Tiki

In San Francisco’s Tonga Room—the Rome of surviving tiki bars—a tropical rainstorm regularly stirs up the pool.

(Fairmont Hotels)

How sex, rum, World War II, and the brand-new state of Hawaii ignited a fad that has never quite ended.

In December 1931 a somewhat adrift 24-year-old washed up in Southern California, looking for something to do. A native of New Orleans, he was named Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt. Curious by nature and something of a protobeatnik by choice, he had spent the previous months vagabonding on the cheap through some of the globe’s more humid locales: Jamaica, Australia, Papua New Guinea, the Marquesas Islands, and Tahiti. By the time he got to Los Angeles, his money had run out.

Gantt made do in the Depression economy through his wits and odd jobs—working in restaurants in Chinatown, parking cars at commercial lots, and doing a bit of freelance bootlegging in the months before Prohibition ended. Sociable and charming, he befriended such Hollywood personalities as David Niven and Marlene Dietrich and through them found occasional work as a technical adviser on films set in the South Pacific. Directors evidently were impressed not only by his knowledge of the region but also by his collection of South Pacific artifacts, which could be borrowed for set props.

A couple of years after he arrived in Los Angeles, Gantt happened upon a newly vacated tailor shop just off Hollywood Boulevard. It was small—just 13 feet by 30—but Gantt liked the feel of it, and entered into a five-year lease for $30 per month. He built a bar that would seat about two dozen customers and scattered a few tables in the remaining space. He decorated the place with his South Pacific gewgaws, along with old nets and parts of wrecked boats he scavenged from the oceanfront. He called his watering hole Don the Beachcomber.

He approached his drink menu the same way he approached his décor: with an eye toward frugality. Rum was the least expensive of the spirits, and Gantt had sampled a variety in his travels. He devised an exotic menu of rum-based drinks that complemented his theme and scratched the names on a board behind the bar.

Donn Beach concocts one of his culture-changing rum delicacies.

(Don the Beachcomber)

The combination of Gantt’s engaging personality and the novelty of his drinks proved irresistible to his patrons. Among those first drinks was the Sumatra Kula, which cost a quarter. A well-dressed man named Neil Vanderbilt came in one day and ordered one, then another and another. He said it was the best drink he’d had in years. He was a writer for the New York Tribune, and he soon came back with friends, including Charlie Chaplin. Word of Don the Beachcomberbegan to spread through Hollywood and beyond. “If you can’t get to paradise, I’ll bring it to you,” Gantt told his customers. (It didn’t work for everyone; in July 1936 a wealthy businessman struck and killed a pedestrian with his car, allegedly while driving home after a night at Don the Beachcomber. The driver was Howard Hughes.) By 1937 the restaurant and bar had outgrown the tailor’s shop, and Gantt moved to a larger spot in Hollywood. He added more South Pacific flotsam and imbued the place with a tropical twilight gloom. The joint became so much part of his personality that he legally changed his name. Ernest Gantt was now Donn Beach.

And Donn Beach was the inventor of the tiki bar, a new kind of place that, over the next 30 years, would migrate from the cities to the suburbs and beyond.

Beach’s reign in Los Angeles proved relatively short-lived. When World War II broke out, he was commissioned and, while aboard a convoy bound for Morocco, his ship was attacked by a U-boat. Beach was injured, and after he recovered he spent the remainder of his enlistment doing what he did best: serving up hospitality. The Air Force put him in charge of hotels and restaurants where airmen could rest and recuperate—on Capri and in Venice, on the Lido and on the French Riviera.

Beach’s ex-wife, Cora Irene (“Sunny”) Sund, was left running the business back in California. She proved as natural an entrepreneur as her ex-husband. When Beach returned home, he found that Don the Beachcomber had blossomed into a chain, with a handful of restaurants nationwide. Beach had little to do but sit at the bar and cash his checks. (The chain would eventually grow to 16 locations.) Beach signed on as a consultant and then packed his bags for Hawaii, where he opened his own unaffiliated Don the Beachcomber in an up-and-coming resort area called Waikiki Beach.

His restaurant became an instant landmark, more Hawaiian than most of Hawaii itself. Beach amplified the faux-tropical theme with palms and thatch and a sweeping shingled roof, part space age, part ceremonial Polynesian meetinghouse. The popular arranger and composer Martin Denny played at the restaurant’s Bora-Bora lounge for nine months straight. Beach was often at the bar, a genial host wearing a gardenia lei that, he was quick to reveal, was for sale in the restaurant’s gift alcove. A myna bird presided over the premises, trained to blurt out, “Give me a beer, stupid!” In the boozy intimacy of late evenings, a gentle rain would often begin to patter on the corrugated metal roof over the bar—thanks to a garden hose Beach had installed. (Always the businessman, he had observed that late-night drinkers tended to linger for another round if they thought it was raining outside.)

