From The Archives: The Tiki Torch Has Been Passed
Three Dots And A Dash, Chicago
In 2015, I wrote an article about the new generation of tiki bars for Robb Vices, an offshoot of Robb Report which disappeared a few years ago — and with it, all the stuff I’d written for it. I forgot about this piece until the recent passing of Brother Cleve, who was an invaluable source for it. I dug the original draft out of my files and with it, found a few Cleve quotes for which I hadn’t had room for in the original article. So here it is, a little outdated at this point but, hopefully, still interesting.
Tiki bars operate in a boom-and-bust cycle; if we're not hearing about the latest tiki revival, we're hearing about its demise. Which makes sense. After all, a Mai Tai or a Zombie isn't an everyday drink the way a gin and tonic or an Old Fashioned is. Tiki isn’t just a set of cocktails, it’s a state of mind. It's about the Hawaiian shirts, the exotica music, the pu-pu platters, the carved wooden idols. It all straddles a fine line between cool and kitschy, so it seems inevitable that if this year's hipsters are embracing tiki, next year's crew will find it cornball. And so the cycle continues.
There are still a few hardy survivors from the golden age of tiki -- let's say the end of World War II to the mid '70s -- which have withstood the whims of cocktail fashionistas and have become veritable houses of worship to the tiki faithful. The Tonga Room in San Francisco, the Kowloon outside Boston, the handful of Trader Vic's still in existence, all harken back to a much different time, when craft cocktails didn't exist, when bartenders weren't celebrities, and when the vibe of a bar mattered as much as the drinks.
Brother Cleve, one of the godfathers of Boston's craft cocktail scene and a renowned tiki authority, remembers the days before cocktail archaeologists like Jeff "Beachbum" Berry (whose new Latitude 29 in New Orleans is perhaps the hottest of the current crop of tiki bars) resurrected and codified classic tiki recipes. "You could go into these places and it would always be different -- the Zombie would always be a different drink in one place than it was in the next, or the Suffering Bastard or whatever. No one made the same versions of the drinks because, of course, nobody knew what the f*** was in 'em."
Classic and modern tiki bars may have Mai Tais and Zombies in common, but they're very different experiences. The epicenter of classic tiki can be found in Ft. Lauderdale, off North Federal Highway. The Mai Kai, a massive A-framed structure with thatched roofs, enormous carved tiki idols, lit torches and countless other faux-Polynesian touches, has been in business since 1956, when tiki was peaking and "exotic" and "authentic" didn't have much to do with each other. There's a floor show complete with grass skirt-clad women and fire-dancing men. The food is mostly '50s-era Chinese. And of course there are cocktails, dozens of them, all with intriguing names and descriptions, from the Bora Bora ("long and smooth, but potent. An adventurous challenge") to the Shrunken Skull ("dangerous and deadly") and the Jet Pilot ("fast and courageous. A vigorous blend of heavy bodied rums and zesty juices").
At the Mai Kai, the actual bar is a small afterthought. You don't see your drinks being made. You don't know the names of the ingredients in the cocktails. That's in stark contrast to Lost Lake, the follow-up to Chicago's massively successful Three Dots And A Dash, both of which are under the wing of Beverage Director/partner Paul McGee. Lost Lake has its share of aloha shirts and palm fronds, but it's also got a big bar that's the center of the action. The menu lists in pretty clear terms exactly what's in your drink, without the metaphors and adjectives: the South Sea Dipper, for example, has "rhum agricole blanc, aged Jamaican rum, lemon, pineapple, passion fruit, ruby port." If you want to know the brands of booze being used, you can watch the bartender take the bottles off the shelves. Here, the drinks, and the bartenders making them, are the star attraction.
Modern tiki bars have a lot more in common with today's craft cocktail bars than with the goofy pineapple palaces of yesteryear. At Lost Lake, there's a craftsmanship, an artistry, and even a solemnity that you won't find at the Mai Kai. The drinks are definitely better in their own way at Lost Lake, but there's something to be said for the "dangerous and deadly" cocktail ethos at the Mai Kai. As Brother Cleve puts it, the classic tiki bars "did what they did without knowing what they were doing. Whereas nowadays, you do know what you're doing. You're consciously trying to do what somebody else did. There's no innocence left. There's no, 'we just made something up.'"
