After college, I moved back to Langhorne, PA in desperate search of a job. I wanted something I had trained for. Something on a newspaper or a local magazine. What I wanted was to start a career in writing and editing. What I got was Kahunaville.
Kahunaville was a themed bar & restaurant, done up to look as though you’d just walked into the exotic rainforest where they were filming Jurassic Park. It would have simply been a rainforest but for the droves of confused-looking white guys in khakis. Also it was in the Oxford Valley Mall, so the Sunglass Hut visible from the bar sort of smashed the effect. Attempting to immerse the clientele was the occasional and abrupt screech of a kookaburra and water fountain shows set to music – as if those things happen in the real rainforest all the time. If that wasn’t enough to make the diners choke on their burgers, then the hourly bar-top dance-party the staff were forced to endure surely did the trick. It definitely did it for me. I lasted two weeks before disappearing on Halloween night on a search for a wig that has yet to end.
For ages, people have been drinking in theme bars. People have sipped cocktails while mermaids swam around a tank behind the bar. Others have pounded mugs of mead while men in armor battled in an arena near a hotdog stand. Business lunches have been held at Hooters, Golden Oldies, and inside giant replicas of the human heart. For generations, kids have been searing their lips off with pizza cheese while animatronic hillbilly animals play a jamboree at Chuck E. Cheese, no doubt instigating at least three lifelong fears in one blast.
Anyone who has been handed a butter beer from a guy with a wand tucked into his pants has wondered where this whole theme bar thing started. Well, they can thank the good folks of the Belle Epoque.
The Belle Epoque (the beautiful era) was the period of enlightenment, cultural and artistic flourishment, and innovation in Europe and France after the Franco-Prussian War and before World War I. In a rose-colored-glasses hindsight that’s making most of the world’s leaders act like real assholes at the moment, the Epoque is now seen as a time of joie de vivre and optimism.
Surely it wasn’t all great, untold thousands lived in squalor. A similar quotient of society had had their lives ruined by the most recent war. And little did anyone know the next one was going to be a doozy. But Parisians had the Moulin Rouge, burlesque, and cabarets. There were booming brasseries, where hot women wearing dinner napkins as dresses would outdrink you at your table then take you to a room for an, uh, ‘encounter’.
You’d think the people of Paris would find this enough to keep them busy until they had to go fight in World War I. But no. In Paris, and Montmartre in particular, artistic and cultural movements were changing the city and society. The place teemed with performers and artists. Parisians were suddenly interested in exoticism and escapism. They didn’t want a meal, they wanted a French meal in a Japanese-decorated restaurant with French waiters. They wanted experience and spectacle. And the collision of an optimistic society questioning its limits along with bold innovations in technology and design gave rise to places to quench that thirst.
What resulted were the first theme bars.
In Montmartre, in the 1890s, were the three ‘cafes of the beyond’. Three cabarets that brought together the too-long overlooked combination of drinking and the afterlife. The Cabaret du Ciel (Cabaret of Heaven) was decked out to resemble heaven. Patrons were greeted by Saint Peter, who also sprinkled holy water on them as they drank their way to cheery oblivion. There was harp music, beer, and the master of the ceremonies was dressed as a priest. Plays were put on about the joys of heaven and angels played music. For reasons better left to the annals of history, parts of Dante’s Inferno were reenacted, but since it was heaven we have to assume they only did the lighthearted parts of the inferno.
Should someone tire of this particular afterlife, they could walk directly next door through the literal jaws of Satan and enter the Cabaret de L’Enfer (Cabaret of Hell). Naturally, the devil greeted them at this afterlife cabaret and warned those coming in ‘enter and be damned!’ Mephistopheles made a cameo here and there. The mood was similarly tongue in cheek to heaven’s cabaret; waiters in devil suits and red imps served customers and almost certainly wondered where in life they had gone wrong. Both cabarets used mirrors and lighting to create spooky otherworldly effects that I’m sure went over well with the absinthe drinkers.
