One Mai Tai, Hold the Colonialism Please
A string is sometimes called a line.
A line can be written or verbal word-play.
Perhaps a bit of poetry. Or a joke. Even a lie.
It’s meant to provide a mental path down the road the storyteller wants you to go.
So goes the story of tiki culture, in this very interesting article, which uses the line of thinking that tiki drinks and decorations are part of a gross form of cultural appropriation, and furthermore, neo-colonialism.
I have always loved tiki culture—the style, the torches, the elaborate statuesque drinks—and have lamented it’s decades-long demise into unpopularity. Lately, I've been cheering its triumphant return into the world of “cool.”
I am also interested in the subject of cultural appropriation and the effects of tourism on global cultures. So, what’s not to like about an article which combines the two and throws in a drink (or three), compliments of the bar? Nevertheless, I am not sure I am buying what the author, Alicia Kennedy, is selling. Take a sip of this article and decide for yourself.
I was once served a piña colada by the bartender at the Caribe Hilton in San Juan, who claimed that he invented the drink. Of course I did not believe him at the time. I thought it was a line. Turns out to be true.
That’s the thing about good lines—you are never sure if they are true or not.
—Ray Brimble
Illustration by Carolyn Figel, published on Eater.com
One Mai Tai, Hold the Colonialism Please
The next generation of bartenders is working to undo the original sin of tiki
by Alicia Kennedy | originally published by Eater.com on Oct 7, 2019, 1:21pm EDT
No drink conjures a blue ocean, hot sand, and swaying palm trees more vividly than the pina colada. There are no pithy Hemingway or Mencken bromides about the consummate blend of pineapple, coconut, and white rum, but Beyoncé has sung about “pina colada-in’.” There’s also that song, which manages to sound how it feels to drink one — if admittedly more curbside Middle America than beachside Caribbean. The pina colada is often considered a tiki classic, even being hailed by some as “the most beloved cocktail to emerge from the tiki era.”
But the pina colada is not a tiki drink. It did not originate in the fevered island fantasia of an erstwhile Texan or through the relentless cocktail experimentation of a savvy bar mogul. It was definitively born, even in its most fantastic creation myth — which involves the folk hero pirate Roberto Cofresí in the early 1800s — in Puerto Rico. And though there multiple competing claims to its origin, the most generally accepted one for the drink as we know it is the Beachcomber Bar at the Caribe Hilton in San Juan, where it was created by Ramón “Monchito” Marrero Pérez in 1954, using local Don Q rum and Coco Lopez canned cream of coconut. It is distinctly a tropical drink.
It might seem like a matter of semantics whether the paper umbrella under which the pina colada falls is “tiki” or “tropical.” But the two are not synonymous. “Tiki drinks refer to the ‘rhum rhapsodies’ of Don the Beachcomber, Trader Vic’s, and their descendants,” says Rafa García Febles, a Puerto Rican-born, New York-based bartender. “And historically, they were made by U.S. Americans or their immigrant bartenders to sell a made-up vision of Polynesia, the Caribbean, and ‘the tropics’ to other Americans.”
“Tropical” is a looser genre, defined largely by drinks that were developed in the tropics — mojitos and daiquiris in Cuba, and the pina colada in Puerto Rico — and which are stylistically distinct from tiki. While a tiki drink can be composed of up to 10 different ingredients, and generally requires sweet, sour, spiced, and strong components, tropical drinks are generally constructed à la minute with fresh ingredients that primarily balance acid, sugar, and alcohol.
“The pina colada is a natively Puerto Rican drink,” García Febles says, meaning that it was created in Puerto Rico, with Puerto Rican ingredients, by a Puerto Rican. “It became associated with ‘the tropics’ at the same time tiki was commodifying the concept and was sold to tourists, hence the confusion.”
The subsuming of anything with a hint of rum and fruit under the category of tiki is a misappropriation that has persisted precisely because of tiki’s original sin: What gave birth to it was a far-reaching act of cultural pillage, one that swiped broadly and unabashedly from Caribbean drinking traditions, then forced them into a pastiche molded by Polynesian aesthetics, all for U.S. consumers.
With the modern tiki revival, bartenders are working to undo that original sin, or at least toward some form of absolution — to hang on to the fun and the orgeat, just without the appropriation. But what does it mean to create a distinct sense of place when that place is not your own?
The Polynesian aesthetic that comes to mind when someone says “tiki bar” was established in 1933 by Donn Beach (born in Texas as Ernest Gantt) with his Hollywood bar Don’s Beachcomber. Trader Vic’s soon followed in Oakland a few years later, after a restaurateur named Victor Bergeron visited and decided he could “do it better.” The tiki bar’s heyday arrived with the end of World War II, when soldiers returned home from the South Pacific in search of distraction.
