And a Bottle of Rum, Revised and Updated
Page 24
I pulled up a stool at the bar and ordered a mai tai. They didn’t get many tourists tracking them down, said Tito Calace, the bartender that night. But the locals still came religiously. “They like the aloha,” he said. And then he made up a classic mai tai, redolent of the sun and the tropics.
In the 2010s, however, the tiki aesthetic and its drinks enjoyed a steady, serious, and somewhat surprising revival. Jeff Berry’s books are lodestars for a new crop of craft bartenders who relish the challenge of mastering complicated six- and eight-ingredient drinks. They’ve rediscovered what customers of Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic’s knew: a well-made tiki drink can be sublime, far more complex than the cartoonish cocktail umbrella jutting out of it would suggest. As Berry has argued, tiki drinks were the original craft cocktails, historically built around fresh juices, premium spirits, and a carefully honed artistry.
Most major and many secondary cities are now home to at least one tiki revival bar—Smuggler’s Cove in San Francisco; Hale Pele in Portland, Oregon; Three Dots and a Dash in Chicago; Hidden Harbor in Pittsburgh; among dozens more. Jeff Berry and his wife, Annene Kaye, opened their own bar in 2014, Latitude 29 in New Orleans, where they feature classic drinks fastidiously remade as well as modern riffs. Few of the new-wave tiki bars have embraced the full-blown excess of the originals—such as the splendid and still-thriving Mai Kai in Fort Lauderdale, which opened in 1956 and remains a mandatory destination for true tiki pilgrims—but most feature enough thatch and bamboo to serve as tribute, along with copious tiki mugs and the occasional blowfish lamp. Virtually all share an enthusiasm for the drinks, made with exacting care and fresh ingredients, offering a portal to the past and its favorite lost world, one sip at a time.
[ MOJITO ]
Place 4 to 6 freshly washed MINT LEAVES in a tall glass. Add two teaspoons BAR SUGAR or simple syrup and three-quarters ounce fresh LIME JUICE. Muddle vigorously with MUDDLER. Add two ounces good aged RUM. Fill glass with ICE and SODA WATER. Garnish with MINT.
Chapter 10
[ MOJITO ]
Rum is an American term applied to an American invention.
—PROHIBITIONIST’S TEXTBOOK, NATIONAL TEMPERANCE SOCIETY AND PUBLICATION HOUSE, 1877
Rumors about a man named Stephen Remsberg surfaced early on when I began researching this history of rum. This Remsberg fellow, I had been led to believe, was an attorney who lived in New Orleans and liked rum. He liked rum a lot. He had also amassed what knowledgeable people told me was the largest private collection of rum in the world. Naturally, I was intrigued. So when I went to New Orleans (not long before Hurricane Katrina upended the city’s culture and neighborhoods), I tracked Remsberg down and rang him up. He invited me to stop by his law offices a few blocks off Canal Street.
Remsberg was then fifty-eight years old and had a slight paunch. He wore an expression that suggested either surprise or disdain—it was hard to tell which. He spoke slowly and with some deliberation. His office was clean and tidy, as one might expect of a lawyer who specializes in commercial contracts, and the space was otherwise unremarkable save for the views toward the Mississippi River. A few minor rum graphics were hung here and there, but little else suggested an unhealthy obsession.
Nor was there anything to suggest that he had arrived at his abiding interest in rum through a long and profound love of tiki drinks. His first sip of a Polynesian-style drink, which he recounted dreamily, occurred in London in the 1960s. He had gone to visit his older brother, and the two set off for Trader Vic’s at the London Hilton. He ordered a vodka drink made with pineapple and coconut—“sort of a beginner’s drink” is how he described it. But his experience at Trader Vic’s was not unlike that of an agnostic who visits the Vatican and comes away devoutly Catholic.
While at law school in Washington, D.C., Remsberg spent his weekends unwinding at the local Hilton’s Trader Vic’s. Later, living in Chicago, Remsberg had the good fortune to reside just around the corner from a Don the Beachcomber restaurant. “I discovered Don’s early on,” he said, “and then I found paradise.” Remsberg was one of the first people I’d met who not only recognized that tiki drinks can vary widely in style, but could also discourse knowingly about them. “I prefer the Don the Beachcomber’s bartending style,” he told me. “Trader Vic’s drinks are very good, and I think his mai tai is fabulous. But his drinks are certainly sweeter.”
