Archives for the 'tiki' tag
Renaissance of Rum
The New York Times says these hard times deserve a return to hard rum — because rum is the Disney World of liquor:
Some major themes in fashionable bars lately: small, elegant, stemmed glassware; arm garters; house-made bitters; a seriousness that is hard to distinguish from humorlessness; gin.
Some major themes in the Night Marcher, a drink that one owner of the Tar Pit, a bar that will open in Los Angeles later this month, calls “our ambassador”: a large, grimacing tiki mug; bondage gear; store-bought Cholula hot sauce; a sense of humor that is hard to distinguish from weirdness; rum.
Yes — that’s what I said!
My fondness for rum is likewise a recent rediscovery. After college, I took a job at a travel agency thinking it would pay the bills while I fulfilled my ambition of becoming a travel writer. I did do some traveling (in which I learned it interfered with my greater ambition of laying about the house), including several trips to Jamaica. On one of these I picked up a duty-free pack of three 750 ml bottles of rum — gold, silver, and coconut — for the princely sum of $11. Soon after, the contents of all three bottles were consumed by four people in a single evening, resulting in one of those please-God-if-you-exist-strike-me-dead-now hangovers that put me off the stuff for over a decade.
But we’re all older and wiser now, right?
“Everybody still enjoyed rum,” said Audrey Saunders, who in 2005 founded the Pegu Club, an ambitious gin palace where roughly half the noteworthy young bartenders in Manhattan once worked. “But people kind of passed it over for things that were more challenging and difficult to work with.” Now that bartenders have tested their mettle by mixing drinks with the bitterest amaro, however, rum is getting a second look.
“We were all too snobby four years ago,” Ms. Saunders said. “Now it’s a different story. Now it’s like: ‘Oh, I miss that girlfriend. You know what? Those were fun times.’ ”
Quick Bites: Sweet and Salty Edition
- Labels mandated by the Country of Origin Labeling laws that went into effect in March are beginning to appear in stores.
- A recent Wall Street Journal Health column chastises Americans for consuming too much salt. In other news, Connecticut-based writer tells Journal columnist to shut the hell up.
- Confectioner makes candy that looks like bacon but tastes like… strawberries.
- Pepsi unleashes two soft drinks for the summer containing beet and cane sugars. Pepsi Throwback and Mountain Dew Throwback, which — alas — feature no psychedelia on their bottles, are intended to return consumers to an Age of Aquarius before HFCS harshed our trip. Ride the snake!
- Tiki comes to DC. Let the drunkening begin.
Behind the Bar
Submitted for your Monday morning distraction: Tubefilter has an interview with Jeff Macpherson (Dr. Tiki) and producer Tosca Musk of Tiki Bar TV. While criminally lacking any content regarding the delectable Lala (I want to go to there!), the transcript charts a course from the days of Macpherson and buddy Kevin Gamble (Johnny Johnny) goofing around in Macpherson’s Vancouver apartment to their current full-time enterprise complete with professional sets, greenscreens, and merchandising. In their own words, they’ve labored just to reach the level of a start-up, leaving me with the impression that when anyone orders a charooba, it’s the good doctor who packs and walks it to the post office.
Many thanks to Jerry Brito’s prescription for my chronic case of the L7s which hepped me to Tiki Bar TV some months ago.
And in related news, a new Connecticut tiki bar has opened — within walking distance of my house. Baby Jesus loves me!
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.
