart. “I want to spend more time with my family,” she said — her four children and numerous grandchildren. “I’m a cyclist. I cycle 40 miles a week. I enjoy the outdoors. I have a boyfriend. I just think it’s time. I’m healthy, so why not?”
Her boss at the Emeryville Trader Vic’s has floated the idea of having a “Claudette night” near the end of the year, when Lum can simply be there to greet guests. Aware of her own legend without needing to preen over it, Lum has warmed to the idea. She won’t have to excuse herself from conversations politely enough to pretend she’s not rushing to seat incoming guests, or scanning every dining room for hot and cool spots, or quelling another crisis by pouring on the love.
And yet, even after 57 years, none of those tasks have grown old. “I want to retire and I don’t want to retire,” she says. “I’m going to miss all these customers who have become like my family to me.”