Post #771911 by Club Nouméa on Wed, Jan 11, 2017 4:45 AM

He may have got a job at the Yacht Club for a while and then have moved back around the corner to the Cercle Bougainville. Bartending is not the most stable of professions.

So he was still in Tahiti in 1934... I am curious to know when he returned to San Francisco and opened his first establishment there. Possibly 1935? (since you found that 1936 reference to his Rendezvous Club...)

There is a Rainbow Cocktail in the Savoy Cocktail Book (1930), which I made tonight - it is a subtle and not particularly brightly coloured thing though, and I have my doubts about whether he would have been able to procure that English book whilst living in Papeete, so I am guessing that Alex's Rainbow Cocktail was a different recipe.

It's so odd that this guy has been overlooked - he's not in the pantheon at all, and yet there he was, from San Francisco, mixing tropical cocktails in Tahiti from the 1920s through to 1934, at which point Vic Bergeron had yet to become a "Trader" and had only just opened his rustic American-style Hinky Dink's bar in Oakland.

So Stergios' Beachcomber Café happened in 1938, one year after Vic Bergeron went tropical and switched his shingle to Trader Vic's...

But he was definitely specialised in tropical cocktails before either Vic Bergeron or Donn Beach. Little wonder he decided to make his own move.

The earliest known tiki mug: "Ruru and Weku", designed by Harry Hargreaves of Crown Lynn, New Zealand, 1949.

[ Edited by: Club Nouméa 2017-01-11 04:52 ]

[ Edited by: Club Nouméa 2017-01-11 05:07 ]