The Enchanted Tiki Boom
The weekend Journal has a great article by cocktail connoiseur Eric Felten on the revival of tiki bars:
With the much-repeated words “worst financial crisis since the Great Depression” marking the moment, it seems appropriate to visit that peculiarly American escape — the tiki bar — itself born in the depths of the Depression.
Market meltdowns and bailout ballyhoo aside, the timing of the article couldn’t be better after a summer of exploring regional tiki bars with my research assistants — not an easy feat in New England once you move beyond Boston. And pegged as it is to a San Francisco tiki crawl happening this weekend, space and structure prevent the story from detailing the cross-country thriving of tiki, from Brooklyn to Chicago to Los Angeles. But it does entertain the question of why:
The tiki-craze may have reached its zenith in the late ’50s and early ’60s, but there’s a new allure to the escape it promises. What are we escaping now? The financial woes may be the best excuse of the moment, but tiki provides an escape somewhat more fundamental, a vacation from the everyday, even if today’s bears little resemblance to the everyday of the ’50s.
Felten suggests that in wired America, tiki is a vacation from technology, a TARDIS to a Stone Age of topless hula girls and mysterious mixology. But I think he betrays his point and arrives at a closer truth when he writes:
There’s good tiki and bad tiki. Anything sleek and postmodern — say, a steel-and-glass totem — is bad tiki. Anything you can find in the luau section of your local party store — think cheap plastic leis and cardboard cutout hula girls — is bad tiki. I’m also of the opinion that “camp” makes for bad tiki. Ours is an irony-soaked culture, and camp is just a gaudy variety of the old, knowing wink-and-a-nod. Campy tiki provides no escape at all.
Tiki, like belief in the Great Pumpkin, must above all be done sincerely. It is “a vacation from the everyday,” and in a world of slack, that means a refuge from cynicism and poseurs and T-shirts with slogans on them. I’ve been to more chic New York bars and restaurants than I can remember and I always think to myself, God — would it kill these people to drop the act and have fun?
Genuine tiki and its aficionados love it not because of its kitsch or even the great drinks but because they — the bartenders, restaurant owners, totem carvers, mug makers and collectors — feel something we’re not supposed to feel amongst the snark and snideness: emotion. It’s the passion that’s retro. Or as tiki blogger Humuhumu puts it another way:
The author, Eric Felten, even mentions something I’ve long held to be true — that while yesterday’s PolyPop escapism was about eschewing formality, today’s escapism is more about eschewing informality.
Mahalo.
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Mrs. Kuhl
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Jerry Brito
