Post #787815 by Swanky on Tue, Jun 19, 2018 5:53 AM

Per Sven, Tiki is an art form.

But I doubt Tiki would have existed without DtB's cocktails.

Today, what is "Tiki" in popular culture has to do with the drinks. It has come to define it. Non-Tiki bars serve the Tiki recipes and people call them Tiki bars. Most of us would disagree. But we don't have a say any longer. It's escaped the world of s sub-sub-culture.

That's my point. The era of it being an underground where people were discovering places, ingredients, ways of carving and decorating, making mugs, etc. has passed to the professional era. Almost every aspect of Tiki has a professional class now. That didn't exist until recently.

So people are defining Tiki to the world whether it is Tiki or not. And those people may well run it headlong into "cultural appropriation" and that too will be beyond the control of the people who have been steadily researching and digging into this stuff for years and decades.

Tiki getting bigger and more popular is not good for Tiki. If it saved more vintage places it would be great, but it has always lacked that power.