First I'll let two others point out the folly of your words.....
Starting with Dr Bamboo from 2010: "...The Mai Tai is one of a very small category of drinks I call "bulletproof." That is, you can give a drink of this type to virtually anyone and they'll like it."
And then there is the ever popular Joe Bob Briggs. This is a long read and I can't find a working link so I'll just quote it from the archives: If you don't read this know, mark it and come back, it is worth it!
Joe Bob Briggs
Joe Bob's Wild America
The Great Mai Tai Hunt (Frat Parties Turned the Classic American Libation Into an Umbrella Drink. I Went to Find the Real Deal)
by Joe Bob Briggs
October/November 2000
You people should be ashamed of yourselves. I'm a betrayed and angry man. We all know that standards in this country have plummeted to depths known only by the dead bloated body of Leonardo DiCaprio. But this is too much. As my buddy Roddy Piper would say, it's time to kick ass and chew bubble gum--and I'm all out of bubble gum.
I speak, of course, of the Mai Tai.
The Mai Tai is our greatest American cocktail. It doesn't have an ounce of single-malt Braveheart wheat-juice in it. It has nothing to do with the latest cranapple-flavored Rooskie pseudo-vodka sloshed out of bottles by guys named Evan. The Mai Tai doesn't come from some candy-ass gun club lounge where racehorse owners talk about debentures in Singapore while sipping "juleps." A Mai Tai, properly made, is strong enough to put permanent fissures in a fat man's brain, yet delicate enough to make his girlfriend try to conjugate verbs with her thighs. The ingredients might come from the Caribbean. The South Pacific might have made it famous. But the Mai Tai comes from California and is so by-God American that any bartender who can't make it should be shot for treason.
I say this now. I had no idea it would come to this when I ascended the 107 floors to the top of One World Trade Center recently in search of a Mai Tai. Windows on the World bills itself as "The Greatest Bar on Earth," and I don't think it's because of the local cover band--called, appropriately, Deep Cover--that was wailing on some seventies disco bullstuff when I got there. I shouldered my way to one of the busiest bars this side of the SAE house at the University of Arkansas, elbowing a few Euro-weenies in the ribs and mussing their shiny leather shoulder-strap jackets. Face to face with one of [five] harried bartenders, I said, "Can you make me a Mai Tai?" I should have known by the long pause that his answer would consign me to Umbrella Drink Hell.
"Sure," he said meekly. "Just a minute."
I watched him as he placed a highball glass on the counter.
(A Mai Tai is not served in a highball glass. A Mai Tai is served in a double old-fashioned glass.)
I watched him as he dumped some ice cubes into the glass.
(A Mai Tai is made with crushed ice.)
I watched him as he poured into this already pseudo-Mai Tai a big gob of Myers Rum. He didn't bother to measure it.
(A Mai Tai is made with Jamaican rum, and sometimes the rums of Martinique, and the proportions are so precise that you can overpower the rum with one false move of an aerodynamically balanced jigger.)
I watched him dump the contents of two unmarked pre-mixed bottles into the glass. One was a milky white jug and one was a Coke-bottle-green jug.
(There are no Mai Tai recipes, to my knowledge, that call for Yoohoo chocolate soda.)
At this point he looked around in panic, searched some shelves, and disappeared. He was gone a long time. I watched the ice cubes in the highball-with-rum-and-unknown-mixes melting away.
He returned. He searched some more. He left again. As he passed me, I said, "What are you looking for?"
He confessed that he had no orgeat syrup, necessary for the subtle almond flavor that, in my opinion, makes or breaks a Mai Tai. He searched the adjoining restaurants for orgeat, found none, returned, and was about to give up when one of his fellow bartenders whispered something to him. He picked up yet another unmarked bottle, dumped a little of it into the drink, poured it into a shaker, strained it back into the glass. As he was inserting the little umbrella, I said "What was that?"
He said, "Amaretto. To cut the bite."
(Amaretto is not an ingredient in a Mai Tai.)
I swallowed it. I swallowed all of it. It was like a combination of cough syrup, pancake batter, and the automatic transmission fluid from a 1973 Oldsmobile Toronado. I staggered back to the bar to find out if the white bottle and the green bottle had contained either anti-freeze or tick repellent. The white one turned out to be Windows on the World's version of Curacao, and the green one was lime juice, or what they claim to be lime juice, since the only way to put lime in a Mai Tai is to--surprise!--squeeze a goldurn fresh lime. The total price of this industrial cleaning solvent: nine bucks. I tried to offer some to Harvey "Choo Choo" Morris, the drummer and lead singer in Deep Cover, but he was a wise man and declined to imbibe while drumming. He also declined after he finished drumming.
