tiki is a catch-all term not only for tiki drinks—faux-Polynesian punches and cocktails, mostly rum-based, with exotic flavorings and theatrical garnishes—but for the entire tiki pop culture boom engendered by those drinks, which from its inception in 1934 to its 1960s peak grew to encompass faux-Polynesian music, fashion, dining, interior design, and commercial architecture. This phenomenon is unique in cocktail history: usually a pop culture trend inspires a drink trend (à la Sex and the City and the Cosmopolitan cocktail), but in tiki’s case the drinks came first.
Where did these drinks originate? From the mind of one man, who single-handedly created the tiki bar and the tiki drink. Just a few weeks after Prohibition ended, a former bootlegger named Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt—alias Donn Beach—opened Don the Beachcomber’s, a tiny South Seas–themed bar in a Hollywood hotel lobby. See Beach, Donn; and Prohibition and Temperance in America. In his earlier travels to Jamaica, he’d met his mixological muse: the Planter’s Punch, which became the foundation for over sixty of his groundbreaking original recipes, from the Tahitian Punch and the Zombie to the Pearl Diver and the Missionary’s Downfall. See Planter’s Punch and Zombie.
Like most classic Caribbean drinks, such as Cuba’s Daiquiri and Martinique’s Ti’ Punch, the Planter’s Punch has only three ingredients: rum, lime, and sugar. See
Tiki drinks, then, are essentially Caribbean drinks “squared” or “cubed.” With their multiple layers of flavor, their house-made syrups and tinctures, and their fresh fruit, spices, and herbs, Beach’s drinks were the first post-Prohibition culinary craft cocktails—sixty years before that terminology existed.
Instead of craft cocktails, Beach called these drinks his “rhum rhapsodies.” Over the years they became known in the trade as “exotic cocktails,” or “exotics” for short. (Only recently have twenty-first-century cocktail writers reclassified them as “tiki drinks”). By any name, in 1934 this was a new and exciting concept for American drinkers, especially after the devolution of mixology imposed by thirteen years of Prohibition, and in no time Beach’s tiny bar was crammed with movie stars and millionaires. In 1937 he opened a larger restaurant across the street from his original location, and its phenomenal success launched the tiki trend that would increasingly come to co-opt American leisure time for the next forty years.
Rival restaurateurs copied Beach’s South Seas decor and got his recipes by poaching his bartenders. Beach tried to stop employee theft by encrypting his recipes—replacing ingredient names with numbers that matched the labels on the bottles behind his bar—and by suing rivals who put his drinks on their menus. But by the late 1930s there were over 150 Polynesian-themed bars and restaurants serving his drinks, often changing the names to avoid Beach’s lawyers (the Missionary’s Downfall, for example, was variously known as the Padre’s Pitfall and the Apostle’s Breakdown).
Beach’s most successful rival refused to resort to thievery. “I didn’t know a damn thing about that kind of booze,” Victor Jules “Trader Vic” Bergeron wrote in his autobiography, “and I thought I’d like to learn.” He traveled to the Caribbean to study the art of tropical mixology, as Beach had before him. When Vic returned to his Oakland restaurant with this new knowledge, he transformed himself from an imitator to an innovator. He found his own mixological style, creating variations on the Daiquiri in much the same way that Beach had riffed on the Planter’s Punch. In short order Vic hatched the Scorpion, the Fog Cutter, and the Mai Tai, three drinks which became as popular as Beach’s rhum rhapsodies. See Bergeron, Victor “Trader Vic”; Fog Cutter; and Mai Tai.
Tiki’s growth from a drink trend to a lifestyle trend began with the end of World War II and the return of American servicemen from the actual South Pacific. No matter how horrific their combat experience there, most of them had fond memories of Hawaii, which served as a transshipment center for fresh troops arriving from the mainland and veterans bound for home. To relive their Hawaiian idyll, they flocked to faux-Polynesian restaurants in their home towns, paying for their Pukka Punches with the spoils of the postwar manufacturing boom. When Pacific vet James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific became a smash Broadway musical in 1949, new tiki boîtes across the country named themselves after Michener’s mythical island, Bali Hai; still more named themselves after Pacific explorer Thor Heyerdahl’s bestselling 1957 book Aku-Aku. By the time Hawaii became the fiftieth state in 1959, the entire United States was infected with tropical fever. Not just restaurants but bowling alleys (Kona Lanes), amusement parks (Tiki Gardens), hotels and apartment buildings (Outrigger Inn, Aloha Arms), even clothing stores (Boutiki) went tiki as suburbanites dressed in Hawaiian shirts, listened to modern-primitive “exotica” music LPs, and held backyard luaus with drinks made from instant Mai Tai mix bought at their local supermarket.
The ascendancy of Polynesian pop culture encouraged more and more restaurateurs to go tiki, which meant increased competition for customers, which meant ever more elaborate interior decor. To “build a better mousetrap,” as Trader Vic put it in an Oakland Tribune interview, owners often hired Hollywood art directors to stoke the fantasy that patrons were drinking by moonlight in a South Seas island grotto, complete with indoor waterfalls and dawn-to-dusk lighting changes. The drinks also became increasingly theatrical. In an effort to outshine their rivals, tiki bartenders put their punches in bespoke ceramic tiki mugs and communal bowls, encased them in ice shells, set them aflame, or shrouded them in a dry-ice-induced vapor cloud to suggest a smoking volcano.
Technicolor drinks served in movie-set bars: it sounds gimmicky, and it was. But it was also just what Americans needed to distract them from the stifling middle-class conformity and political paranoia of the Eisenhower era, not to mention the daily reminder of possible nuclear annihilation as the Cold War heated up in the Kennedy years.
In the early 1980s, the Mai Tai gave way to the Margarita and the Zombie to the Screaming Orgasm. Tiki bartenders scattered to the four winds, taking their secret knowledge with them. But with the current global craft cocktail renaissance, a new generation has rediscovered and embraced tiki’s complexity and theatricality. Mai Tais and Zombies are once again popping up on drink menus across the United States and Europe, along with original new tiki concoctions by contemporary mixologists, and tiki bars are once again luring crowds into their artificial paradises.
But faux Polynesia has new rough seas to weather in the twenty-first century. With US sociopolitical divides widened by the Trump administration, tiki has found itself caught in the crossfire of the culture wars. On the left, social justice advocates condemn Polynesian pop for appropriating and exploiting the sacred religious and cultural artifacts of Pasifika peoples. On the right, neo-Nazi activists have in turn appropriated Polynesian pop itself, marching in aloha shirts while brandishing tiki torches along with their automatic rifles and racist placards. Ironically, a tropical cocktail culture founded on escape from the modern world now finds itself smack dab in the middle of it. If there was ever a time for tropaholics to anesthetize with a Zombie or a Painkiller, this is surely it.
See also Bergeron, Victor “Trader Vic”; Beach, Donn; and craft cocktail.
Bergeron, Victor J. Frankly Speaking: Trader Vic’s Own Story. New York: Doubleday, 1973.
Berry, Jeff. Beachbum Berry’s Potions of the Caribbean. New York: Cocktail Kingdom, 2014.
Berry, Jeff. Beachbum Berry’s Sippin’ Safari. San Jose, CA: Club Tiki, 2007.
MacKenzie, Bob. “Trader Vic Bergeron: ‘Who Cares About the Past?’” Oakland Tribune, September 29, 1976.
By: Jeff Berry