The hula bowl bore a table’s worth of drinks lapping against the slopes of a flaming volcano.

(Duke Carter Collection)

Donn beach remained a fixture in Honolulu until he died in 1989 at the age of 81. The New York Times ran a brief obituary that painted him as a sort of Thomas Edison of the thatched-roof bar, the inventor of 84 bar drinks, including one immensely enduring libation called the mai tai.

This was not without controversy. “There has been a lot of conversation over the beginning of the mai tai, and I want to get the record straight,” Victor Bergeron, better known as Trader Vic, once said. “I originated the mai tai. Anybody who says I didn’t create this drink is a stinker.”

Victor Jules Bergeron was born in San Francisco in 1903, the son of a French Canadian waiter and grocery-store operator. Before he was six he had survived the great earthquake of 1906 and a ravaging bout of tuberculosis that claimed his left leg. In 1934, with $300 of his own and $800 borrowed from an aunt, he opened a small beer joint and luncheonette in Oakland. It was called Hinky Dinks, and it would likely have come and gone like so many other largely forgettable restaurants, but Bergeron, like Donn Beach, didn’t set low expectations for himself. Prohibition had recently ended, and Bergeron’s customers displayed an uncommon curiosity about cocktails—the more outlandish and inventive, the better. In 1937 Bergeron took a vacation to New Orleans, Trinidad, and Havana and sampled some of the famous cocktails then in fashion, like rum punch in Trinidad and daiquiris made at the legendary El Floridita in Havana. Back in California, Bergeron visited a tropical-themed restaurant called the South Seas that had recently opened in Los Angeles, then went on to visit a place everyone was talking about. It was Don the Beachcomber.

A grinning god in the gardens of the amazing Mai-Kai in Fort Lauderdale.

(James Teitelbaum)

Bergeron headed back to Oakland and set about reinventing his restaurant and himself. He got rid of the name Hinky Dinks (which he concluded was “junky”) and cast around for a new one. His wife pointed out that he was always involved in some deal or trade. Why not Trader Vic’s?

Bergeron hastily spun a whole history to go with his new name: He now told his customers that he had lost his leg to a shark. Like Donn Beach, he filled his newly christened restaurant with South Sea detritus, lined the walls with dried grass mats, used palm tree trunks as columns, and hung fisherman’s floats, masks, and spears—all things that brought to mind the mysterious South Sea Islands, none of which he’d ever visited. Bergeron would take the idea launched by Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt and upon it build an empire.

Trader Vic’s both tapped into the zeitgeist and helped shape it. South Pacific culture had a small but growing hold on the American pop imagination in the 1930s, as the middle class began to embrace a bowdlerized version of an old avant-garde favorite. Primitive art from the South Seas had fascinated the cultural elite since at least the paintings by Paul Gauguin in the late nineteenth century, and through a sort of obscure cultural alchemy, these primitive forms became popularized and marketed in the form of the tiki statue—an outsized carved wooden figure of a human form, often grotesquely exaggerated. It soon took its place in the American living room.

The 1937 Bing Crosby movie Waikiki Wedding introduced more Americans to the exotica in their back yard. Then came World War II, which further directed America’s attention to a little-considered region of the world. When the war ended, returning servicemen brought home stories and snapshots of Pacific lands. Soon came the short stories of a talented naval reservist, who had spent much of his enlistment typing away in a Quonset hut in Vanuatu. He was James Michener, and the book he published was titled Tales of the South Pacific. It won a Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and made it to Broadway as a musical entitled South Pacific, with songs by Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Victor Bergeron pours a drink at Hinky Dinks, before he became Trader Vic and built his chain of restaurants.

(Trader Vic’s)

In 1947 the Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl had set off from the coast of South America on a raft to test his theory that Polynesia had been settled by the Incas; his account, Kon-Tiki, became a runaway bestseller. In 1959 Hawaii joined the Union amid fireworks and hullabaloo, and two years later Elvis added his own brand of fuel to the South Pacific infatuation with his movie Blue Hawaii.

