Post #396483 by bigbrotiki on 07/25/2008

On 2008-07-25 08:43, Limbo Lizard wrote:
So, was the genesis - or, at least, the proliferation - of "tiki" mugs (and their cousins - Fu Manchu, Hula Girl, et al.) largely as a take-home souvenir for the customer, do you think?
I don't recall the specialty mugs and glasses from visits to Trader Vic's (back in the day), so much as in Chinese restaurants. It seems that as the Poly Pop/Tiki places were in decline (1970's), their bar menus were adopted and lived on in Chinese restaurants, after a fashion. They used lots of fancy mugs, and mimicked the style of drink descriptions, but in unintentionally confused and hilarious "chinglish" (Suffering Barstard, Viscous Virgin).

The COMMERCIAL raison d'etre for the Tiki Mug is certainly that of a Restaurant Logo souvenir, with it's name and location on the back or underneath. These mugs cost the restaurateur less than a buck a piece, and they tacked that on to the cocktail. It's a good point to note that the idea to make a Tiki into a mug was probably commercially motivated. But WHO thought of it and WHEN? :)

On 2008-07-21 22:39, bigbrotiki wrote:
....But even Vic never served cocktails in Tiki mugs, nor did Don...

While I would say that by the 70s there probably still were quite a few genuine Polynesian restaurants around (those that had survived) that served their cocktails in Tiki mugs, you are certainly right that by the 1980s the only eateries left (with the exception of the great survivors like the Kahiki and the Mai Kai) serving drinks in Tiki mugs were the Chinese restaurants...even if the establishments were not Tiki in style. That was a function of the fact that A.) Chinese restaurants jumped on the Tiki wagon kind of late, and B.) that their wholesale supplier for Chinese restaurant decor and wares offered Tiki mugs as cocktail vessels.

By the time I began seriously researching Tiki in the early 90s, I did not encounter one restaurant in Southern California that still used Tiki mugs as daily drink vessels.