The employees stuck to the script with dedicated gusto. If someone ordered ‘A black coffee spiked with cognac’ it would have been relayed through devilish channels as ‘A seething bumper of molten sins, with a dash of brimstone intensifier!’ I’m sure people got the point. They had walked through Satan’s mouth to get in the place and Mephistopheles was at the next table pounding cognac, so we can assume the place’s strong suit wasn’t subtlety.
If you weren’t interested in life after death as much as just death, down the road you had the Cabaret du Néant (Cabaret of Nothingness). This café had a decidedly different flavor than its neighbors. Patrons were greeted by a monk and led through a dark hall to the drinking area, where the waiters were dressed as undertakers. Paintings of people on the walls would transform into skeletons and the magic tricks here involved people getting into coffins in white shrouds and turning into skeletons.
In the ‘Salle d’Intoxication’ people drank out of cups shaped like human skulls at tables shaped like coffins beneath a chandelier of human bones. I’m sure they took great advantage of the fact that the word ‘bières’ in French means both beer and coffin. As for the décor, it was heavy on the skeletons, gore, death, and corpses. Just imagine the bedroom of a twelve-year-old who’s just discovered goth. As one patron noted ‘The walls were decorated with skulls and bones, skeletons in grotesque attitudes, battle-pictures, and guillotines in action. Death, carnage, [and] assassination were the dominant note.’
In other words – drink up!
These weren’t the only themed bars. There was a Café of the Penitentiary, which was like eating in the dining hall of a prison and customers were served by prisoners with fake weights chained to their ankles. The Cabaret of Truants, decorated like a medieval hostel, customers were served by witches and troubadours. This sounds pleasant enough until you learn that the outer wall had giant spiders crawling all over it – enough to not only keep me away from the cafe, but to keep me away from France.
By the 1940s, the French had lost their taste for spectacle while drinking. They also had menage a trois, Gauloises, and Adolf Hitler to keep them busy. The theme restaurant moved across to America and took hold there. We had The Pirates Den in Greenwich Village, The Death Row Diner, where each cocktail is some tortured version of ‘your last order’. After World War II, movies about the Pacific theater – such as the musical South Pacific and not so much the ones with actual carnage – sparked an interest in Tiki culture. Soon, every suburban household in the 1950s had a Tiki bar in its backyard. Exotically colored drinks wearing little umbrellas as hats didn’t hurt either.
As I see it, the theme bar is the mystery novel of the drinking world. Sure, you could set it in a British village, Hell, or rainforests with screeching kookaburras and depressed waiters, but you’re still going there to do the same thing: get hammered.
With that in mind, let’s make a cocktail. The drinks at the Cabaret du Néant were just as disturbing as you’d imagine them to be. ‘One microbe of Asiatic cholera from the last corpse, one leg of a lively cancer, and one sample of our consumption germ!’ Now, I like Asiatic cholera in my drinks as much as the next man and who doesn’t like his cancer to be lively, but let’s take a different direction.
Tonight, we are drinking a Mai Tai – a delicious little cocktail that graced American backyards in the 1950s and 1960s, led to thousands of fallings-out with neighbors, millions of hangovers, and countless divorces. Plus, there’s no cholera or cancer, lively or otherwise, in this recipe.
Ingredients:
– 2 oz aged Jamaican rum (or any rum)
– ¾ oz fresh lime juice
– ½ oz orange curaçao
– ¼ oz orgeat syrup (almond syrup)
– ¼ oz simple syrup
– Garnish (lime shell, fresh mint, an paper umbrella, a fork – who cares)
Instructions:
Crush some ice. This is a great activity if you are angry. It’s cold and needs to be smashed. Then shake all the ingredients with that crushed ice. After that, pour (unstrained) into a rocks glass or an old-fashioned Tiki mug. A Donald Duck mug you found under the deck also works, we got an agenda and we don’t got all the time in the world. Garnish with whatever you want. If you want to make sure the job’s done right, top the drink with some dark rum. Drink three to go to heaven, drink 5 to go to nothing, and drink 7 to go to hell. If I see you there, then your first seething bumper of molten sins with a dash of brimstone intensifier is on me!