Disneyland opened in 1955, and among its first rides was a Jungle Cruise, in which boats drifted through tropical scenes; a few years later the park’s creator presented an attraction called the Enchanted Tiki Room, where 225 birds chattered and danced among “tiki gods” named Kor, Maui, Pele, Rongo, Tangaroa, and Tangaroa-Ru (this was Disney’s first use of “Audio Animatronic” figures). Aloha shirts took off, driven in part by the ukulele-playing TV host Arthur Godfrey’s fondness for them. If it had thatch and torches and colorful fabrics and little statues (which Donn Beach liked to call his “cannibal gods”), the public wanted more of it.

The American cult of tiki moved into the suburbs and beyond. Apartment buildings, bowling alleys, trailer parks, Laundromats, and corner restaurants were dressed up with tiki heads and masks, rattan walls, dried blowfish, and electric tiki torches.

A growing number of tiki bars and restaurants emerged as landmarks on the American cultural landscape, building and expanding on the foundation laid by Donn Beach and Trader Vic. Here one could briefly enter an exotic world and engage in curious rituals amid hula girls and seductively unfamiliar music. Temples of tiki cuisine cropped up throughout the country to meet the demands of what the tiki historian Sven Kirsten called the “modern primitives.” They offered easy escape for those who didn’t want to drop out of society and play bongo drums all day but weren’t content with the circumscribed life of the “organization man.”

Tiki revival: the pupu platter at Waikiki Wally’s in New York City.

(Wylie Nash)

Customers typically entered the tiki realm by crossing a low bridge or passing through a damp grotto, which offered a gentle transition from the pesky reality outside the door. It took a few moments for one’s eyes to adjust, as the restaurants were often windowless. Who wanted to see the harsh sun, the parking lot, and the road outside? The tiki restaurant existed in a sort of perpetual twilight, lit by propane torches, the fiery eyes of tiki statues, and golden flames licking off the pineapple-and-brown-sugar dishes delivered by a hula girl.

If there was a cult at the tiki palaces, it was that of the tiki drink. Few customers came to the restaurants solely because of the food. (Noting the flaming entrées, the Columbus Dispatch once wrote of the Kahiki that it “is one of the few restaurants in Columbus in which food can injure you.”) The lure was the drinks. Restaurants sought to outhustle one another in concocting the most outrageous cocktails, giving them names like Pele’s Bucket of Fire, Sidewinder’s Fang, Molucca Fireball, Tonga Surfrider, and the Aku-Aku Lapu. (Not all bars showed imagination; many saw fit to name their specialty simply The Mystery Drink.)

Tiki bars marshaled whole stockrooms of custom-made ceramic skulls, pineapples, barrels, Easter Island heads, and statues in which to serve their potions. Specific drinks were reserved for specific vessels; the Deep Six, for instance, was always to be consumed “from the horn of a water buffalo” (or a ceramic facsimile), which was often available in the gift shop.

The mug god is angry.

(Duke Carter Collection)

The competition for the most elaborate drinks led to CIA-level secrecy, chiefly out of fear that a bartender might leave and take prized recipes with him. A 1948 Saturday Evening Post story observed that the bottles at Don the Beachcomber lacked the original labels and had been replaced by new ones with cryptic letters and numbers. Bartenders used coded recipes to mix these anonymous ingredients. “Infinite pains are taken to see to it that the service-bar help cannot memorize Don’s various occult ingredients and proportions,” the Post reported.

The tiki restaurant and the tiki cocktail persisted well into the 1970s—“an unprecedented lifespan for a drink fad,” writes the tiki drink expert Jeff Berry. Still, tiki gradually became tacky. The thatched roofs grew ratty, the hula girls passé, and the drinks too potent and elaborate for an emerging era of white-wine spritzers. In the 1980s the branch of Trader Vic’s in Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel—perhaps the most famous of them all—was shuttered by its owner, Donald Trump, who announced that the restaurant had “gotten tacky.” 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.”

As with many trends pushed to the brink of oblivion, tiki enjoyed a revival in the late 1990s, led by hipsters who took the so-called loungecore movement in a more ironic direction. Tiki mugs that had languished in Salvation Army shops were snapped up and traded on eBay, and tiki aficionados gathered at tiki events and went on road trips to search out the survivors of the era. A surfeit of tiki cocktail guides made their way into print. At the trendy clothing and gew-gaw chain Urban Outfitters, shoppers could buy plastic coconut drink mugs.