Remsberg over time became a serious tiki cocktail detective, and devoted hours to cracking codes and re-creating drinks of the era. One major discovery occurred when he was visiting Don the Beachcomber’s flagship restaurant in Los Angeles some years ago (it’s since closed) and he noticed that the bartender finished his cocktail liturgies at the bar, eschewing the usual custom of slipping into the back and doing it in the sacristy. Remsberg noted that he added a few dashes from a pair of unmarked cruets, so he casually inquired what they contained. Pernod and Angostura bitters, he was told. For years, Remsberg had been trying to figure out the “secret ingredients” in the Beachcomber’s tiki drinks, and here it was, laid out before him, much simpler than he ever thought. It was as if he was Howard Carter and here was the door to Tutankhamen’s tomb.
Remsberg’s interest migrated from specific drink recipes to rums in general; one of his early epiphanies was that outstanding tiki drinks required outstanding rums. What’s more, many drink recipes he uncovered employed identical juices and sweeteners, and varied only in the types of rums that were used.
So rums became a small hobby of his. Then they became a large hobby. He acquired bottles when he traveled to the Caribbean, and before he knew it he had a growing collection of hard-to-find rums. Friends and relatives started to seek out obscure rums for him on their travels. He began prowling old bars for historic bottles and he delighted in what he was able to turn up on eBay. (“What do you search for?” I asked. “I type in ‘rum,’ ” he said.) As one would expect of such an endeavor, the collection became somewhat unwieldy. At the time of our meeting, he said he had in excess of seven hundred different rums, although he hadn’t taken inventory in some time. And that didn’t include the little airline-sized bottles, of which he had maybe twice as many.
We swapped notes about some rums we enjoyed and speculated on what had happened to once-popular brands. But my time was winding down. I rose to leave. He looked up at me from behind his desk, and I was uncertain if he was regarding me with surprise or disdain. “What are you doing tomorrow?” he then asked. “Do you want to stop by the house?”
* * *
—
Stephen Remsberg’s house might be regarded as the Louvre of rum; that is, if the Louvre were built around a small kitchen, and then spilled into a small adjoining room with a bar. It was smaller than I expected, but he had fit so much into the space, mostly by attaching to the walls many linear feet of narrow but tall shelves about the height and width of, say, a rum bottle.
What’s striking about the collection is not the sheer acreage of liquor—which is actually quite impressive—but that it’s an active tasting collection. “I don’t collect empties,” he said. “I collect rum, not bottles. And I’ll open any bottle that I have two of.” As such, Remsberg’s house is more than a mortuary of defunct brands. It’s a museum of tastes, some of which have been wholly lost.
Strolling around the collection with my knowledgeable tour guide, I visited with some old friends of mine. “This is my one sample of the old heavy rum from Puerto Rico that was especially made for planter’s punch. That would have disappeared around 1950.” He pointed. “And these are three old Barbados rums, and this”—a bottle of Finest Old Jamaican Rum, dating to about 1910—“is one of the first two or three rums I believe to be sold as a brand in the bottle.” (Rums before that were usually sold in bulk from the barrel, he explained.)
Remsberg cleared a spot on his kitchen counter, set out some short glasses, and we worked our way through history an inch a
t a time. We sampled the heavy Jamaican Wedderburn- and Plummer-style rums, named after nineteenth-century plantations. Both were popular in England, Remsberg said, and neither very popular in North America or even Jamaica. We sampled London Dock rums, shipped from Jamaica or Guyana to be aged in the barrel in the cool, damp environs of the London docks, which gave them a rich, mellow taste that was in much demand. We took a brief detour to sip an Egyptian rum, which was curiously floral and not very pharaonic.
