Tiki and the invented tropics

The tropics in a glass were invented in Los Angeles. Not the rum, which was Caribbean, nor the lime, nor the idea of a cold drink in the heat, which is as old as punch, but the whole picture: the thatch, the carved figures, the drinks with twelve ingredients and a flaming lime shell. It was the work of a few American showmen in the decade after Prohibition, and it borrowed the look of the Pacific from people who were not asked.

A bar off Hollywood Boulevard

Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt was born in 1907, in New Orleans by Difford's account and in Texas by others, and spent his twenties drifting around the Pacific and the Caribbean, collecting carvings and rums and taking the occasional film bit part. He reached Hollywood in 1931, worked as a design consultant on films that needed a South Seas look, and in 1934, the year after Repeal, opened a three-table bar off Hollywood Boulevard decorated with what he had collected on his travels. He called it Don the Beachcomber and eventually changed his own name to match.

The drinks were the point. Gantt, now Donn Beach, had learned the planter's punch formula in Jamaica and built a whole list on it: rum, citrus, sugar and spice, layered with several rums at once, with house syrups whose recipes he wrote in code so his bartenders could not take them elsewhere. The Zombie was his, and it made rum, until then the cheap bootleg spirit, respectable. Film people came, and the look spread.

The Trader

Across the bay from San Francisco, a restaurateur named Victor Bergeron ran a place in Oakland called Hinky Dink's. He saw what Beach had built, and by 1936 had renamed his own place Trader Vic's and refitted it in the Beachcomber style. What he did claim, with some force, was the Mai Tai.

Bergeron's account, which Difford's Guide sets out in detail, is that one evening in 1944 he made a new rum drink for two Tahitian friends, Ham and Carrie Guild, and that Carrie's exclamation on tasting it, which translates roughly as out of this world, gave it its name. The recipe he later published used a seventeen-year-old Jamaican rum, orange curacao, orgeat, rock candy syrup and fresh lime. The drink went to his Seattle branch in 1948, was formalized for the Matson Line's Royal Hawaiian hotel in 1953, and from there became the drink of Hawaiian tourism. In 1972 Bergeron wrote that he originated the Mai Tai and that anyone who said otherwise was, in his phrase, a dirty stinker.

The other claimant was Beach. The strong version of his claim, that he served a Mai Tai in 1933, is reported by Difford's as a claim and nothing more; the softer version, which Jeff Berry's research traces to Beach's own words, is that Bergeron's drink grew out of a Beachcomber punch called the QB Cooler. Fred Fung, Bergeron's executive assistant for forty-one years, conceded that Vic copied the Beachcomber's look and insisted the Mai Tai was Vic's own. Bergeron defended his claim in print for the rest of his life. The drink's flavor profile may owe something to Don.

A hotel in San Juan

The tropical drink's other great success came from a hotel bar, not a tiki bar, and from the Caribbean rather than a Californian idea of the Pacific. In the mid-1950s, by the hotel's own account, a bartender at the Caribe Hilton in San Juan, Ramon Monchito Marrero spent three months refining a drink of rum, cream of coconut and pineapple juice before naming it the Pina Colada. Marrero gives 15 August 1952; the hotel says 1954. Cream of coconut was itself a new product; Marrero's own account has him using the newly available Coco Lopez, which is why the drink could not have existed much earlier in its familiar form. Marrero served it for thirty-five years. Puerto Rico named it the island's official drink in 1978.

Two rival claims survive. Ricardo Garcia, a colleague at the same hotel, said he made it. The Barrachina restaurant in Old San Juan has a plaque crediting Ramon Portas Mingot in 1963. Difford's Guide notes that the drink does not appear in cocktail books until the late 1960s and that a coconut-free Cuban pina colada, a pineapple Daiquiri in all but name, was described in Travel magazine in 1922. All three bartenders may have had a hand in it.

How the tropics reached Singapore

Tiki's reach was long enough to reshape a drink that predated it by forty years. The Singapore Sling, as printed in bar books of 1922, 1930 and 1939, was a gin sling with cherry brandy and Benedictine, with no pineapple juice and no grenadine. The version served today at the Raffles Long Bar is pink, long and fruity, with pineapple juice and grenadine. Difford's Guide ties that recipe to the hotel's relaunch in the 1970s under a new general manager, and notes the skeptics' argument that pineapple and grenadine suited the fashionable pink, tiki-style drinks of the day and were cheaper than imported citrus. The link is an inference, and we present it as one. It is a plausible one. By the 1970s, a tropical hotel drink was expected to look a certain way, and that expectation came from California.

Whose tropics

The critique of tiki has sharpened in recent years. In 2020 Punch published a conversation among three bar professionals of Indigenous and Pacific Islander descent. Their objections are specific. The escape fantasy is colonial nostalgia, a romance of islands with the islanders removed. Carved figures that carry religious meaning in Pacific traditions are turned into mugs and decor, and the participants ask for a thoughtful examination of that habit. The style assumes that Pacific peoples belong to a vanished past, when they are present, employed in the industry, and facing rising seas. And newer bars often open with the decor and none of the research.

Their proposals are also specific: exchange rather than borrowing, honesty about rum's colonial history, and input from the communities whose images are being used. The Fabled Pour takes that seriously. We love the drinks. The rum, the lime, the orgeat and the crushed ice are a real tradition with real authors, mostly American, and we tell their story as theirs. The masks are not ours to use.

Folklore and fact

Fact: the 1934 Hollywood bar, the 1944 Mai Tai account and its 1953 Hawaiian commission, the Caribe Hilton's mid-1950s drink and the 1978 Puerto Rico designation, the Singapore Sling's 1970s makeover. Contested: whether Beach made a Mai Tai in 1933; which San Juan bartender and which year; Barrachina's 1963 claim. Interpretation, labeled as such: that tiki fashion explains the Singapore Sling's pineapple and grenadine.

Sources

• Tiki's rise, fall and revival. Difford's Guide, undated. https://www.diffordsguide.com/encyclopedia/1102/cocktails/tikis-rise-fall-and-revival
• Donn Beach. Difford's Guide, undated. https://www.diffordsguide.com/people/51656/celebrity-drinker/donn-beach
• Mai Tai cocktail and its history. Difford's Guide, undated. https://www.diffordsguide.com/encyclopedia/1257/cocktails/mai-tai-cocktail-and-its-history
• The problem with tiki bars. Punch, 2020. https://punchdrink.com/articles/problem-with-tiki-bars-cultural-appropriation/
• Pina Colada history. Difford's Guide, undated. https://www.diffordsguide.com/encyclopedia/469/cocktails/pina-colada-cocktail
• The birthplace of the Pina Colada. Hilton, undated. https://stories.hilton.com/hilton-history/the-birthplace-of-the-pia-colada
• Singapore Sling. Difford's Guide, undated. https://www.diffordsguide.com/encyclopedia/446/cocktails/singapore-sling
• Mai Tai (Beaumont-Gantt's recipe). Difford's Guide, undated. https://www.diffordsguide.com/cocktails/recipe/1220/mai-tai-beaumont-gantts-recipe
• Donn Beach. Wikipedia, undated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donn_Beach