This article is awesome! I have a special place in my heart for all things tiki, especially the cocktails. You can further expect that I'll review the
books published by Jeff Barry
, the apparent scion of Tiki mixology in America.
Dining & Wine
By STEVEN KURUTZ
Published: November 28, 2007
A tiki bar detective’s mission: to elevate the lowly reputation of umbrella drinks to their rightful standing.
Many of the cocktails that Mr. Berry has studied, the Zombie included, owe their creation to a raconteur named Ernest Raymond Beaumont-Gantt who remade himself as Donn Beach and started the tiki craze in 1934 by opening Don the Beachcomber’s in Hollywood. In their interior design, the tiki joints inspired by Mr. Beach tended to thoroughly fake pastiches of tropical themes — swaying hula girls, angry savages — that can offend some modern eyes.
...To recreate the Beachcomber drinks, Mr. Berry became a kind of cocktail
shamus. He visited libraries and thumbed through old issues of Gourmet
on the chance any recipes had been printed (they hadn’t). Eventually,
he learned that some of the Beachcomber’s bar staff had kept the secret
recipes in little black books. Mr. Berry got his hands on one of the
recipe books — but found that it too was coded.
The Audio Slide Show: The History of Tiki
Next question, when is the food club going to make a tour of all the Tiki establishments of New York City? The gauntlet is thrown.
Finally, the two books:
Beachbum Berry's Intoxica!
and
Beachbum Berry's Taboo Table