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