"What has happened to us as a nation?" I mused three days later, after regaining full use of the left side of my body. I resolved not to rest until I got an act of Congress, or at least a bulletin from the Food and Drug Administration, requiring the return to real Mai Tais within my lifetime.
The Mai Tai was invented by one of our greatest bartenders, the one-legged foul-mouthed rum-lover Vic Bergeron, on a day in 1944 when he was experimenting with tropical drinks at his original Trader Vic's restaurant in Oakland. At this point Vic was in his bartending prime, having spent 20 years working up to what would be his piece de resistance, and to start it he took down from the shelf a bottle of 17-year aged Jamaican rum. Anyone who thinks the Mai Tai is a cheap drink should consider this. Jamaican rum aged 17 years is so rare that it doesn't even exist anymore. When the big multi-national companies started buying up the sugar cane plantations in the Caribbean, they shut down all the little rum distilleries where it was still possible to find recipes from the days of Sir Walter Raleigh, which is one reason we have a whole generation of cheap Bacardi drinkers. (Don't even get me started on Puerto Rico. If they want statehood, they need to start sending us some rum that can be swallowed without a visit to the eye, ear, nose and throat specialist.) But back to this moment in American alcohol history. Trader Vic poured two ounces of J. Wray and Nephew 17-year Jamaican rum over shaved ice in a double old-fashioned glass. He then squeezed into the rum, with his fingers, one fresh lime. At this point the drink is virtually complete. In the great man's autobiography, he wrote "The flavor of this great rum wasn't meant to be overpowered with heavy addition of fruit drinks and flavorings." But to give it just the little tang he wanted, he added a tiny bit of orange curacao from the Holland DeKuyper company, and French orgeat syrup (Garier, if you're taking notes) to get the almond flavor. He shook it and served it with a fresh mint sprig. It so happened that two friends of his from Tahiti were in the bar that day. A woman took the first drink and pronounced "Mai tai roa ae!" In Tahitian this means "Out of this world--the best!" And so the Mai Tai was born, named, and, from what I know now, immediately began its long slow decline into frat-boy hell.
Fifty-six years later, I began my quest to resurrect the authentic Mai Tai. I consulted guides to Tiki bars. I looked for recipes on the website. I found the best bartender's guide to tropical drinks, Beachbum Berry's Grog Log, which recommends Lemon Hart Jamaican rum in place of the now impossible to find J. Wray & Nephew. And after proper research, I set off for some recommended bars where the Mai Tai was still revered.
My first stop was Poli-Tiki, a bar on Pennsylvania Avenue virtually in the shadow of our nation's Capitol, where, I was told, there were carved Tiki heads in the shape of ex-presidents, and where Martin Denny reigned supreme on the jukebox. (Martin Denny is the thinking man's Don Ho. His big hit from the fifties, "Quiet Village," is the acknowledged anthem of all Tiki bars, featuring bird calls and primitive drumming that seethes with the allure of island sex. You need this music for a perfect Mai Tai.) I found the place--it was smaller than I expected--and entered to the strains of . . . Santana. Some guy had just put enough change in the jukebox to play an entire Santana album. Why was Santana even being allowed at Poli-Tiki? Confused, I sat at a vinyl booth that was reminiscent of a Greyhound Transit Diner, circa 1958. I asked for the menu. All great Tiki bars have tropical drink menus. This menu had burgers, nachos and onion rings on it. I called the bartender over and asked him if he could make a Mai Tai. He agreed to do it. He added, for some reason, an orange slice on a spear--not a good sign. I took one drink and said "Mai Tai Roa Lani," which, in Tahitian, means "This drink tastes like my tie." It was too thick, too syrupy, and I kept trying to find the lime and couldn't taste it. I asked him what he put in it. He said "One cheap rum and one pretty good one." While I was waiting to see if the dreaded Mai Tai Headache would develop (it did), I noticed that there were no Tiki heads of politicians on the walls. I went downstairs to find glow-in-the-dark pool tables, a bamboo curtain, and a guy sleeping on a Teak chair, but no Tiki heads. Apparently they had been taken out and moved to some other restaurant, or flea market, and I could only hope it was some place where Santana was not playing.
Fortunately, I got a Mai Tai tip in the place. For a real Mai Tai, the guy said, I should head for The Tiki Bar on Solomon's Island, but he warned that it would be a two-hour drive to the coast of southern Maryland. He obviously didn't understand he was speaking to an obsessed Mai Tai lobbyist who had just been humiliated within a few blocks of my nation's Capitol. I was trolling through Solomon's Island by the next afternoon.
I was happy to see that, of all the fish restaurants and boardwalk bars in the little fishing and tourist town, the only place that was really packed was the outdoor Tiki Bar. I was further heartened by noticing the Mai Tai listed as their permanent number one drink specialty, with a picture actually painted into the wooden awning.
It took me five seconds to order the drink. It took them four seconds to bring the drink.
