The Mantiki East was located at 1611 University near Snelling, the former site of the Heimbach Incinerator Company. We report these irrelevant things merely because we can.

Will Jones mentioned the Mantiki East in his column on January 22, 1964.  The house band was a bluegrass group called the Country Briars.

Jones:

The decor of the Mantiki East is what might be called 3.2 Polynesian. There’s a suggestion of grass huts, low tables, and a section where customers sit on the floor at low Japanese-like tables.

On the night I went there, the room was packed, and everybody was reverently digging the authentic Kentucky-Tennessee-West Virginia sounds of the Country Briars, and their funny-hat routines as well.

The room is a fairly exact copy, I am told, of a room in San Diego, Calif., the Mantiki West, where the same formula has been successful: bluegrass music among brown grass huts.

Fortunately, I was contacted by Mike Appleton, who gave me the history of the venue.  It was owned by his parents, Tom and Marcia Appleton.

My parents were both from St. Paul and lived out in San Diego in the very early ’60s because of my dad’s work. Out there, they fell in love with a bar called the Mantiki, spending too much of their time and money there. When my dad’s job moved him back to Minnesota in 1963, they decided to open up a St. Paul version of the bar and call it the Mantiki East.

The bar actually opened in November of 1963. The grand opening was November 22, 1963. The date they chose may have been a portent for things to come… I know that good times were had, but the bar eventually became too difficult and too expensive for my parents to run, so they subsequently sold it in 1965. The building was heavily damaged by fire that same year [December 6, 1965], and it was never reopened.

Thanks, Mike!

Image courtesy Mike Appleton

Matchbook images below courtesy Mike Appleton