Tiki soon became a generic term for anything vaguely tropical. The tiki historian Sven Kirsten has lamented the “Jimmy Buffetization” of tiki. The revival became all about kitsch: the faux-primitive statues, the blowfish lamps, the netting, the thatch over the home tiki bar, the scratchy albums of Martin Denny, whose jungle-rustic instrumentals provided the soundtrack for the tiki heyday in Waikiki Beach.

A luau from the Hawaii Kai in Manhattan. The actual meal almost certainly didn’t include the whole roast pig.

(Richard Snow Collection)

Yet, beneath the gloss of kitsch, a touching sincerity informs many of those who today seek out lost tiki culture, folks who view it not just as a campy safari into the heart of faux-Borneo but as a search for a genuinely lost American civilization. The tiki movement was as every bit as real an era in American history as the House of Kamehameha was in Hawaii.

Efforts to halt our cultural memory loss are well under way. Zines such Otto Von Stroheim’s Tiki News and John Trivisonno’s Mai Tai offer information-dense updates on tiki culture. There are published guidebooks, such as James Teitelbaum’s Tiki Road Trip, and Web sites, like Tiki Central (www.tikiroom.com) and Michelle Whiting’s Critiki.com, that offer reviews and information on some hundreds of tiki-related establishments extant today.

Then there are the tiki scholars, like Kirsten and Jeff Berry. Berry, in particular, has been assiduously documenting and re-creating the actual drinks, long since forgotten, in his Beachbum Berry’s series of guides, including Grog Log and Intoxica!

“With sense of wonder intact,” writes Kirsten in his Book of Tiki, “the Urban Archeologist realizes that one does not always have to search far to explore the mysteries of forgotten ancient traditions, but that strange treasures can lie right in your own neighborhood, hidden under the layers of progress and development.”

Donn Beach and Trader Vic, it turns out, were the Stanley and Livingstone of the mid-century American jungle, blazing a trail deep into the world of pop fantasy and artifice from which America has yet to fully emerge. H

Wayne Curtis is author of And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in 10 Cocktails (just published by Crown, a division of Random House), from which this article is adapted.