“And these are my six remaining New England rums,” Remsberg said. His Boston rums dated from the last gasp of the Boston rum era, with samples from the early to the mid-twentieth century. They included Caldwell’s, Pilgrim, Old Medford, Chapin, Il Toro, and one privately bottled rum that likely was collected by a butler right from the barrel at a distillery. We sampled Caldwell’s, and it was just as I hoped it would be—dense and cloying and filled with the rich, yeasty taste of molasses. “By 1900 they were making a serious rum in New England,” Remsberg said. He returned to his shelf and pulled down a bottle of white rum—a rarity here, since he generally prefers dark and doesn’t collect much white. “This doesn’t look like much,” he said. He was right, it didn’t. It was a bottle of white Bacardi dating from 1925, straight out of the crypt of Prohibition. I wrinkled my nose slightly—I find most white Bacardi harsh and industrial tasting, and I generally drink it only out of necessity or politeness. Remsberg noticed my reticence and smiled. “You should really taste this,” he said. “This would have been the old Bacardi White Label they used to make the first daiquiris in Havana. This would have been aged four years, then they would have stripped the color out of it by filtering it through charcoal. I don’t have limes or I would make you Constantino’s El Floridita daiquiri. But you can say this is what started the daiquiri—this rum.” He poured out a bit more than a thimbleful into a glass, and I brought it under my nose. It wasn’t in the least medicinal, but surprisingly complex and inviting. I sipped. My word. It was like tasting in Technicolor—full, complex, and not too floral, but also lacking any trace of unpleasant or oily heaviness. It was unlike any other white rum I’ve tasted.
Remsberg grinned at my inability to hide my shock. “So you can see why Prohibition-starved Americans flooding El Floridita would have said, ‘This is good!’ There was something about those early Cuban cocktail rums. They were just better rums than the world had seen. Nobody is producing a white rum today as pleasing as this.”
* * *
—
Today, virtually all traces of Bacardi have been erased from Havana, like a Stalin-era apparatchik airbrushed out of a Soviet politburo photograph. When Bacardi left the island in 1961, fleeing before it was nationalized by the Castro regime, the company abandoned millions of dollars worth of distilling equipment, a century of local contacts, and that whimsical tower designed by Maxfield Parrish. But the Bacardi family took what was most important: its trademark. It would rebuild its production and markets abroad, but neither forget nor forgive Castro and his “bearded ones.”
Old Havana looks less dowdy and more refreshed now than it has since Prohibition days. The Bacardi tower has been spruced up by the Cuban government as part of its ongoing restoration of the historic downtown. Tourism revenues have been replacing sugar subsidies from the former Soviet Union, with travelers coming from Canada, England, Spain, and Latin America. Old Havana bustles with stone masons perched on wooden scaffolding of questionable safety. Men approach travelers on the street and in halting English offer cigars, women, and rum.
As was the case in the 1920s, when I visited in 2004 a number of bars had cropped up to serve the tourist trade, and many of the old cocktail recipes had been resurrected. Old Havana in places had the feel of an alfresco museum of vintage drinks. Tall men in short-waisted scarlet jackets hustled about outdoor cafés off Obispo Street, taking orders for daiquiris and Mary Pickfords and MacArthurs and mojitos.
Especially mojitos. If you walk into any Old Havana bar—except for Hemingway’s El Floridita, where daiquiri pilgrims make their obeisance—and hold up two fingers without comment, the odds are favorable you’ll get two mojitos in return.
La Bodeguita del Medio is Havana’s mojito mecca. It’s a ten-minute walk from El Floridita on a quiet street around the corner from the Plaza de Armas, and you could easily pass by the robin’s-egg blue storefront without giving it a second look. It was first opened in 1942 by Angel Martínez, who called it the Pleasant Storage Room and sold rice, beans, and other staples. He expanded into serving lunch, changed the name to Casa Martínez, then in 1950 changed it again to La Bodeguita del Medio. He served drinks—including, evidently, mojitos—and his place became a hipster haven in the 1950s, attracting visiting celebrities like Nat King Cole, Errol Flynn, Pablo Neruda, and an unknown university student named Fidel Castro.
The bar survived Fidel’s revolution; a black-and-white photo on one wall shows Che Guevara in jungle fatigues sitting comfortably with others, the multiple condensation rings on the table suggesting this wasn’t simply a photo opportunity.
