And a Bottle of Rum, Revised and Updated

by Wayne Curtis

  The haute tiki cocktail bar took these coarse combinations, tinkered with them, and dressed them up. The juices at the better establishments were always freshly squeezed. “For the life of me I can’t see why any bar uses anything but pure fresh lemon or orange juice,” wrote Trader Vic in 1948. David Embury, whose drink-making bible was published the same year, was even more emphatic: “It should scarcely be necessary to caution you never, never, NEVER to use unsweetened canned juices,” he wrote, and warned of the “exceptionally vile concoctions of the prohibition era” that involved the same. “The first commandment with respect to fruit juices,” Embury said, “is to use nothing but fresh fruit, freshly squeezed.”

  The drinks weren’t just fruit juice, of course. They were mostly alcohol. Perhaps the most legendary was the zombie, which can trace its lineage, as can so much tiki culture, back to Donn Beach. Popular lore says that Donn himself mixed up several rums and a few other ingredients to help revive a badly hungover customer on his way to a crucial business meeting. When asked later how it went, the man replied he felt like “the living dead.” A name was born.

  The specific ingredients that went into a zombie were a vexing mystery for decades. Donn Beach kept it a closely held secret. His widow at one point published a recipe that included five rums, lime juice, bitters, maraschino liqueur, and absinthe. In Here’s How Mixed Drinks (1941), the author likewise specified five rums, but now accompanied them with apricot brandy, brown sugar, and lime and pineapple juices. Neither of these drinks is particularly notable, and will mostly make one wonder what the fuss was about. But then around 2005, tiki historian Jeff Berry managed to crack the code. He’d spent more than a decade in pursuit of the authentic recipe, talking to bartenders and others who had once worked alongside Donn Beach and then tracking down the contents of two secret mixes that were specified in the original. The 1934 Zombie Punch is believed to be very close to the original, and can be made with three rums (Puerto Rican, Jamaican, and Demerara), lime juice, falernum (a spiced liqueur from Barbados), grenadine syrup, Pernod, Angostura bitters, and a bit of grapefruit juice and cinnamon syrup.

  The zombie was accorded full-fledged celebrity at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, where it was a bestseller at the Hurricane Bar at Flushing Meadows. Lucius Beebe wrote that it cost a dollar at the bar and was limited to one per customer, “by a management at once thrifty and mindful of municipal ordinances.” Beebe noted that the zombie craze led to a run on 151 proof rum, which was typically floated on the top of the cocktail, and heretofore had been consumed only by lumberjacks, Grand Banks fishermen, and others who valued the rapid warming qualities of high-proof spirits.

  Like any celebrity, the zombie made a high-profile target for spoilsports and other critics. “This is undoubtedly the most overadvertised, overemphasized, overexalted and foolishly feared drink whose claims to glory ever assaulted the eyes and ears of the gullible American public,” wrote Embury. He allowed that he was “allergic to secret formulas,” since “all this mystery, of course, is calculated to inspire curiosity and thus advertise the drink.”

  Other critics dismissed such tiki drinks as concoctions appealing only to uneducated palates—to those who preferred sweet to dry, who hadn’t traveled Europe and understood that an aperitif was meant to titillate one’s appetite, not to sate it with sugar and fruit. Sugar in drinks was for unmanly men and those from the lower ranks of society. “Sweet alcoholic drinks are favored by the young and callow of all classes,” wrote Paul Fussell in his study of American social structure, “a taste doubtless representing a transitional stage in the passage from the soda fountain to maturity.”

  Critics overlooked one essential fact: Many tiki drinks were actually very good, even sophisticated. They were drinks taken quite seriously at the better places—like Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic’s—where rum was accorded the honor it deserved.

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  Donn Beach was the Alice Waters of rum. He showed Americans that the spirit didn’t have to be the tasteless, bland commodity of the sort exported in tankers from Puerto Rico. Done right, rum had local variations and nuance. Rum had history, and aged rum especially had an intriguing richness and depth. Beach had a rare nose for the subtle differences among the better rums, and made a point of traveling through rum-producing regions to study the techniques and processes of rum making. On his buying trips, he’d lay in a two-year supply at a time, and he stocked some 138 different types of rum. He was particularly drawn to the more robust Jamaican rums, and established lasting friendships with the makers of both Wray & Nephew and Myers’s.

