TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Tikipalooza: Umbrella Drinks Resume Their Reign

Tribune illustration by DAVID WILLIAMS

Fruit. Torches. Tropical gods. This is one potent and perennial pleasure.

ADVERTISEMENT

By JEFF HOUCK | The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 17, 2008

Few food euphemisms are more derisive than calling a cocktail an ''umbrella drink.''

The phrase conjures images of oily cruise ship passengers sucking down hypersweet cocktails while lolling in the sun on the Lido Deck and gnawing on chewy chunks of fruit plucked from the rim of the glass.

To Jeff ''Beachbum'' Berry, the story of the umbrella drink that symbolizes the tiki and Polynesian craze of the 1950s and '60s is a tale about efficiency.

Berry is the author of ''Beachbum Berry's Grog Log'' (SLG Publishing, $9.95), hailed by The New York Times as the world's first ''serious tiki cocktail book.'' He also serves on the advisory board of the Museum of the American Cocktail in New York City and New Orleans.

Berry says a man named Harry Yee started using paper umbrellas in drinks in the late 1950s. As the head bartender at the Hawaiian Village Hotel in Waikiki, Yee was responsible for creating new drinks. He served mai tais adorned with orchids and a sugar-cane sticks. But the combination didn't work out so well.

''What would happen is that people would take the sugar cane and orchid out and put them in the ashtray,'' says Berry, who in May presented a beachfront cocktail seminar during the Tampa Bay Wine & Food Festival.

''Harry had to clean out all these ashtrays that were sticky and messy, so he came up with the idea of garnishing with a paper parasol because it wouldn't be yucky to clean up after at the end of the night,'' Berry says. ''[The umbrella] really became the tiki drink icon. Now people just call them umbrella drinks.''

Tropical drinks have gone in and out of style for 70 years, but their fruity flavors are making a comeback with a generation raised on sweet sodas and juice drinks. Also, growth in the consumption of premium rums is spurring bartenders to rediscover the classic recipes for mai tais, daiquiris and grogs, as well as to create their own new concoctions.

BIRTH OF THE TIKI

In 1934, just after Prohibition ended, Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt, who later changed his name to Donn Beach and went by the nickname Don the Beachcomber, opened his tiki bar in Hollywood, Calif. Prior to that time, whiskey and gin had been the choice of elite drinkers. Rum was considered lowbrow hooch imbibed by rummies, stew bums and sailors.

After Prohibition, rum was plentiful and dirt cheap at 40 to 70 cents a quart. Beach, who had been to Jamaica and other Caribbean islands in the '20s, ''basically turned it into all these fantasias that were based on the old Planter's Punch formulas, with rum, sugar, lime and maybe some bitters in there,'' Berry says.

After Hollywood stars such as Charlie Chaplin, Howard Hughes, Marlene Dietrich and Orson Welles flocked to Beach's bar, the trend took off up the coast at Trader Vic's in the San Francisco area.

''You had the West Coast teeming with the high-end fur-coat crowd in the tiki vibe,'' Berry says.

POST-WAR POLYNESIA

In the '30s, only the rich could afford to travel. Going to Beachcomber's or Trader Vic's was like an exotic minivacation. Then in the '40s, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, American troops got to visit the Pacific, stopping first in Hawaii.

After the war, ''they brought those memories home with them, and that created the second wave of tiki popularity,'' Berry says. ''James Michener published 'Tales of the South Pacific,' and the country went crazy for anything Polynesian. This time, it had more of a blue-collar vibe.''

COFFEE, TEA OR TIKI?

Hawaii's statehood in 1959, coupled with the advent of long-distance jet travel and cheap cruises to the island chain, spurred the second revival of tropical culture that lasted through the mid-1970s. Opportunists jumped at the craze, creating Polynesian resorts, copying architectural styles and transforming island fashion into casual wear.

One remnant from that era is the Mai-Kai restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, with outrigger canoes hanging from the ceiling, dancers twirling fire-tipped batons and a sunken-ship bar with water streaming down the windows to make you think you are at the bottom of the ocean.

The craze extended to the Tampa Bay area. The Hawaiian Village resort in Tampa offered ''Hawaii in Tampa.'' Tiki Gardens in Indian Rocks Beach promised ''strange gods'' and ''South Seas Magic.''