The look of tiki solidified around elaborate ceramic mugs modeled on Polynesian statues, along with flamingos, palm trees, and pineapples, all of which evoke — from a mainland U.S.-centric point of view — an escape from reality. The word “tiki” itself was taken from Maori mythology, where it’s the name of the first man ever created, and refers to the carved statues of humans prevalent throughout Polynesia.
The postwar tiki moment managed to stretch on into the 1970s, which is impressively long-lived as far as trends go. Boredom, over-expansion, and declining quality — prefab sour mixes replaced fresh juice, while bland, generic rums were subbed in for high-quality, distinctive spirits — led to a hard die-off. By 1982, Gael Greene was asking in the pages of New York, “Does anyone know or care that Trader Vic’s still exists, duskily dim, in the netherworld of The Plaza?” The Zombie gave way to the cosmopolitan and fruit-flavored martinis.
In the aughts, we were collectively reminded — extremely sternly, and frequently by men in vests and suspenders and interesting facial hair — that in a time before tiki and World War II and Prohibition, drinks were once made differently. That the Old Fashioned did not contain club soda or half an orange tree, martinis should not taste like fruit, and ice cubes the size of boulders should be carved by a rugged, calloused hand. It was extremely exhausting.
So, a few years ago, people wondered what it would be like if drinking cocktails were fun again. When Shelby Allison, one of the partners behind Chicago’s famed Lost Lake, and fellow bartender Paul McGee decided to do “something stupid” for a cocktail book club project in 2011, she accidentally fell in love with tiki drinks, which had not yet been revisited with the same reverence as the pre-Prohibition classics.
“Like most people, I thought of rum- and fruit-forward cocktails as being sickly sweet, unsophisticated, flat pool drinks,” she says. But opening up Jeff Berry’s Beachbum Berry’s Sippin’ Safari, she found “beautiful, complex, wonderful, historically significant contributions to the cocktail canon.”
The craft cocktail movement, for all its dogma, had in fact laid bare the way for a tiki revival — restoring pride of place to meticulous preparation, fresh ingredients, and quality spirits, built on a respect for time-honored drink traditions. But with the return of tiki, bartenders were confronted with a dilemma: They loved the mood that tiki projected and, of course, the intricate drinks, but also knew they shouldn’t serve cocktails in the hollowed-out heads of Maori deities. “Like any cultural or cocktail or culinary moment in our history,” Allison says, “we can be more sensitive and open to marginalized people.”
Allison hopes to leave “topless native babes” and other hallmarks of “colonial fetishization” in the past, which is why Lost Lake brands itself as “tropical cocktail bar,” not a tiki bar. “With this new wave of tiki,” Allison says, “we have an opportunity to distill down Don the Beachcomber’s original intent, which is to take people out of their miserable lives to somewhere they’ve never been.”
But to continue to use people and places that are real — and that increasingly experience suffer from a precarious existence, owing to climate change, among other calamities — as inspirations for a fantasy reinforces the colonialist idea that they are politically or culturally different, and therefore worth less, than the people who are doing the “escaping.” For instance, the word “exotic,” which connotes and denotes foreignness, continues to be employed in headlines, restaurant reviews, menus, and even in the subtitle of Martin Cate’s James Beard Award–winning book Smuggler’s Cove: Exotic Cocktails, Rum, and the Cult of Tiki. This allows escapism to remain a highlight of tiki for some. Who’s allowed to escape, though, and from where? What about the people for whom palm trees and pineapples aren’t somewhere else, they’re just... home?
A nondescript bar in North Dakota selling pina coladas and Mai Tais in the dead of winter isn’t necessarily making a comment on another culture, but when those drinks are packaged into something that more closely resembles an improvised vacation, the lines are murkier. It reminds me of a common refrain in my (new) home of San Juan: “I live where you vacation,” which a friend recently reversed to the more apt, “You vacation where I live.” The latter puts an onus on visitors — whether actual or metaphorical, through aesthetics or flavor — to consider the reality of tropical life and the people who live it. Many face precarious environmental or economic situations exacerbated, if not created, by the very countries where these visitors originate.
Allison is aware of this friction and how it plays out at her bar — that it’s not always possible to focus on just the nitty-gritty of assembling a well-balanced cocktail. “I’m a white person who owns a bar that plays music from the Caribbean and other rum-producing places,” Allison says. “I serve cocktails that are inspired by or directly from islands in the Caribbean or other tropical places. It’s complicated, for sure.”
It is perhaps possible to both complicate and lean into exoticism by reclaiming the heritage of drinks that make up the modern escapist canon. That’s what Leslie Cofresí and Roberto Berdecía are attempting with JungleBird, their San Juan tiki bar, which is named for the Campari-spiked rum cocktail. “JungleBird as a project began from a soul-searching exercise of, ‘How can we define our tropical origin without falling into tiki?’” Cofresí, who opened JungleBird after the success of his other San Juan bar, La Factoría, told me. “It’s a search to build our own language and not to be defined by the outside looking in. While trying to fight it, we discovered a way to embrace it.”