Summer 2016 | Sea Island Life Magazine Spring/Summer 2016 | Page 49

Trader Vic’s mai tai OPPOSITE PAGE PHOTO BY LARA FERRONI PHOTOGRAPHY; PHOTOS ON THIS PAGE COURTESY OF TRADER VIC’S F rom “Mad Men” to modernism, the current fascination with all things midcentury has brought a variety of once-forgotten trends back into the limelight. The most interesting of all just might be tiki, a tropically inspired pop culture phenomenon that reached its heyday in the 1950s. Yet decades after its initial popularity peaked, misconceptions still exist about the tiki movement. Despite being loosely based on Polynesian culture, for one, it’s actually as all-American as baseball and Coca-Cola. While most people today think of tiki in terms of the tropical cocktails it introduced to bar menus across the country—strong blends of light or dark rum, fresh fruit juices, and flavored syrups and liqueurs—they might be surprised to find out those same drinks are derived from Caribbean recipes created centuries ago. Luckily, a dedicated community of self-described “tikiphiles,” historians and bartenders endeavor to set the record straight on tiki culture while securing its status as a viable art form with enough steam to carry it into the 21st century. Tiki Through Time Tracing the origins of tiki culture requires an understanding of a very specific era in American history: the first half of the 20th century. Following the national repeal of Prohibition in 1933, Americans began to experiment with more complicated cocktail blends. They mixed fresh fruit juices and As the tiki trend took off, it began influencing restaurant and bar decor, as seen here at Trader Vic’s. handcrafted liqueurs and bitters with potent spirits thus creating some of the first examples of what contemporary mixologists now refer to as culinary craft cocktails. Simultaneously, another form of entertainment, the picture show, had mushroomed into a full-fledged industry, introducing moviegoers to the kinds of far-flung places they’d previously only imagined. Capitalizing on the public’s interest in Polynesian exploration, Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt, more commonly known as Don the Beachcomber, opened a cafe in Hollywood in 1934, serving rum-based cocktails, including the Zombie, alongside a selection of Cantonese dishes. Gantt decorated his lounge with wicker furnishings, floating glass lights and handcarved statues, and would eventually develop a lucrative side business renting out some of his pieces to movie studios. Later, many Southern California-based tiki bar owners—including Gantt’s main competitor, Trader Vic’s founder Victor Bergeron— would form collaborative relationships with film industry workers, hiring art directors and set designers to furnish their bars with accents such as full-size canoes and working waterfalls. Within just a few years, tiki fever had reached an all-time high, influencing everything from restaurant and bar design to the architecture of motels, apartment buildings and bowling alleys. It wasn’t until the dawn of World War II, though, that much of the American public came face to face with the foreign lands of the South Pacific for the very first time. As soldiers returned to domestic soil, they brought with them detailed memories of lush places beyond the sea. Americans’ fantasies of what they considered an untamed topography and culture became a form of escapism—a perfect dichotomy to the structure of a middle-class life in the suburbs and the nuclear family, according to Sven Kirsten, a cinematographer and selfdescribed “urban archaeologist.” Kirsten has studied tiki culture since the 1980s and authored several Taschen-published books on the subject, including “The Book of Tiki” (2000), “Tiki Style” (2004) and “Tiki Pop” (2014). “The juxtaposition of these midcentury Americans who were very straightforward with these absurd pagan idols really fascinates me,” Kirsten says. “I love visual extremes, and that’s one of them—guys in suits and women with beehive hairdos posing with tikis.” As the tiki trend’s popularity grew, more and more Americans searched for ways to bring it out of the bar and into everyday life, turning to SPRING/SUMMER 2016 | SEA ISL AND LIFE 49