NY Times story - Sweet on Tiki, Flower of Cocktails 3/31/2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/dining/01tipsy.html?_r=1&ref=travel&pagewanted=all

Sweet on Tiki, Flower of Cocktails

By FRANK BRUNI
Published: March 31, 2011

There have been many changes in Adam Kolesar over the years, starting with his facial hair, to which he devotes an agitated, overzealous attention described less aptly as grooming than as absurdist art project. He has made geometric patterns with it. He has dyed it blue. In its current, uncolored form it crawls in five bands, separated by shaved skin, from his cheeks to a point just a few inches below his jaw line. It’s a stylized but scraggly marvel.

He loves and listens regularly to music but arrived late at an appreciation of country, an evolution that has caused his wife, Susan, a corporate lawyer, even more dismay than his beard does. “Had he told me when we met that he would become a fan,” she said dryly and without any obvious sarcasm, “we would not be married.”

But the most surprising transformation, or at least the one with the most thorough impact on their lives, concerns what and how he drinks.

On their first date 11 years ago Mr. Kolesar had a solitary beer, then switched to iced tea, having exhausted his minimal interest in alcohol and surpassed his usual quota for the month. Today, at his behest, the living room of their apartment in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn is dominated by one of the most eye-catching and elaborate home bars I have ever seen, a gleaming aluminum approximation of the rear end of an Airstream trailer, complete with glowing red taillights and mock license plate. It is outfitted with four stools; equipped with every kind of mixing and fizzing and grating and straining apparatus imaginable; festooned with kitschy swizzle sticks; and stocked with 50 different spirits.

That’s just what fits. Elsewhere around the two-bedroom apartment are additional bottles of booze, bringing the total to more than 150, including at least 60 varieties of rum, which are essential for his particular passion: tiki drinks. He makes highly specialized, utterly obscure ones for the friends he frequently invites over. He goes on the hunt for classic tiki — that’s the pretend Polynesian genre epitomized by Trader Vic’s and Singapore Slings — around the country. In certain New York cocktail circles Mr. Kolesar is known as Tiki Adam and considered to be one of the great characters of the city’s bar scene, not least because he didn’t care at all about cocktails until shortly before his 40th birthday. He’s 47 now.

As soon as I heard tell of him, I hunted him down, determined to use this column on occasion to introduce drinkers of eccentric note. We first met at the restaurant Prime Meats, also in Carroll Gardens, whose bar he visits at least twice a week, usually between 8 p.m., which is just after he has helped put his 4-year-old daughter to bed, and 11, when his wife, working on her laptop at home, calls it quits. It wasn’t tough to spot him. In addition to the beard there are the tattoos. They cover his arms and include detailed likenesses of two of his five motorcycles.

Other people search in vain for a hobby to embrace. Mr. Kolesar has scads. He hunts (sober), fishes (less so) and plays bass guitar in amateur punk bands, one of which was called Johnny Bubonic & the Black Death. It’s hard to see how he finds any time for work, but he has a profession, and it’s as unusual as the rest of him.

“I’m a feeding therapist,” he said, clearly anticipating and then enjoying my baffled expression. Feeding therapy, he explained, is an offshoot of speech therapy, and it’s for young children, usually 2 to 4, who have trouble moving past soft, puréed foods or eating anything that isn’t the same bland color. They need to be coached to branch out and sometimes even to chew. He has a private practice devoted to that.

In college at the University of South Carolina Mr. Kolesar majored in theater. But when you’re contemplating a career as an actor, he said, “there’s an apprehension about having some measure of control over your destiny.” He talks like that: in formal cadences and with elevated diction that seems to contradict the biker-dude aesthetics. He’s one surprise atop another.

He did graduate work in speech pathology at South Carolina, postgraduate work in childhood development at Georgetown University and later made his way to New York, where he met his wife. She was, he said, “a referral from a mutual friend,” meaning a fix-up or blind date.

She was also pivotal to the birth of Tiki Adam. In her vision of courtship and married life, she and her beloved would frequently linger at a restaurant table over a slowly disappearing bottle of red. But Mr. Kolesar had seldom bothered with alcohol. Not drinking, he found, made him more of a curiosity than drinking. It suited him.

