WHO STARTED THE TIKI CULTURE? BY JEFF BEACH BUM BERRY

Here's another place pretty massive called the Kahiki in Columbus, Ohio. You can see the scale there. There's there are people getting out of their car. This went all the way back about twice. There were like eight dining rooms inside, two stories, a 40-foot high Easter Island head fireplace. Pretty impressive. And it's all because of these drinks. These drinks which were called rum rhapsodies back in the 1930s when they first became popular. When you walked into one of these Polynesian palaces, this is what you would be presented with in the bar. You take your choice from these exotic beverages. These were conversation piece cocktails. All rum-based, all fancifully garnished, all something that got people talking if a date had nothing to say to his, a guy had nothing to say to his date. When the drinks came, oh, thank God, we can talk about the smoking volcano. We could talk about the ice cone in our Navy grog, et cetera, et cetera. Now, in most high-end, very expensive restaurants, what do you do after you've had your cocktail and you've been seated at the table and you've ordered your entree? Normally, you switch to wine. These restaurants did not have wine sellers. They had rum sellers. And you continued to drink these tropical drinks all the way through your meal. Here we have the Maikai in Fort Lauderdale, same restaurant as that bar I just showed you, one of seven dining rooms. And everybody's got their suckling pig entree and they're still drinking rum barrels, black magics, Navy grog back there and all that. Even dessert came in the form of an exotic rum drink. Here we have the flaming coffee grog being served, also with the Maikai, poured from a great height, theatricality, conversation piece. So these drinks, because of their novelty that just never seemed to wear off, because they tasted so good, because they were conversation piece cocktails, because they were so theatrical, they kept these restaurants in business forever. Thousands of these places. Every city in America, every small town had at least one. Chicago had six. L.A. had about 12. New York had about 10. London had at least three or four. There was the Beachcomber in Mayfair, which I think the Mahiki is very close to the original side of that. Anyway, where did all these drinks come from? They all came from this guy, Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gant, a New Orleans native. His dad was a hotel owner who struck it big as a wildcatter in the Texas oil fields, became a very rich man. And when Don turned 18, he said to his son, all right, son, I'll send you to the college of your choice, Ivy League, Harvard, Yale, wherever you want to go, or I'll finance a trip around the world and after that you're on your own. Don, being a guy after our own hearts, chose the trip because college is work. He went around the world. He exposed himself to exotic drinks that no American would know about. Remember, this is the 1920s. The world was a lot larger then. Nobody traveled then unless they were very, very rich or very, very adventurous. Most Americans never even left their home state, sometimes not even their hometown. So the world was a vast, exotic, alien place. The final frontier was the South Pacific. Very few people would ever see that in their lifetimes back in the 1920s. But Don traveled there. He saw what people were doing with drinks. He saw Filipinos mixing rum with coconut. In Singapore, he saw them make a Singapore Sling at the Raffles Hotel. All these drinks that in America nobody knew about. In America, people were drinking, all right, martinis if you wore a top hat and tails, but mostly a slug of whiskey or a beer. The great age of American cocktails had long ago passed. That would have been around the Civil War era. So cocktails were in the doldrums. There was prohibition as well. So you couldn't have a drink legally if you wanted one. But Don was off during prohibition, learning, picking up things, drinking. Planner's Punch, as served in Jamaica, when Don went there as a teenager. By the way, he went there because his grandfather was a rum runner. He had a yacht called the Port of New Orleans. He would sail it from New Orleans to Jamaica, pick up some rum, sail it back, and sell it. And Don crewed on that yacht in the 1920s. And that's where he would have gone to the Myrtle Bank Hotel, which specialized in the Planner's Punch, which is a 200-year-old recipe. One of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak. Don took that and he ran with it. He said, why just lime as a sour? Why not a combination of lime and grapefruit? Or lime and grapefruit and passion fruit? He dimensionalized that aspect of it. The sweet, why just sugar? Why not take a vanilla syrup or an allspice syrup or honey or use falernum, a Barbados syrup, which I'm sure we all know about, ginger, lime, and clove syrup? All these incredibly exotic sweeteners instead of just sugar. He did the same thing with the strong. In Jamaica, your three parts of strong would be a dark Jamaican Punch rum, like a Meyers or an Appleton. He said, well, why don't we take two rums, three rums, mix them together? Why not cut that heavy, dark, molasses-y, sugary taste of that dark Jamaican rum with a light, dry, white Cuban rum? See what happens. The two rums will inform each other. The light rum will mellow out the dark Jamaican rum. The dark Jamaican rum will infuse the light rum with more body, more depth, more character. Here we have an example. This is his Puka Punch. You see that lovely look, the nice frothy head on it, that aerated liquid in there. Not all of the ice is diluted. It's not a watery drink. It's not too strong. Just precisely the amount of ice that he wanted diluted balanced that drink out perfectly. Not too strong, not too light, not too syrupy, not too dry.