Drinkers arrive by the busload these days, ushered through by tour guides who announce that their charges have fifteen minutes to sample one of the famed mojitos before heading to the next attraction. The front room is no more than twenty feet wide, with an L-shaped bar that seats fewer than a dozen (everyone else crowds in or spills out into the street), and a compact dining room in the back and a small upper galleria with some artifacts and photos. A three-man band clusters in a corner and plays songs from the Buena Vista Social Club soundtrack. Where El Floridita strives for elegance, La Bodeguita specializes in a scruffy informality, and drinkers for years have left their mark by scrawling their names on the walls—Che Guevara’s signature is said to be somewhere. (Customers have scribbled one name over another using increasingly thick markers.) The bar also features a Hemingway stamp of authenticity: a framed inscription allegedly written and signed by the man’s own big hand reads, “My mojitos in La Bodeguita. My daiquiris in El Floridita.” (Some have suggested that Hemingway wasn’t a regular patron here as he was at El Floridita, but that he scratched this out one night when in his cups at the behest of a persistent, marketing-minded bar manager.)
The Cuban government, which today owns virtually all the public restaurants in Cuba, understands the allure of the bar’s name among capitalist marketers, and has licensed other La Bodeguita del Medios—in Dubai, Paris, and Milan. There have also been samizdat variations in Miami and Palo Alto, the latter of which had a cardboard cutout of a grinning Ernest Hemingway propped outside to lure in customers to sample their “coastal cuisine with a Cuban influence.”
Mojitos at La Bodeguita in Havana are made by unflappable bartenders in unfathomable quantities. They line up a battery of tall glasses along the bar during lulls, and preload them with mint, lime juice, and guarapo. When the mojito orders flood in with the arrival of each tour group, a bartender adds a splash of club soda and then pulverizes the whole mess with a wooden muddler the size and shape of a souvenir baseball bat. The process results in a small, frothy geyser, which sprays the bartender and a few patrons. No one seems to notice or care. Then comes ice. Then rum is lavished on top freehand.
The mojito is a simple drink that most likely started as a rural farmworker’s favorite in the nineteenth century—the mint, sugar, and lime could divert a drinker’s attention from the singular nastiness of cheap rum—and migrated to the blue-collar beaches of Havana. From here, it was a short hop to the more trendy Havana nightclubs that flourished under U.S. Prohibition, when the ice and bubbly water were introduced. The second volume of Charles Baker’s The Gentleman’s Companion: Being an Exotic Drinking Book Or, Around the World with Jigger, Beaker, and Flask, first published in 1939, talked of the “greatly improved rum Collins” served at Sloppy Joe’s bar in Havana, made all the more delectable with a spiral of lime peel wrapped around the ice and garnished with “a bunch of fresh mint.”
/> Like the daiquiri before it, the mojito set across the Straits of Florida and spread north after Repeal. It cropped up in the teeming post-Prohibition bars. During the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, a mojito was featured in a free cocktail guide for visitors to the Cuban pavilion. That same year Trader Vic was advertising mojitos in newspaper ads for his Oakland restaurant. The 1941 book Here’s How Mixed Drinks featured a mojito recipe typical of the era, which called for a twist of lime and a garnish of mint leaves—although not muddled to bring out the deeper mint flavor.
After an initial fling with celebrity, the mojito mysteriously fell out of fashion in America. Maybe it was the pesky requirement of mint leaves, which had to be fresh. During the Spam and Wonder Bread era, prepackaged drinks were ascendant—think of instant daiquiri and mai tai mixes. Or maybe it just met the fate of so many excellent drinks that have fallen off the radar for no discernible reason. Whatever the cause, the mojito reverted to being a local Cuban drink without a broad following overseas.
This state of affairs persisted until the 1980s, when the mojito resurfaced stateside, first at Miami restaurants serving gentrified Cuban cuisine, then around the country, in many cases attached remora-like to the Nuevo Latino fare of chefs looking for the next big thing. Los Angeles became the mojito center of the West Coast (where the Los Angeles Times called the mojito, for inscrutable reasons, “a cosmo for the more adventurous”) and the cocktail raised its profile sufficiently to make cameos in such popular series as Sex and the City. In 2002, the mojito had its biggest cameo in Die Another Day. Finding himself in Cuba, James Bond orders a mojito instead of his traditional martini. (“Mojito? You should try it,” Pierce Brosnan says to Halle Berry, a line lacking the memorable flair of “shaken, not stirred.”) Overnight, the mojito was everywhere: in Cleveland and Boston and Houston, and then on to the chain bars in suburban strip malls. Sometime in the 2000s, the revived mojito finally established itself as an enduring classic cocktail, in league with the Manhattan, martini, and margarita.