The Spirit World

Tiki drinks can often bring to mind a silly rum enhanced juice laden libation sporting a paper parasol, and often festooned with various bits of fruit and greenery. You out grew these sorts of drinks back in your college days. Truth be told, these faux tropical concoctions really hold a hallowed position amongst the ranks of culinary cocktails, or at least should, when they are made with the skill, craftsmanship, and most importantly the quality ingredients with which they were originally conceived.

Jeff Berry, also known as “Beachbum Berry” (or just “the bum”), has long been hailed as the ceaseless evangelist and historian for all drinks tiki, or “Exotic Drinks” as he informs us they should be more precisely referred to.

Jeff has penned three books in the past, “Beachbum Berry’s Grog Log”, “Beachbum Berry’s Intoxica”, and “Beachbum Berry’s Taboo Table”. All of which provide a wonderful snapshot of the various recipes where were the hallmark of many of the legendary, and in most cases long gone, Polynesian inspired restaurants. These first three books were printed rather simply, with a spiral ring binding, and were a tad light in the manner of any background information or details. Thankfully, Jeff has decided to deal with this problem quite solidly in his most recent book “Beachbum Berry’s Sippin’ Safari”. This new book is filled not only with glossy color photos, but a wealth of information about the origins, evolution, and the eventual near extinction, of the “Tiki” restaurant.

The grand tradition of Tiki restaurant and the faux culture it inspired, got its start from Don The Beachcomber, who’s restaurants started in 1934, and gradually spead out from there. This theme was quickly seen by Victor Bergeron as having grand potential, and he renamed his restaurant “Hinky Dink’s” to “Trader Vic’s” and the two tiki power houses were born.

America had just crawled out from under Prohibition, and was anxious to re-discover cocktails. Toward this end Donn Beach built out a cocktail program which was firmly based on rum, with various juices, syrups, and flavorings expertly combined which would all support the tropical getaway ambiance of his “Don the Beachcomber” restaurants. These drinks emphasized the importance of both quality ingredients along with precision measurements and preparation. One taste and the culinary craftsmanship of these drinks are obvious.

As Jeff documents in his book, the very success of the drinks created by Donn Beach and Victor Bergeron, might also have led to their eventual fall from grace. The bartenders who worked at “Don The Beachcomber” were so good at their craft, that they soon found themselves being sought after by other bars. As the bartenders moved on, they carefully guarded their recipes, keeping them in little black books which the restaurant they might be working at would never have access to. Other bartenders would have to simply try to recreate the recipes from scratch, using simply their own palates to guide them, and as you might expect, this usually wasn’t terribly successful. The drink recipes were further obscured by Donn Beach himself. After realizing that his first batch of bartenders were now mixing his recipes elsewhere, he decided to take measures to prevent this from happening in the future. He did this by adding a layer of obscurity to his cocktail recipes. Instead of listing all of the ingredients straight out, he would instead list some of them as things such as “Syrup #4” or “Mix #2”, and the bartenders would pour these ingredients from bottles similarly labeled. Now the bartenders themselves didn’t know what was actually in the recipes they were mixing up, and so when they left for another restaurant, the recipes wouldn’t follow with them.

The problem of course was that this level of secrecy just meant that other bars would attempt to come up with their own recipe, which brings us to where we are today where everybody has their own recipe for drinks such as the Mai Tai, Zombie, or Scorpion, with many of them being fairly sad excuses for a cocktail.

After reading “Sippin’ Safari”, you will have a far better appreciation for the Exotic cocktails of the past, and be ready for re-discovering these wonderful libations. My personal hope is that through the efforts of Jeff Berry and other Tiki aficionados we will see a return of the quality Exotic cocktail, and the fanciful and often fantastic restaurants which they called home.