He recounted that first date this way: “She’s thinking, ‘I have a lifetime ahead of me of ordering wine by the glass.’ She’s horrified. But I’ve got just enough game to keep her in play.”

That’s one way of looking at their progression to a second date. Another is that she trusted her powers of eventual persuasion — rightly, it turns out. In recognition of his affinity for ritualized, poorly understood traditions, her Christmas gift to him in 2002, shortly after their wedding, was a class on rum punches that Dale DeGroff, a noted cocktail historian, was teaching at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. Mr. Kolesar went, learned how to make a proper zombie and a dignified piña colada, and was hooked. Not on the booze and not on the high, but on the chemistry, cosmetics and back story of the cocktail culture that bloomed in the economically flush period between World War II and Vietnam. Tiki was a particularly fanciful flower.

“Drinking isn’t about the drunk for me,” he said. “It’s about creating the taste profile of an era I romanticize and care about.”

His wife put it another way. “He’s painfully geeky,” she said. “You are talking to a lawyer, and I’m pained by his geekiness, and that takes a lot.”

Bit by bit Mr. Kolesar delved deeper, researching tiki, rounding up recipes, collecting every implement and arcane tincture he might need to make them. He traveled to Tiki-Ti in Los Angeles and Mai-Kai in Fort Lauderdale because they are some of the high churches, and he had become a worshiper, well on his way to priesthood.

“It’s pretty amazing, the knowledge he has,” said Damon Boelte, the bar director at Prime Meats. “He’s definitely in the top five in the country.” Mr. Kolesar has become a close friend to Mr. Boelte, and also to Brian Miller, one of the principal mixologists at Death & Company, in the East Village, which isn’t a tiki bar but makes tiki drinks exacting enough to meet Mr. Kolesar’s approval.

Along with Prime Meats, it’s one of his five favorite places to drink in New York. Two others — Lani Kai in SoHo and Painkiller on the Lower East Side — are relatively new and reflect a tiki resurrection in recent years. A final one, Dram, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, doesn’t specialize in any one genre.

Mr. Kolesar appreciates most any finely made cocktail, especially if it harbors a rare ingredient, and he gets around, though not as much as he’d like. He’s a family man after all. That’s why the Airstream comes in handy. He can wallow in tiki while keeping an ear out for the kid.

“My wife cried when she first saw it,” he said of the aluminum extravaganza, because she realized that her proper living room was no more. But life with Mr. Kolesar is like that: a series of trade-offs. You tolerate the beard. You take the tiki. In return you get the red-wine partner you always wanted. About once a week, over pizza or pork chops in a favorite neighborhood haunt, they linger over a bottle of Valpolicella, their daughter growing sleepy beside them.

Wow, that's a lot of words to describe a perfectly normal guy - normal to me, at least. A good, steady driver, too, only got us lost once, and in a very entertaining way. Jeez, just doin' one's own thing gets you into the New York Times now, is it? :wink:

No, but seriously, that's a nice piece of writing. Not that back-slapping fan-boy drivel, but a colorful portrait acknowledging all the vagaries and ironies of life. Love it or leave it.

[ Edited by: bigbrotiki 2011-04-07 14:09 ]

[curmudgeon]Yeah, sorry to poo poo, but, if that is one of the most elaborate home bars they have seen... and if that title picture is "All his tiki accoutrement", well, you can guess my opinion. Take a short stroll through the Home Bars area here and he'd just get floored I imagine. All his tiki is less than I pass over regularly and refuse to buy because it is too common.

Oh well. I do dig the Airstream bar. Don't think the taillights are original though, so there I go getting all High and Mighty indignanat again! Sheesh! Can you believe this asshole?

I know a lot of people who would have to argue a lot with the notion this guy is in the top 5 in the world of mixology. I'll pick my 4 and have a Smack-Down Mix-Off any day! Bring it on at Hukilau!

