The Mai Tai is a rum sour accented with orgeat (almond syrup). In the first half of the tiki era’s 1930s–1970s heyday, the most famous faux-Polynesian punch was the Zombie; second place belonged to the Mai Tai, which not only eclipsed the Zombie but outlived the tiki era to become a standard call in mainstream bars and restaurants. The Mai Tai owes little of this success to the fact that it’s a great drink—which it is, in the rare cases when it is made correctly. Rather, the Mai Tai’s longevity comes from its association with Hawaii; like the Piña Colada, the Mai Tai is as much a symbol as a drink. It’s a getaway in a glass.
Victor “Trader Vic” Bergeron is generally acknowledged as the Mai Tai’s inventor. “In 1944, after success with several exotic rum drinks, I felt a new drink was needed,” he wrote in his 1972 Bar Guide. In the service bar of his Oakland restaurant, Vic settled on a mix of seventeen-year Wray & Nephew Jamaican rum, lime juice, curaçao, and orgeat and rock candy syrups, which he shook with shaved ice, poured into a double old-fashioned glass, and garnished with mint and a spent lime shell. Vic offered this new creation to Carrie Guild, a friend from Tahiti. She pronounced the drink maita’i, Tahitian for “good.”
Guild later confirmed this story in a signed affidavit. It went unchallenged until 2002, when Phoebe Beach—the widow of Donn “the Beachcomber” Beach—wrote in her book Hawaii Tropical Rum Drinks and Cuisine by Don the Beachcomber that her late husband had created a Mai Tai in 1933. There’s no reason to doubt this claim but good reason to doubt that Vic copied Donn’s Mai Tai, both because it had disappeared from Don the Beachcomber’s menu by the time Vic first visited in 1937 and because Donn’s Mai Tai, a blended drink combining Jamaican and Cuban rums with grapefruit and lime juices, Cointreau, falernum, and dashes of Pernod and Angostura bitters, tastes almost nothing like Vic’s. See Beach, Donn.
At any rate, it was Vic’s formula that rose to prominence. But not overnight. In fact, the Mai Tai appears to have been a fairly obscure menu item at Trader Vic’s restaurant chain until early 1953, when it finally made it into print after Vic included it on the revised drinks list he created for the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki Beach (although there was a Trader Vic’s operating nearby at the time, Vic had severed his connection with it only months after it opened in 1940). Despite telling the Honolulu Star-Bulletin that the Mai Tai was his favorite of the new drinks, he placed it near the bottom of the menu, well below the Zombie and even that old warhorse the Planter’s Punch. Nonetheless, it rapidly gained traction with travel writers, and soon the Matson Line, the Royal Hawaiian’s owner, began featuring it on its ships and at its other hotels. By 1955 the drink had spread virally through the islands. Or, rather, the name had: Vic’s recipe was a trade secret, so rival hotels simply mixed rum with pineapple juice or orange juice, sweetened it with grenadine, and called it a Mai Tai. With Hawaiian statehood in 1959, and the massive influx of tourists who encountered the Mai Tai at hotel luaus, Vic suddenly found his drink the biggest seller at his own mainland restaurants, which by the 1960s he was calling “the home of the Mai Tai.”
Ironically, even though the Mai Tai had become an iconic vacation drink by the 1970s, the only place making it properly was Trader Vic’s; other boîtes generally did as Hawaii did and served random combinations of rum and fruit juice. Today this is still largely the case, although craft cocktail bars have come to embrace Vic’s original formula as the elegant, layered, timeless construct that it is.
Recipe: 60 ml seventeen-year Wray & Nephew Jamaican rum (long defunct: substitute the oldest Jamaican available), the juice of one lime, 15 ml each curaçao and orgeat syrup, and 7.5 ml sugar syrup; shake with shaved ice, pour into a double Old-Fashioned glass, and garnish with mint and a spent lime shell.
See also Bergeron, Victor “Trader Vic”; orgeat; Planter’s Punch; sour; and Zombie.
Bergeron, Victor. Trader Vic’s Bartender’s Guide, Revised. New York: Doubleday, 1972.
Berry, Jeff. Beachbum Berry Remixed. San Jose, CA: Club Tiki, 2010.
Delaplane, Stanton. “Around the World with Delaplane.” Long Beach (CA) Independent Press-Telegram, October 2, 1955, 148.
“Something About an Island.” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, February 4, 1953, 30.
Trader Vic’s. “Let’s Get the Record Straight on the Mai Tai.” Trader Vic’s press release, San Francisco, 1970.
By: Jeff Berry
Selling the drink / selling the dream, ca. 1960.
Courtesy of Jeff Berry.
Selling the drink / selling the dream, ca. 1960. Source: Courtesy of Jeff Berry.