  Back home in Hawaii, Beach would blend and test to find the perfect balance and combination of rums, and then layer in additions like lime juice or Pernod or vermouth or pineapple and coax it into the perfect drink. “Donn would sit there all day with his cronies mixing drinks,” recalled restaurant supervisor Nash Aranas, quoted in Sven Kirsten’s glorious history of the tiki movement. “He would test, test, test like a mad scientist.” Even Trader Vic doffed his cap: “I salute Don the Beachcomber as the outstanding rum connoisseur of our country,” he said, and printed this accolade on his menus.

  Many of the original drink recipes called for a wide range of rums: white, medium-bodied, and aged rums, many of which you can’t find today—and if you could, you’d sip them slowly, as if they were fine cognacs, rather than mixing them with pineapple juice. Beach called for rums from Jamaica, Guyana, and Puerto Rico to mingle in his Plantation Punch recipe (along with triple sec and falernum), and his navy grog likewise called for three rums, all heavy and dark. Five rums in a zombie would have been more for show than taste, but two or three rums from different regions complement one another exceptionally well, and made for a far more complex drink than one made with a single rum.

  Beach was abetted in his mission to spread the gospel of rum by an unlikely ally: food guru James Beard. In the late 1950s and the 1960s, Beard penned a series of columns for House & Garden that dwelled on the delicious rums he had discovered and the cocktails that highlighted them best. Beard took global cuisines seriously in an age when ham, brown sugar, and pineapple were deemed exotic and tropical. He brought to the attention of his readers serious wok techniques and authentic South American ingredients well ahead of the trends. And Beard approached rum with the same seriousness.

  Beard suspected much of the public was embracing rum because of its novelty in fanciful drinks, like those touted by the tiki palaces. He encouraged his readers to look deeper. “Today rum is returning to its rightful place as a general favorite,” he wrote in 1960. “We are rediscovering what the colonial knew—that, of all the liquors, rum is the most versatile….You can drink rum straight, on the rocks, in a highball, in a rum old-fashioned, or a rum sour.

  “Each rum has its own special flavor and quality,” Beard continued. “Indeed, one of the assets of rum as a drink is the wide choice of types and their versatility.” Beard was a pioneer in explaining how rums varied by island and by heritage. This was not news to rum aficionados—Embury had outlined the regional differences in his bar book in 1948—but for those who believed a bottle of Bacardi Silver was the final word in rum, it came as an overdue education.

  Cuban rum, distilled at a higher potency, stripped out more of the flavors, and was filtered to refine it further still. Beard noted that Jamaican rums had a different flavor profile than these lighter, more processed rums. Barbadian rums like Mount Gay occupied terrain between Cuban and Jamaican rums—not quite as full as the latter, but more robust than the former. The Virgin Island rums were finding a niche in the middle, like Barbados rums, and the New York Times reported that they possessed “their own peculiar molasses flavor and are at their best when served in mixed drinks of the heavy type, such as swizzles, punches, and coolers.”

  Demerara rum had the powerful aromatics of Jamaican rum but an additional flavor of something slightly burned, and was a
t times flavored with bark. Martinique rums, while less common in the United States (even though the island once had dozens of distilleries and a long tradition of rum making), were strikingly different, more aromatic, made as they were from sugarcane syrup rather than molasses. Thanks to Beach, Bergeron, and Beard, a nation that knew how to speak whiskey learned again how to speak rum.

  And rum began to find its market. In one nonscientific study in 1962, an enterprising reporter tallied the jigger count at a bar near Grand Central Station over the course of a twelve-hour bartending day. The result: straight whiskey remained dominant with 185 jiggers, followed by Scotch (125) and gin (120). But rum was closing in at 90 jiggers, and was still outpacing vodka. Indeed, that year rum sales grew 16 percent. Rum now accounted for 2.5 percent of the liquor market.

