{"id":6504,"date":"2026-09-15T14:34:02","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T12:34:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=6504"},"modified":"2026-09-15T14:34:02","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T12:34:02","slug":"escaping-the-real-world-with-tiki","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=6504","title":{"rendered":"Escaping the Real World with Tiki"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The end of summer can be tough. The year\u2019s weekend has ended. The sun abandons us in the west, packs up his rays and goes on a six-month hiatus to Australia. Those days of swimming, and slow, easier afternoons in a beer garden are over. The bathing suit and the sunscreen are loaded into a box labelled \u2018please God no\u2019 and stuck up on a shelf until next June.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the meantime, semesters start, managers awake out of a glazed torpor to order you around, and companies make a sudden drive towards the end of the year. Reality comes pouring in with September. And since September hath thirty days, we are right smack dab in the middle of that reality sandwich.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What to do?  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We lie to ourselves. OK, delude. OK, lie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The autumnal equinox isn\u2019t until September 23rd<\/sup>, which means we still have eight days to lie to ourselves without being called into a room and ambushed by friends and family as they read letters to us. It is within this mood of summer \u2018escapism\u2019 that we look to America\u2019s brief love affair with Tiki culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The West\u2019s obsession with Polynesia dates back to the 1700s and starts in England. James Cook went off to the Pacific and came back with vibrant descriptions of exotic islands like Tahiti and Hawaii. Artists who had been along for the trip, like William Hodges and John Webber, provided Europeans with colorful proof of the explorer\u2019s tales. Their depictions of brown people living in lush greenery under blue skies spurred the imagination of white people living in dank cities under gray skies. They saw the Garden of Eden. And bosoms.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the 1800s, the Brits are living to work. They\u2019re toiling for little money, which is then being pilfered from them by any number of collectors: bill, rent, tax. There are prisons specifically for people in debt. And along come writers like Herman Melville and Robert Louis Stephenson who spin tales of adventure in exotic locales. Factories and industrialization had done their damage, leaving a British society obsessed with money and property. And here are people living in the islands under a permanent sun. They live simply, in peace, they don\u2019t worry about money, don\u2019t own things, and don\u2019t mind showing off their bathing-suit bits. And the West was suddenly teeming with romantic, misplaced, simplistic fantasies of adventure, pleasure, and unencumbered sex amongst native peoples who didn\u2019t know what toilets or money were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem is, it\u2019s not at all true. In the first place, treating Polynesia as one society is like thinking everyone in Europe speaks one language. It\u2019s the sort of stupid assumption one might make by an American elected president in 2024. Polynesia isn\u2019t governed by one chilled-out guy who smokes a lot of hash and eats Cheetos. The islands are made up of complex people living in complex societies; their social mores \u2013 sexual and all \u2013 are based on a number of careful and complex factors. The west had made a fantasy out of various Polynesian cultures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nevertheless, the pareo\u2014wearing-genie was out of the bottle. Wrong or not, people in the West become hooked on the idea of the islands. They represented a place far away from the problems they faced in the west. There, you didn\u2019t have to wake up for work, or drive to work, or work. You just chilled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it\u2019s another South Pacific traveller who brings Polynesia to America. Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt (heretofore Donn Beach) spent his college money traveling around the world, finding a special affinity for the island cultures in the South Pacific and the Caribbean. He returned to Los Angeles in the early 1930s to find work and did so making movie sets. It\u2019s with the discarded junk and hodge podge of back room refuse that he opened Don the Beachcomber in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Donn Beach is more than a bar hack. He understands that the country has just come through Prohibition and it now in the Depression. So he doesn\u2019t just open a bar, he creates a bamboo-gated haven decorated with tropical plants, fake palm trees, and big masks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Never mind the fact that he wasn\u2019t really attempting to reproduce an authentic Tahitian bar. Or the fact that the Tahitians didn\u2019t really drink. Or the fact that all of the things that he dug out of dusty prop rooms had nothing to do with any of the cultures in the Pacific. He knew that the things he chose would be those things Americans already associated with the exotic tropics and the imaginary South Seas universe. Grass skirts, long-chinned masks with round eyes, coconut bras for men or women (in Tiki, who cares?!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His faux-Polynesian village becomes the haven of the famous, the busy, the worried. Just like the artists and writers of 19th<\/sup> century England, he creates an escape from the rough and tough real world. But he has something Herman Melville didn\u2019t: fancy, colorful, fruit-filled cocktails made with enough rum to bring down a herd of Ernest Hemingways.