LET’S HAVE A TIKI

Ohana

Someone once said that Tiki is, along with Jazz, one of America’s only original art forms – a statement so monumentally Not Even Wrong it is hard to unravel, but which goes a long way towards explaining the peculiar position the movement has in American culture. “Tiki” is the first man of Maori creation myth, and thus the expressive columnar statues that depict him. Despite its association with those islands, the name is impossible in Hawai’ian, where the equivalent is “Ki’i”. In the early 20th century, as the American Empire spread westwards, the country became enchanted with the South Pacific as Paul Gaugin, Robert Louis Stephenson, and Herman Melville had before. Now with travel somewhat easier and photography and mass-production at their disposal, a later and lesser wave of explorers took the bits of the tapestry of Polynesian cultures that appealed to them, invented bits they liked better, and constructed a pastiche in bars and restaurants in California and beyond. Well-to-do preppy types from the South and the Midwest reinvented themselves with improbable names like “Donn Beach” and sold the middle classes an exotic and frankly sensual vision of rum, pineapples, and bare-breasted lovelies with flowers in their hair.

After World War II – when so many American men visited the South Pacific for themselves, albeit in less than ideal circumstances – the phenomenon took off, providing safe and comfortable venues to wear seersucker and drink out of a coconut shell, to tell war stories without the inconvenience of mosquitoes or yaws. And Tiki bars have somehow maintained a small cultural space throughout the remainder of the last century and into this one, with a few desultory attempts at reinvention or renewal as seen, for instance, in San Francisco’s hip Smuggler’s Cove and its library of hundreds of rums, but for the most part remaining staunchly conservative, with the décor and the drink list every bit as prescribed and circumscribed as it is for an Irish pub. The carrying capacity of a city for Tiki bars is limited; there is only so much appetite for Mai Tais and Crab Rangoon, and the forced novelty has long been dated. So, whether this is an itch that Dublin needs to scratch, in a cold climate where none of the tradition and background resonates, remains to be seen.

And it is certainly cold on the February evening I find myself on Harcourt Street. Going down the steps to any venue here feels like a defeat in itself. Ohana is downstairs from Clonmell House, former residence of the Lord Mayor before the Dawson Street location was adopted, and now home to the Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Make of the juxtaposition what you will. I am welcomed by a charming woman who thrusts a nylon flower lei upon me; it would be churlish to refuse. I don’t usually dress for these occasions but today I am already accoutered with a suitable Aloha shirt from my collection, under some heavy tweed.

The forms here are nicely observed. There is bamboo, there are statues, there are colourful fake flowers. There are nooks and niches of seating, and there are a fair few people here, generating a pleasant buzz. There are plastic gorillas scattered around for some reason – the great apes, ourselves excepted, being largely unknown in the south seas. Maybe it’s a “King Kong” thing. The drinks list is faithful to the canon. The Fog Cutter – the most mis-named drink in the world, a sort of tropical Long Island Iced Tea that does much to induce fog and nothing to dispel it – is here hybridized with a Ramos Gin Fizz. I try this first, and it is successful; a lot of citrus, a lot of booze, stood up with a well-frothed egg white and served in a civilized flute glass. I am disappointed not to see the Scorpion Bowl on the list – a quintessential bit of Tiki nonsense in a baroque ceramic vat with flames and dry ice and all sorts going on. Perhaps they worry about the hardware being swiped. The barkeep affably compares notes with me on Tiki bars we have known. I ask him what his house drink is, and there is no question: the Piña Colada. I order one with some trepidation. It is built on Bacardi Cuatro, which I think is a bit too añejo for the purpose, and has coconut rhum agricole as well as the coconut cream. And there’s lime. Too many notes, Herr Mozart. I’m still tasting it some days later. More to the point it’s served in its frozen form, out of a Slush Puppie style of machine. I get where they are going with it, but I would prefer a bit more restraint.

Restraint, though, is not really a word in the Tiki vocabulary. A Tiki bar is a place for spinning sexy colonialist fantasies and mixing heavy, sweetened drinks that would give Charles H. Baker pause. To that end, Ohana definitely succeeds. How far those fantasies will stretch on Harcourt Street is another question.