''California and Florida were the two states most tiki-crazed,'' Berry says.

MAI TAI MYSTERY

The iconic tiki drink is the mai tai.

''Almost everyone has had one, and almost everyone has had one made improperly,'' Berry says. ''It's really an abused formula.''

Demand for the drink during its heyday in the 1950s and '60s was high, but recipes varied from bartender to bartender, each of whom protected his or her secret mixes for job security.

''If a bartender didn't know how to make it, he'd just wing it with some rum, some pineapple and some grenadine to make it red,'' Berry says. ''You could have 200 variations of that drink that bear no resemblance to the real thing, and people just don't seem to care, even though there's no pineapple in a real mai tai.''

CLASSIC TIKI DRINKS

Summer is here. It's time to sample a taste of the islands.

The key to a tiki drink, Jeff ''Beachbum'' Berry says, is finding a balance between the sweetness of fruity syrups and the sour tartness of the citrus.

''Balance also is achieved by dark and heavy rums,'' he says. ''All those elements are yin and yang balancing each other out. Made right, you have no idea what's in the drink, other than a harmonious balance of ingredients.''

MAI TAI

(From Trader Vic's, Oakland, Calif., 1944. Created by Trader Vic.)

1 ounce fresh lime juice

1/2 ounce orange curacao

1/4 ounce sugar syrup

1/4 ounce orgeat syrup

1 ounce aged Jamaican rum

1 ounce aged Martinique rum

Shake ingredients vigorously with crushed ice. Pour unstrained into a double old-fashioned glass. If necessary, add more crushed ice to fill glass.

Garnish: Sink a spent lime shell into drink. Top with a fresh mint sprig.

NAVY GROG

(From Don the Beachcomber's, Hollywood, Calif., circa 1941. Created by Donn Beach.)

3/4 ounce fresh lime juice

3/4 ounce grapefruit juice

3/4 ounce soda water

1 ounce honey mix (equal parts honey and water, heated until honey dissolves)

1 ounce white Puerto Rican rum

1 ounce dark Jamaican rum

1 ounce Demerara rum

Shake ingredients vigorously with ice cubes. Strain into a double old-fashioned glass with ice cone around straw.

Note: To make Navy Grog Ice Cone, pack a footed pilsner glass with finely shaved ice, run a chopstick through the middle to make a hole for the straw, and then gently remove cone from glass. Freeze cone overnight. When ready to serve, return ice cone to glass and run straw through cone. Drink is sipped through straw.

DERBY DAIQUIRI

(From the Mai-Kai restaurant, Fort Lauderdale, 1959. Created by Mariano Licudine.)

1 ounce fresh orange juice

1/2 ounce fresh lime juice

1/2 ounce sugar syrup

11/2 ounces white Puerto Rican rum

A handful of crushed ice

Put ingredients in a blender and blend at high speed for 30 seconds. Pour unstrained into a cocktail glass.

SAMOAN TYPHOON

(From the Hawaiian Village Motel and Restaurant, Tampa, 1969. Created by chef Joe King Sui. A giant Easter Island statue with a flaming head crouched at the entrance to the motel, which promised guests ''a bit of Hawaii in Tampa.'')

1 ounce honey mix (see Navy Grog above)

4 ounces fresh lime juice

2 ounces unsweetened pineapple juice

2 ounces orange juice

2 ounces passion fruit syrup

4 ounces gold Puerto Rican rum

1 ounce dark Jamaican rum

11/2 ounces vodka

2 cups (16 ounces) crushed ice

Dissolve honey mix in lime juice, then place in a blender with all other ingredients (saving the ice for last). Blend for 15 seconds. Pour unstrained into a large snifter with two straws. Add ice cubes to fill. Serves two.

Garnish: Pineapple slices speared to maraschino cherries.

OUR 4 FAVORITE TIKIS

1. Tiki Gardens: This beloved but now-defunct Indian Rocks Beach tourist trap offered a slice of Polynesia in Florida.

2. ''Kon Tiki'': Thor Heyerdahl's book about floating through the Pacific Ocean was a great read.

3. The Enchanted Tiki Room: Who can resist Disney World's animatronic singing toucans? Not us.

4. Tiki Barber: Enough said.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT