Last call looms over Victoria’s Bengal Lounge
He can’t knock it down, but Nat Bosa is free to modify the Empress Hotel, the venerable, 477-room brick pile on Victoria’s scenic Inner Harbour. A Vancouver developer known for building luxury condominium towers, Bosa bought the Empress in 2014, for something approaching $100 million.
He had never spent a night in it, he told a local reporter, but he had once had “a great lunch” inside the 108-year-old building, where he and his wife Flora plan to spend another $30 million on interior renovations and landscaping. Already the tall trees in front of the hotel entrance have come down; trademark ivy covering the exterior has been cleared.
Victorians groused. A few were even heard to harrumph. Harrumphing used to be big in this town, when it was more Anglo-Saxon than multicultural, stiffer than the House of Lords.
Last week came news the renovations will spell doom for one of the hotel’s most beloved traditions, second only to its afternoon tea, served in a massive lobby to U.S. tourists, mostly.
The Bengal Lounge — its clubby dark wood panelling, overstuffed leather chairs, punkah ceiling fans, tiger skin and busts — will be no more, come May, to be replaced with, well, the Bosas aren’t saying. Something modern and bland, it is feared.
The Bengal must be saved, nostalgic lounge lovers wail. A petition to keep the long, rectangular room with remnants of the charm of the British Empire was launched immediately: Some 1,500 people signed the petition the very first day.
The Bengal has great bones, expensive cocktails, a fragrant curry buffet. Originally a reading room for the hotel’s “gentlemen residents,” it became The Coronet, Victoria’s first cocktail bar. Finally, in the late 1960s, it became the Bengal — a.k.a., “the tiger room” to some — with waiters dressed in Indian garb.
The staff is dressed less distinctly now. The bar, once centre stage and the scene of countless political and business deals, is relegated to a corner. But the curry keeps coming, the cocktails remain fussy and old school, the fireplace is lit and the daily papers are spread out at the entrance table, crisp for the taking.
Veteran bartender Len Lim is still slinging drinks; he’s closing out his 45th year. The atmosphere can’t be matched anywhere this side of the Atlantic. Of course it’s exorbitant. “Nobody comes here because it’s a good deal,” a reviewer once said of the Bengal. “You come here because the soft leather couches seem to envelop you like a big relaxing paw. They get softer as you sip your iced beverage and suddenly you’re all warm and aglow with politically incorrect visions of house boys and elephant guns.”
Bartender Lim paused for a second Thursday as the lunchtime crowd sank into those leather chairs. The room was filling quickly. “It’s been busy since the news came about closing,” he said. “It’s sort of sad.”
But the Bosas aren’t swayed. While some elements in the room will be preserved, the Bengal will soon be no more.
“We’re going to make the hotel the pride of Victoria,” Bosa told the Business in Vancouver newspaper this week. “Whether (the Bengal Lounge) stays as food and beverage or something else, we’re not touching the heritage. That’s what I bought the hotel for.”
Good riddance, say a pair of University of Victoria professors who have no use for the lounge and its “stereotypical” ways, its “kitsch frescoes of decorated elephants” and “tattered tiger skin.”
“The regressive symbolism of the lounge is a disquieting throwback to an era when the South Asians were subjected to harsh imperial rule of the British Raj,” professors Daromir Rudnyckyj and Lincoln Shlensky wrote Wednesday, in the Victoria Times Colonist.
“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 Britannica,” they went on. And on. The two professors suggested the room be converted into “an educational and retail space to showcase First Peoples culture and arts.” There’s an idea: Carvings and trinkets for sale. It sounds like anywhere. Tigers, elephants, politically incorrect visions be damned.