So can old school tiki bars coexist with the new? Jim Kearns, owner of The Happiest Hour and Slowly Shirley in New York and a tiki cocktail enthusiast, believes so. "I think probably the level of ingredients and execution will be higher at newer places," he says, but adds that "any gem that's kind of preserved like that is going to be appreciated." He calls Jade Island, a decades-old tiki survivor on Staten Island, "an amazing place. The drinks are kind of hit and miss, but just to go and actually check the place out and have a pu-pu platter, it's fantastic." Kearns' favorite vintage tiki bar is the Tiki Ti, a Los Angeles institution since 1961: "To me, it just felt kind of like a time capsule. It really feels like a preserved gem." His favorite of the new crop is Smugglers Cove, which straddles the best of the old and new with a classic tiki look and vintage recipes, along with a modern scholarly dedication to the art of the cocktail.
One thing is for sure — the latest tiki revival will fade, the Hawaiian shirts will go back in the closet, the bars and the menus will evolve, and we'll once again be reading about the "death of tiki" -- while the survivors march on with tiki torches blazing, oblivious to time and trends. As Brother Cleve says, "Just from talking to a lot of people in the business, they feel that it's a very temporary fad, and it's something that's not going to last. I don't think I totally agree with that, but I understand — with everything that's involved with being a saloon owner in the 21st century, you want to be able to change it at the drop of a hat. Whereas these [old] places... what are you going to do with the Mai Kai?"
BONUS TIKI THOUGHTS FROM BROTHER CLEVE
I called Brother Cleve with the intention of getting a few quick quotes to spice up the article. But no interaction with the man was ever quick, nor did they ever stick to one subject. Three-plus hours later, I had enough material to fill a book on everything from the Boston music scene in the early ‘80s to legendary bandleader Juan Garcia Esquivel. And plenty of observations on tiki bars, cocktails, and culture, of course. I wish I’d saved the recording of the call, but I did transcribe a lot more of Cleve’s thoughts than I wound up using. Here are some of them.
Most of these places now — they're situated, like, a place like Smuggler's Cove, it's gorgeous inside, but it's a building on a street in a big city. It's not like these A-Frame palaces. The difference now is that we have tiki bars hidden away on streets. In the postmodern scheme of things, we don't have the real estate like they used to have. And the monstrosity ones, like the Kowloon, which holds, I don't know, 2,500 people? It's 15 miles north of Boston and you can see it from half a mile away.
We can thank Jeff Berry for making these recipes available and finding them all. I had a discussion with him the last time he was up here [Boston], and I was pointing out where all these tiki bars used to be as we were walking around. And we were kind of lamenting, in an odd kind of way, the fact that you could go into these places and it would always be different — the Zombie would always be a different drink in one place than it was in the next, or the Suffering Bastard or whatever. No one made the same versions of the drinks because, of course, nobody knew what the fuck was in 'em. You'd kind of judge these bars like, "Oh, this one has a fish tank bar rail," or "The Fogcutter is really good over there, but I'd skip the Pearl Diver." Now, at least, you do get really good drinks, and the thing that you do get in tiki bars now that you don't really get in your craft cocktail bars is that they've gotten so smart now, these bartenders, that they don't put anything on the menu that they didn't create themselves.
The sexist pig in me — I grew up in the '70s, when everything was made of sleaze — when I go to the Mai Kai and I see half-naked girls with coconut shells on their tits serving me drinks, I am more than happy. But by today's standards, we can't do that in contemporary tiki bars. So instead of girls with coconuts I get guys with really big beards, and that's fine. Today the bartender is the show and the drink is made in front of you, with all kinds of seriousness. Whereas if you go to the Mai Kai, and this was a tradition that started with Donn Beach [founder of legendary tiki bar Don The Beachcomber], the drinks were made in the kitchen — the girls with the coconuts were not making the drinks, they were just serving them.... All of these drinks were designed [to be made] on an assembly line in the kitchen. It didn't take you 15 minutes to make a drink, because there were 4 or 5 people making it.
A lot of these places did have the Polynesian music playing, they had the "mystery bowl" on the menu — they had that at the Kahiki [outside of Chicago]. It was a huge gong that someone would hit somewhere, and it would just resonate throughout the whole room. And then this woman would come out holding this big bowl with dry ice like a foot above the damn thing, she'd come and deliver it to the table. It was focused on how it was delivered to your table. The bars in these places were normally quite small. The original bar at the Kowloon is probably about 8 seats. The idea was you went to dinner there and you sat at your table and your drinks were brought to you.
[On the Tonga Room in San Francisco] Every time they threaten to close it, another 50,000 people show up!