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Why rum? Lots of reasons. Post-Prohibition America is short on distilleries. Mid-Depression America is short on money. Rum is cheap, rum comes from nearby Cuba, rum can be mixed into fruity concoctions to convey island joy and strolls on the beach, not like whiskey which conveys city angst and sprints from gunfire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s in this way that rum plays its part in the imaginary universe of Tiki bars. Though the Pacific islands had sugarcane, they did not make rum. Rum becomes marries to Polynesia in American Tiki culture. As he knew with grass skirts and coconut bras, Donn Beach knew that Americans would associate rum with sailors, pirates, tropical ports, and exotic travel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it works, too. His inventions will become the second wave of American cocktails. His punch recipes and fusion of rum, multiple citrus juices, sweeteners, spices, and fruit will be unlike anything has ever tasted in America before. And they will love it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then comes a little tiff we call World War II. Donn Beach puts his money where his hollowed-out pineapple was and joined the army air forces to go defend the land that he loved. Except he gets sent to Europe. After he\u2019s injured in a U-Boat attack, someone recognizes his genius and he\u2019s made the operator of officer rest-and-recreation centers. He creates some of the Air Corps\u2019 best themed cocktail (including the Test Pilot and the immediate ancestor of the Mai Tai called the Q.B. Cooler). He gets to flex his hospitality muscles setting up rest camps for combat-weary airmen of the 12th and 15th Air Forces in Capri, Nice, Cannes, the French Riviera, and Sorrento. While Donn is helping with the recovery of soldiers in the European theater, there\u2019s a whole other war happening. Whether he knows it or not, it\u2019s this war that is going to help his Tiki bars explode after the war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that\u2019s just what happens. Along with their crippling PTSD, wounds, and chlamydia, soldiers who served in the Pacific also bring home stories and souvenirs of south sea adventures. James Michener\u2019s Tales of the South Pacific<\/em> wins a Pulitzer in 1947. The same year, Thor Heyerdahl navigates a bamboo boat called Kon-Tiki (it\u2019s right in the name) across 4,300 miles of the Pacific before wrecking into the Raroia Atoll. South Pacific<\/em> is on Broadway in 1949 and it\u2019s a movie in 1959. Everyone sings Bali Hai. Nobody knows what it means. It doesn\u2019t matter. Hawaii becomes a state in 1959.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And for about two decades, Tiki blows up across America. Otherwise button-down accountants wear brightly-colored shirts and after three Zombies will put on the grass skirt of their waitstaff. Bars with bamboo walls, carved wooden poles, Tiki masks, exotic plants, Hawaiian music, palm trees, go up all over America. The drinks are huge and potent and served in hollowed-out coconuts. The Zombie. The QB Cooler. The Scorpion. Missionary\u2019s Downfall. The Jet pilot. They all help two generations of Americans let loose and private wish for a good lei with their waiter. In between those moments, Americans wonder where the ukelele and the slide guitar have been their whole lives. These bars become a localized Eden. And Americans liked it so much that they built and then decorated similar bars in their backyards and basements for fifteen years.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not the first time in history we\u2019ve seen escapism in bars. Hell, if you go back to the neolithic caves where uncovered barley was creating the world\u2019s first booze, I\u2019m sure Nog and Mog decorated for mammoth season. And the Tiki bar just picks up on the need to go somewhere else for a drink. It offers what the grotesque theme bars of the Belle Epoque offered: escape. But while the theme bars in early-20th<\/sup> century France offered themes like heaven, hell, and mental asylum, Tiki offered unadulterated Eden. Where the Belle Epoque offered a place to bend your brain, Tiki bars offered a place to calm your mind. Where the Belle Epoque poured champagne and Absinthe, Tiki bars offered cocktails so strong customers were often limited to just two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though Tiki bars revived a bit in the 1980s, Donn Beach and Trader Vic\u2019s vision of a Polynesian escape petered out in the late 1960s. This is when the boomers struck out on their alcoholic own and wanted nothing to do with the d\u00e9cor and drinking habits of their parents. We have no such reservations, which is why we are going to drink Mai Tais.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Mai Tai dates to 1944, when Victor \u201cTrader Vic\u201d Bergeron created it at his Oakland restaurant. It is arguably a descendent (i.e. ripped off) of Donn Beach\u2019s QB Cooler, but with the benefit that you don\u2019t have to buy 14 obscure syrups that you will use once. Trader Vic\u2019s creation also comes during one of Tiki\u2019s most important evolutionary steps: World War II. For if Americans don\u2019t fight in the Pacific and Michener doesn\u2019t write Tales of the South Pacific, there\u2019s a good chance Tiki bars become a small quirk relegated to a dusty corner of bar and restaurant lore. But instead, the postwar fascination with the South Pacific (misguided perhaps) moved Tiki into the American mainstream. And so it was that the Greatest Generation spent two decades in Hawaiian shirts getting well hogged on fruity drinks sitting in hollowed-out pineapples and wearing umbrellas as little hats. Nothing better to ring out the summer that with the Mai Tai.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ingredients<\/p>\n\n\n\n