In the end, I think Tiki doesn't quite belong in that article. For us folks drunk on Tiki, he does not seem to have really dipped his toe in. At least they get the top 2 vintage Tiki bars (as far as drinks, by far) in the world right.[/curmudgeon]

Yes, you ARE being a curmudgeon, Tim! My whole point was that what seems terribly exotic to outsiders, like the writer and his New York white collar readership, seems almost "normal" to us. And yes, we all know Tikier-than-that home bars. But as the article states, Mr. Kolesar comes to Tiki from the mixology side, not from the artifacts collecting side, so his bar is probably the tikiest thing that writer has ever seen. AND Mr.Kolesar is an esteemed, active member of a small but dedicated circle of New York Tiki rummies, which includes Mr. and Mrs. LeisureMaster, and top New York bar slinger Mr. Brian Miller.

On 2011-04-07 10:26, bigbrotiki wrote:

...what seems terribly exotic to outsiders, ...seems almost "normal" to us...

"Exotic" is one way of putting it.

BUT I think his wife described it more accurately... "He's painfully geeky”.

As we all are ?? Ha, ha. :D

And "Feeding Therapist" sounds like a racket to me. He charges money doing what your average responsible parent does for free ?? "Eat your vegetables or no ice cream for you !!" "That'll be $10,000 please."

[ Edited by: JOHN-O 2011-04-07 11:33 ]

Oh, OK then...

I read this article last week in the New York Times and was unimpressed. It's not just that the Tiki aspect of it is fairly mediocre, the whole piece is pretty dull. It did raise one question: Is New York City cocktail culture so low key that this guy is "considered to be one of the great characters of the city’s bar scene"?

The Times regularly has profiles of fairly ordinary people doing somewhat unusual things. I often find these pieces to be interesting. This just wasn't one of the interesting ones. It reminded me of the sort of pieces one comes across in smaller newspapers...

Local Man With Somewhat Unordinary
Hobby Does Stuff, Collects Things

*Wife tolerates his interests, neighbors don't seem to mind

"I'm just having a good time doing what I enjoy doing," says man*

On 2011-04-06 23:47, bigbrotiki wrote:
Jeez, just doin' one's own thing gets you into the New York Times now, is it?

Ya, this article is rehash of rehash.
In the video, the interviewer questions how/why is Tiki making a sudden comeback?

(No offense FezMonkey, reg. your post)

Tiki has been "making a comeback" for more than 15 years now. That does not fit my definition of "sudden".

On 2011-04-07 11:53, woofmutt wrote:
I read this article last week in the New York Times and was unimpressed. It's not just that the Tiki aspect of it is fairly mediocre, the whole piece is pretty dull. It did raise one question: Is New York City cocktail culture so low key that this guy is "considered to be one of the great characters of the city’s bar scene"?

The Times regularly has profiles of fairly ordinary people doing somewhat unusual things. I often find these pieces to be interesting. This just wasn't one of the interesting ones. It reminded me of the sort of pieces one comes across in smaller newspapers...

[list]**Local Man With Somewhat Unordinary

Hobby Does Stuff, Collects Things**

*Wife tolerates his interests, neighbors don't seem to mind

"I'm just having a good time doing what I enjoy doing," says man*

That's pretty funny, woofter! :lol: And exactly making my point: WE here, being veteran Tikiphiles, perceive this article as unimpressive, because we have been deeply engulfed in this stuff. How about the majority out there, who maybe have never heard of it, or of craft cocktails? This article was written for them, not for Tiki Centralites.

What if you knew as much, and more, about all the other subjects in the profiles you found interesting? Would you still? I have found again and again that if I read an article about a subject that I know a lot about, I am often shocked about the mistakes and superficialities in that article - transpose that to ALL the stuff you see in the media that you buy sight unseen as the truth, it's pretty shocking.

And no, not so much the cocktail scene, but yes, the Tiki scene in New York is quite low key. Except, of course, the riff raff at Riff Raff's ! :lol:

Nothing says Tiki more than a nice big white wall for the back drop.

What's wrong with you people in New York?

Well, you got to give this guy a little slack. He may be one of those guys (like me) who has to clear everything with the SWMBO. From the sounds of it, if he want ape-sh*t crazy with the bamboo and carved idols and such....she'd have him served with divorce papers so fast it'd make his head spin. She's a lawyer, he's a "feeding therapist"...I imagine she's got more control over the $$ than he. If they had a house with a garage....his stuff'd be out there instead (like my kegerator and such).

He looks to be more into the rock-a-billy scene (maybe the "country music" they refer to in the article?), than a pure tiki scene.

howlinowl