Tiki bar
Musicians such as Alfred Apaka[6] and Don Ho[7] played a historically important role in their popularity, and the bars also booked acts such as exotica-style bands and Polynesian dance floor shows.
The bar served a wide variety of exotic rum drinks (including the Sumatra Kula and Zombie cocktail), and later Cantonese food.
When Beach was sent to World War II, Don the Beachcomber flourished under his ex-wife's management (Sunny Sund), expanding into a chain of 16 restaurants.
The bar was designed to evoke the South Pacific, with palm trees, tiki masks on the walls, a garden hose that showered a gentle rain on the roof and a myna bird that was trained to shout "Give me a beer, stupid!"
[12] Prior to Don Beach opening his first tiki bar, during the 1920s South Pacific-influenced dreams of escapism had started to become more prevalent in American music and popular culture.
[13] The original restaurant was demolished, but a much smaller version in the form of a side-room bar named the Pacific Seas resides at another Clifton's location.
[14] The Tonga Room of the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco is an iconic tiki bar operating since 1945, still retaining its Polynesian flair after having undergone a number of facelifts over the years.
[21] Shelter Island, San Diego had at one time a heavily concentrated area of tiki bars, the best known being the still operating Bali Hai.
[23] Also in 1962, the Sip 'n Dip Lounge opened in Great Falls, Montana, bringing a tiki theme to the cold northern state and featuring a swimming pool where swimmers could be observed underwater from a window in the bar, a concept inspired by a similar design at the Playboy Club in Chicago.
Stephen Crane's The Luau restaurant is also gone but was considered historically important in the tiki craze's early days, as were Trader Vic's and Don the Beachcomber.
[87][88] In that decade, the Sip 'n Dip Lounge, which had survived with its tiki theme intact, added the feature of having women dressed as mermaids swimming in their pool within view of the bar's patrons.
[89] The live mermaid incorporation and the overall retro tiki ambience led GQ Magazine to rate the lounge as one of the top 10 bars in the world for 2003.
[91] The interiors and exteriors of tiki bars often include tiki masks and carvings, hula girl motifs, black velvet paintings, large tropical murals, live plants or palm trees, bamboo, grasscloth, tapa cloth, and similar fabrics, torches, woven fish traps, pufferfish lamps, glass floats, and the use of rock and lava stone.
[94] An early menu from his The Luau restaurant in Beverly Hills outlines where he got the materials for its decoration, including "chairs from Hong Kong", "Monkey pod furniture milled in Papaaloa", "structural bamboo hand-wrapped by Philippine craftsmen", "Chinese soapstone", the shells of "man-eating clams from the Indian ocean", and mentioning other materials from Nepa, Niiu, Samoa, Tahiti, Fuji, and of Tonga-Tabu origin.
[101] Some of the biggest tiki restaurants are designed as large open air spaces with cavernous ceilings that allowed for the construction of separate areas with exotic names.
[102] This allowed keeping dinner show areas secluded away from more private drinking lounges, and lent to the "experience" by making patrons feel they had been transported away to an entire village.
[104][105][106][107][108] The look of the establishment's menu, swizzle sticks, matchbook covers, and cocktail napkins can be extremely important design considerations for tiki bars.
[9] Multiple types of rums (light, dark, spiced, overproof and originating from various countries) are typically mixed together with orange liqueurs (Triple sec, Grand Marnier, Cointreau), tropical fruit juices, sweet syrups (falernum, fassionola, orgeat) and bitters.
[113][114] Some classic drink recipes[115][116][117][118] from the early tiki era, many attributed to Don the Beachcomber or Trader Vic, include the: Blue Hawaii, Cobra's Fang, Coffee Grog, Corpse Reviver, Doctor Funk, Diki-Diki, Fog Cutter, Fu Manchu, Gold Cup, Head Hunter, Mai Tai, Navy Grog, Lapu Lapu, Mr. Bali Hai, Outrigger, Pago Pago, Pearl Diver, Py Yi, Planter's Punch, QB Cooler, Rum Barrel, Scorpion, Shark's Tooth, Shrunken Head, Singapore Sling, Suffering Bastard, Sumatra Kula, Test Pilot, Three Dots & A Dash, and the Zombie New tiki drinks continue to be created by a variety of bartenders and others.
Home bars often serve a dual purpose — to create a recreational space in which to imbibe home-crafted cocktails, and to show off tiki collections of mugs, art, and other artifacts.