A Top 10 Tiki Tour A passionate connoisseur’s choice of the greatest survivors By James Teitelbaum The bar at Hala Kahiki. (James Teitelbaum) What happens when a love of tribal art, mid-twentieth-century pop culture, and good rum drinks all come crashing together? I had never asked that question before, but it was answered for me anyway in 1991, when I discovered my first vintage tiki bar. This, I thought, was truly the place for me. It seamlessly incorporated three favorite recreational pursuits—and in an amusing way. Spending the 1990s on tour with a variety of musical acts—alternately as a keyboard player and as a sound engineer—afforded me an opportunity to visit all the major cities in North America. During all these trips, the search for tiki was a constant. I began to share my discoveries on a Web site beginning in 1995. The site’s popularity suggested a book, which became Tiki Road Trip (Santa Monica Press, 2003). After I had visited over a hundred bars, bowling alleys, restaurants, and strip clubs festooned with ersatz Polynesian fertility symbols, it became clear that a true tiki style could be quantified. The sense of having entered a time warp to a bygone era is key, as is the patina that comes with remaining unrenovated (but not unmaintained) for decades. Actual tikis are mandatory, of course, but what isn’t present is an essential consideration as well. Televisions, neon beer signs, and loud music all take you right out of the fantasy of being in some unspecified far-off land. The line between having fun with tiki and offending living Pacific islanders is a tricky one to walk. It is best to imagine an uncharted island group, somewhere west of Easter Island, north of New Zealand, south of Hawaii, and east of French Polynesia. It is here that we enjoy a dance that resembles the hula—but isn’t. We drink complex rum drinks and never mind that rum is a Caribbean concoction. We carve idols that resemble the deities of the Marquesas, Rapa Nui, or Hawaii—but not exactly. We sing songs about island life, though the indigenous music of any one real island has never been heard here. A passage in the Mai-Kai. (James Teitelbaum) Like the actual Pacific islands, our fantasy archipelago is scattered widely, often with great distances between outposts. You’d need a talented navigator to help you find them all. Until you acquire one (hint: Tiki Road Trip), here’s a primer to the very best. Mai-Kai Restaurant Fort Lauderdale, Florida Celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in 2006 (the big party is during the Hukilau Festival, October 5–8), the Mai-Kai is the real deal—and the last of its kind. A series of large rooms, each named after a different Pacific island, are copiously decorated with a variety of authentic Pacific island artifacts. The floorshow is spectacular, the drinks are wonderful, and the family that owns it is just as enthusiastic about it as they were in 1956. From the lush outdoor gardens to the splendor of the mystery-drink ritual, it simply doesn’t get any better. Hala Kahiki River Grove, Illinois Forty-five minutes from downtown Chicago, this intimate cocktail lounge is everything a great tiki bar should be, with staff in Hawaiian attire, hapa-haole music playing over the sound system, and more than a hundred drinks on the menu. Trader Vic’s Atlanta, Georgia The last of the original Trader Vic’s to open in the United States—in 1976—is a perfect example of why the chain was so successful. You could get lost in the village of intimate little dining rooms, tropical drinks don’t get much better than these, and the food, cooked in Trader Vic’s trademark Chinese ovens, is delicious. Trader Vic’s Emeryville, California Another vintage Trader Vic’s location, packed full of original art and artifacts collected over the past 72 years (the chain originated in 1934). The Atlanta Trader Vic’s. (James Teitelbaum) Tiki-Ti Los Angeles, California This diminutive shack might hold 30 people, and two of them will be Mike and Mike junior, the son and grandson of Ray Buhen, the ex–Don the Beachcomber bartender who founded Tiki-Ti in 1961. Along with Mai-Kai and any Trader Vic’s location, Tiki-Ti completes the holy trinity for those looking for truly outstanding tropical cocktails. The Alibi Portland, Oregon The Alibi is a bit more divey than the rest of the bars on this list, but the amazing sign outside, the pre-tiki history of the place (dating from the nineteenth century), a great mural, and lots of tikis make this one great. Omni Hut Smyrna, Tennessee Forty-five minutes southeast of Nashville sits this lovingly maintained restaurant. Omni Hut has survived a fire, the lack of a liquor license (bringing your own is absolutely allowed), and proximity to pop-country music. Jardin Tiki Montreal, Quebec Located near the Olympic Village in Montreal, this massive restaurant is notable for its turtle pond, many gigantic tikis, and the two-story-high atrium in which you dine. The food is a lackluster Chinese buffet, but you won’t care. It’s all about the ambience. Tonga Room San Francisco, California Visually, the Tonga Room has no peer except the Mai-Kai. Every half hour an indoor rainstorm pours water into the lagoon in the middle of the restaurant, complete with recorded thunder and strobe-lightning. Beautiful woodwork and mushroom-shaped huts make this one a stunner, but the food and drink leave plenty to be desired. Nevertheless, here you revel in an atmosphere of complete escape and relaxation. Tiki Revival: Everywhere! Dozens of new tiki bars have opened in the past decade. A few truly get it. Some of these: Forbidden Island, Alameda, California; Waikiki Wally’s, New York City; and Tiki Terrace, Prospect Heights, Illinois. James Teitelbaum has been writing about tiki since 1994.

A Tiki Bookshelf The tiki civilization has a surprisingly broad literature. Much of it is still in print, but perhaps it’s best to start with the pioneering Trader Vic, whose Trader Vic’s Book of Food and Drink sold so well when it was published in 1946 that it is still available (from, among other places, Abebooks, whose anniversary we marked on page 10 of this issue). Trader Vic’s predecessor is handsomely represented by Hawai’i: Tropical Rum Drinks & Cuisine by Don the Beachcomber, which was actually written by his widow, Phoebe Beach, and Arnold Bitner and published in 2001; it contains dozens of the potions that made him famous. High among Don’s and Vic’s acolytes is Duke Carter, whose Tiki Quest: Collecting the Exotic Past is a lavish compendium of the ceramic skulls and grimacing gods in which the drinks were served. His fellow aficionado Sven A. Kirsten has produced an extremely handsome miscellany titled The Book of Tiki (Taschen Books), which also features the barroom hardware, as well as matchbooks and menus from scores of restaurants, among them the not very imaginatively named Trader Dick’s. Jeff Berry has made a thorough study of everything that crossed bar or table in a tiki restaurant and reveals the results in three books, the most recent being Beachbum Berry’s Taboo Table: Tiki Cuisine From Polynesian Restaurants of Yore. Here you will find the key to making “Chicken of the Gods” (you’ll need half a pound of water chestnut flour) and that sadly neglected delicacy rumaki (chicken livers or oysters wrapped in bacon, secured with a toothpick, and broiled or fried; it was invented by Don the Beachcomber). Finally, if you have read James Teitelbaum’s rundown of the greatest surviving tiki restaurants that accompanies this article, you will know that he is the best possible guide to these imperiled shrines. He’ll help you find the way to the one nearest you in his 2003 Tiki Road Trip: A Guide to Tiki Culture in North America.