The best way to describe it might be Snapple-and-pineapple-juice-that-gets-you-so-drunk-you-want-a-sec ond-one. This was definitely some kind of spring break concoction that had been put together by drill instructors at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station next door as a form of boot-camp hazing. These things were so thick yet fruity that you sort of sipped them, then gulped them, then inhaled them, and then they hooked you up to an IV and you just mainlined it until closing time. As I tried to focus on the bare bronzed chest of the Neck-Chain-Wearing Yachting Guy sitting across from me, I asked one of the bartending cuties what was in the drink.
"Well, it's three or four different kinds of rum," she said.
I asked her what brands of rum.
"Oh, they would never tell us what's actually in it. We just pour 'em."
And then she points to . . . a giant plastic jug! They were sloshing these things, pre-mixed, out of a two-gallon Mai Tai Mushmaster. I staggered back to my car and slept it off while tourists stared at my beached-whale gaping carcass. I was nearing Mai Tai Nadir here.
Four days later, after passing a brain scan, I gathered together every Mai Tai recipe I could find and consulted every possible Mai Tai mixologist, both professional and amateur. It slowly became clear that the word "Mai Tai" had been appropriated for an astonishing variety of drinks, most of them of the fruity party-till-you-puke variety. Everywhere I went I ordered a Mai Tai, but at last I wised up and discovered that, if the first sip doesn't taste right, the next 90 won't either. The drinks ran the full gamut, so many different tastes and styles that the word "Mai Tai" seemed to be as generic as, say, "schizophrenia." At most places these were hammerhead knockout drinks. But at The Tobacco Company in Richmond, renowned as one of the greatest bars in Virginia, the Mai Tai was so fruity that it could have been served as punch at a first-grader's birthday party. For some reason many bars have taken to adding orange juice or pineapple juice to the drink. I can understand why they might do this in Hawaii, where it's just cheaper and easier, but it's those cheap-ass Hawaiian Mai Tais we're trying to avoid in the first place!
Let me make this clear: The Mai Tai is NOT A FRUIT DRINK!
Rum is made from sugar cane. It's already sweet! Is this so hard to understand? At various times I had Mai Tais containing Maraschino syrup, grenadine, triple sec, all kinds of things out of plastic jugs (lime juice in a plastic jug is not lime juice), and so many canned fruit juices that I couldn't possibly enumerate them all, although the strangest was Ocean Spray Mauna Lai Paradise Passion Juice. There's also a disturbing tendency to float some dark 151 Demerara rum on the surface of the Mai Tai, thereby masking the taste of what is supposed to be the perfectly aged Jamaican rum that is the essence of what the Mai Tai started out to be! Demerara rum is from Guyana, I think, and it doesn't have anything to do with a Mai Tai.
Okay, I'm gonna be calm now. I finally called Peter Seely. Peter Seely is the grandson of Mai Tai inventor Vic "Trader Vic" Bergeron, who died in 1984, and of all the Trader's grandchildren, he's the one who loves rum drinks the most. He is a self-admitted "rum snob." From his office in Emeryville, California, he offered to help. The first thing he did was send me some Trader Vic's Mai Tai mix. Although I'm pretty sure the Trader would not have approved of a drink made from a mix, I tried this stuff and it does not ruin good rum. It's probably the closest you can come to a classic Mai Tai at home. The next thing he did was give me the substitute recipe for a Mai Tai. Since the original rum doesn't exist, the Mai Tai has become a mythological drink in some ways. Since you can't really make it, you have to improvise. And this allowed the juiceheads to get away with Headache Drink Terrorism. The substitute recipe uses some Jamaican rum, some Martinique rum, and basically follows the tenets of the original, except modern tastes require a little more curacao and orgeat than Vic would have used. Peter is a talkative and funny man, and he was only speaking casually when he gave me the keys to the kingdom.
He said, "The next time you're near a Trader Vic's, tell the bartender you want the Mai Tai made 'the old way.'"
Why?
"Because, if you say that, he'll make it from scratch. He'll measure everything according to the recipe. And the old way is a little stronger."
I was on the next plane. I not only had a Mai Tai the old way, but I had a Mai Tai in the modern descendant of Trader Vic's original restaurant, at a marina in Emeryville, California, across the bay from San Francisco. I didn't really like the cherry and orange slice on a stem that has been added to the fresh mint sprig, but I put all quibbles aside when I tasted this Mai Tai.
Mai tai roa ae.
After two I was crawling on the floor, reciting Shakespeare's late love sonnets.
I had four. I vaguely remember Martin Denny on the sound system. Or maybe it was Don Ho.
No, I had five.
I slept that night, for the first time in weeks. Somehow it was a start. If I could feel this renewed, there was hope for the republic.
Maybe I had six.
And then my own opus on the subject....