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  One of the remaining landmarks of Waikiki Beach’s first tourism boom is a Moorish-style confection the color of cotton candy that rises among palm trees midway down the beach. The Royal Hawaiian Hotel, which opened in 1927, was built by a steamship company to promote Hawaii as a destination. It’s now surrounded by charmless high-rises that cast it alternately in shadow and glare, but on the hotel grounds you can still find evidence of the lost era at the outdoor bar just steps off the beach. Here, exceptionally elaborate drinks are served amid tiki torches as you listen to both crashing waves and a crooner with a wireless mike working the tables looking for guests to sing along. (“Remember that one? It’s by a guy named Neil Sedaka.”)

  This is the Mai Tai Bar, and the namesake drink is a vision to behold. It’s served in a glass big enough to house Japanese fighting fish, and is richly but discretely colored, like a hazy sunset. A wedge of pineapple perches on the rim, lording over a shrub-sized sprig of mint, a bright cherry, a purple floating orchid, and a small, colorful parasol. The whole tableau is as lush and tidy as a Victorian conservatory.

  The mai tai remains the quintessential tiki drink. It’s also a survivor, persisting after so many other concoctions of the era perished. There’s a good reason for its longevity—it’s an exceptionally fine drink when made well. (A mai tai was the first thing asked for by Patty Hearst, the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapee turned coconspirator, upon her release on bail in 1976.) The problem is that it’s much easier to make one poorly than properly. A mai tai can easily become unbalanced—too sweet, too tart, too alcoholic—and it’s the rare bartender who can craft a worthy mai tai consistently. It’s no wonder that mai tai premixes have come to be so popular, and why the mai tai has suffered such a quick descent into mediocrity. A traveler treads into dangerous terrain when ordering a mai tai at an unfamiliar bar—or strip-mall Chinese restaurant.

  A classic version starts with the same building blocks of all outstanding rum drinks—lime and sugar—which are mixed with at least two rums, a light and a dark, and a touch of Curaçao (an orange-flavored liqueur). The secret ingredient, if there is one, is orgeat (pronounced or-ZHAY), an almond-flavored syrup now often found as a flavoring in coffee shops.

  Like any good rum drink, a mai tai enhances and brings out the quality of the rum. In other words, better rums always make a better mai tai. This isn’t true of another tropical drink, the piña colada, which I would classify as among the lesser examples of the late-phase tiki cocktail. The piña colada was invented in 1954 by a bartender at the Caribe Hilton in Puerto Rico. It was an instant hit—and why not? Pineapple and coconut are the linebackers of the taste world, and can flatten the harshest of rums. It’s no great surprise that it was invented in Puerto Rico, where so much rum was meant to blend in rather than be heralded.

  The Royal Hawaiian is probably the best-known place to order up a mai tai at Waikiki Beach, but it’s by no means the only place. The mai tai is actually inescapable—as unavoidable as the mojito in Havana or the hurricane in New Orleans. The Halekulani Hotel’s surfside bar serves a mai tai nicely garnished with a splint of sugarcane. The Kaimana Beach Hotel serves its drinks under gnarled and ancient hau trees, where the whole of the Hawaiian experience has been condensed into a single glass. That the drink was invented in California hardly matters.

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  The mai tai has more fathers than one can reasonably hope to count. There’s a good explanation behind the volume of claims. The Los Alamos–like secrecy that prevailed in many tiki bars meant that no standard recipe rose to the top. Trader Vic Bergeron published two cocktail recipe books at the height of his fame, yet neither included the mai tai. So anyone with access to a few bottles of liquor could throw together anything and call it a mai tai. And they did. Inexplicably, many involved pineapple juice—which Trader Vic’s original assuredly did not.

  Bergeron spent a fair amount of energy in his later years defending his paternity. That others claimed to be the mai tai’s inventor, he said, “aggravates my ulcer completely.” The mai tai arose as many fine cocktails do, he said, as the result of an impromptu mingling of ingredients. It was 1944. “I was at the service bar in my Oakland restaurant,” he recalled in 1970. “I took down a bottle of seventeen-year-old rum. It was J. Wray Nephew from Jamaica; surprisingly golden in color, medium bodied, but with the rich pungent flavor particular to the Jamaican blends. The flavor of this great rum wasn’t meant to be overpowered with heavy additions of fruit juices and flavorings. I took a fresh lime, added some Curaçao from Holland, a dash of Rock Candy Syrup, and a dollop of French Orgeat, for its subtle almond flavor. A generous amount of shaved ice and vigorous shaking by hand produced the marriage I was after. Half the lime shell went in for color [and] I stuck in a branch of fresh mint…”

  He said he first served the drink to friends, a couple visiting from Tahiti named Ham and Carrie Gould. Carrie smiled and said, “Mai tai roa ae”—which means “the best” in Tahitian. Bergeron christened the drink on the spot. It later made the leap from Oakland to his San Francisco and Seattle restaurants. And in 1953, according to Trader Vic, the mai tai was exported to Hawaii when he was hired by the Matson Steamship Lines to create a drink menu at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.

