Former Vegas tiki titan returns with new downtown bar
– Johnathan L. Wright

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 last 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.”

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