The no doubt lovely bikini-clad ladies at the Hawaiian Tropic Zone are probably wondering what happened to all those big-tipping bankers that used to frequent the HTZ, aka “The Hottest Place on Earth!”.
Turns out that bankers at Morgan Stanley, Lehman Bros and Smith Barney are under a new expense policy regime: no client entertaining at the Hawaiian Tropic Zone — so reports the New Yorker.

One apparent appeal of the place is a twice-daily beauty contest that goes on. Here’s an exchange describing the contest between an unnamed young investment banker and Dennis Riese, owner of the restaurant:

“‘I’d heard that periodically all the girls line up and customers rank each of them from one to ten. Is that true?’ (banker)
‘No, but we have a beauty pageant … Twice a night. Music comes on, and they walk across that stage up there … The ballots are on every table.’ The winner, Riese said, ‘gets a little tiara, and she wins fifty dollars.’

‘My understanding was that you rank them, from one to ten,” the banker persisted. ‘And it seemed surprising to me—I would think that the women who scored very low, especially ones who took pride in their good looks or their bodies—’

‘But we don’t do that,” Riese interrupted. “That would be prehistoric.’”

Sadly, it appears that the contest prize money has gone down — either that, or the number of contests have gone up. Back at the writing of this NY Post article, the prize money was $100.