Tasty TIKI BAR tipples at home
Gather all your ingredients, then kick back
From their origin in California in the 1930s, tiki bars have long been a kind of tropical fantasia, a rumsoaked refuge from postwar anxieties and the daily grind.
But tiki culture — the 20thcentury North American style, not the Polynesian mythology it’s loosely drawn from — is by nature a pastiche, borrowed from other cultures in ways that are sometimes informed and respectful, sometimes problematic.
Some argue that certain elements of tiki iconography exploit genuine elements of Polynesian and other “exotic” cultures, turning them into escapist kitsch.
These days, one can slurp from a bowl bedecked with scantily clad island girls or vaguely “African” idols for only so long before sensing, beneath the pulse of rum, that these things should make you go “Hmmm.”
Defining a tiki drink can be tricky business. Is it only “tiki” if it came from the recipes of Don the Beachcomber (the founding father of the tiki bar) or Trader Vic’s (the home of the original Mai Tai)? What about imitators?
Should tiki drinks incorporate only ingredients that were available in the 1930s, the dawn of tiki? What about all those blended tropical drinks that share tiki’s “come with me and escape” esthetic?
If a palm tree is standing within 20 metres of the bar, are you automatically drinking a tiki drink?
It’s an oversimplification, but tiki drinks are basically “Caribbean drinks with Polynesian names,” says Jeff (Beachbum) Berry, owner of Latitude 29 in New Orleans, and author of multiple books that detail the history of tiki drinks.
Without Berry’s work tracking down recipes from early tiki bars in California, we would have little idea what most original tiki drinks tasted like.
Berry’s definition is based on Don the Beachcomber’s approach: A tiki drink, he says, is a Caribbean drink squared, and in some cases cubed.
Don’s inspiration for almost all of the drinks he created was the Planter’s Punch — which consists of rum, lime and sugar and maybe some bitters.
Then, he took that basic drink formula and multiplied everything by a factor of two or even three.
Instead of lime juice, what happens when you put lime and grapefruit together? Multiple sours, multiple citrus.
Same thing with the sweetness. Instead of using just sugar, what happens if we incorporate honey, or honey and falernum, or honey and falernum and passion fruit syrup?
Martin Cate, a rum and exotic cocktail expert and the owner of San Francisco’s iconic rum and tiki bar Smuggler’s Cove, said Trader Vic’s added to the approach by blending rum with other spirits to make more complex drinks, and substituting the base spirit in some classic templates.
This background helps make sense of some of the strange outliers in the tiki canon: the Singapore Sling and the Suffering Bastard, for example, which aren’t rum-based and are neither Polynesian nor Caribbean in origin.
The gin-based Saturn, a recipe Berry found printed on the side of a cocktail glass in a vintage store, has become a regular on modern tiki menus.
These oddballs slid past the velvet rope by a variety of means: adventurous or boozy-sounding names that matched the esthetic, origins in a perceived “exotic” locale (the Suffering Bastard was invented in Cairo in the ’40s). Others showed up in beach bars and got mistaken for a member of the club (as with the piña colada, which Berry says has nothing to do with tiki).
Archipelago’s recipes include ingredients not on classic tiki menus — pandan, guava, Thai iced tea — but are used in ways that bear out tradition: complex layering of booze, citrus, spice and sweeteners into delicious drinks.
To paraphrase the oft-quoted line about defining obscenity, I know tiki when I taste it.
And given the unease many have started to feel around some elements of tiki, I’d say amen to aware evolution.
The tiki school of beverages includes some damn tasty drinks, and I’d like to be able to enjoy the island reverie without worrying that I’m indulging in the cocktailing equivalent of lawn jockeys.
A fan of real tiki should know the history and be clear about what’s classic and what’s new.
But tiki has long taken charming strangers into its embrace, and modern tiki can afford to open its doors — to welcome new and charming guests, and throw some older esthetic baggage out in the street.
Instead of using just sugar, what happens if we incorporate honey, or honey and falernum, or honey and falernum and passion fruit syrup?