  The chief countervailing genesis tale comes, not surprisingly, from Donn Beach, who claimed he invented the mai tai at his bar around 1933. The Beachcomber’s version started with heavy Jamaican rum and light Cuban rum, then added lime, bitters, Pernod, grapefruit juice, falernum, and Cointreau. A newspaperman who claimed to have been drinking with both Beach and Bergeron in the early 1970s says that Bergeron admitted that Beach was the mai tai’s inventor.

  Maybe, maybe not. Donn Beach may very well have been the first to apply the name mai tai to a drink. But the one served at Trader Vic’s is the source of today’s classic mai tai, and is far and away the better drink. It deserves to prevail.

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  By the late 1970s, tiki was tacky. The thatched roofs were ratty, the hula girls passé, and the drinks too potent and elaborate for the emerging era of white wine spritzers. The actor Yul Brynner came down with trichinosis after eating at Trader Vic’s at the Plaza Hotel in New York. (He settled out of court for $3 million.) A decade later, Trader Vic’s was closed by then-owner Donald Trump, who announced that the restaurant had “gotten tacky.” (In 1994, a haute Polynesian restaurant called Gauguin briefly opened in the space once occupied by Trader Vic’s.) Bergeron eventually turned over control of the chain to his children and retired to pursue a quiet career as a painter and jeweler. According to the New York Times, he liked to paint “ice-skating nuns and perky otters.”

  Perhaps the loudest death knell for tiki rang out in 2000, when the glorious Kahiki restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, built in 1961 and featuring a forty-foot-high tiki with a fireplace in its mouth, was demolished to make way for a Walgreen’s drugstore.

  The collapse of the original tiki culture was nowhere as shocking and complete as at Waikiki Beach, which I first visited in 2002. Don the Beachcomber’s old place had been de
molished, and Trader Vic’s was gone. All the other tiki palaces had likewise disappeared. The Tahitian Lanai, a tiki hotel and restaurant with individual grass dining huts off a lagoon, had been bulldozed for holiday condominiums. (Lost with it was the “Lovely Lovely,” a potion of high-proof rum, brown sugar, lemon and lime juices, and Curaçao.) Even the tiki rooms at the larger, more established hotels had vanished. The Mai Tai Bar at the Royal Hawaiian, which was never very tiki, could serve as a backdrop for a Jimmy Buffett album.

  I had heard about a surviving tiki bar that hadn’t yet succumbed to the times a few miles from Waikiki Beach, and I set out to find it. La Mariana Sailing Club turned out to be north of the city in a grim industrial area of blank concrete walls and dusty roadside debris. It was a low building in a compact, overgrown waterside oasis of palms next to a manufacturing plant that processes crushed aggregates.

  I walked inside. It took a few moments for my eyes to adapt to the gloaming. But when they did, I felt like Hiram Bingham at Machu Picchu, stumbling into a lost culture. There was a waterfall behind the tables in the main room, and colored lights twinkled throughout. Corky, an unsocial African gray parrot, performed pitch-perfect renditions of car alarms and digital telephone rings.

  As Honolulu’s other tiki bars had shut down, owner Annette Nahinu, who died in 2008 at the age of ninety-three, had gathered up bits of the past and installed them in her place. The tables were from Don the Beachcomber; the blowfish lamps from Trader Vic’s. The huge clamshells next to the waterfall came from the Hyatt’s Tiki Room, and the tiki support posts from the Sheraton’s Kon-Tiki. When the Tahitian Lanai shut down, La Mariana acquired not only the woven lauhala walls from the Waikikian, but also Ron Miyashiro, the bar’s former pianist. For years he played on Friday and Saturday nights for the regulars who migrated with him.