Wall Street Journal on October 4th, 2008

Grab a copy! :)

Blue Horse Shoe Loves Tiki.

I am long cocktail umbrellas,
ex-trader midnite

Hell yeah!

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122307378792603773.html

Well its about time@ COOL! :lol: WAY TO go!
How many Tiki Joints make it into the WSJ?
HappyHappyHappy and More HAPPY!

That's a cool write up and interesting to see the photos. Guaranteed a few more people are going to check these places out after reading this one!
Seems to be written quite well too.
Nice read, thanks for sharing.
I myself, don't have a single reason to read the WSJ so glad you posted!

TabooDan

"We live in an obnoxiously insistent age, with its relentless blog slog and the Sisyphean ordeal of answering emails."

What a great sentence. A really well written article.

Deleted for double post

[ Edited by: tikiyaki 2008-10-04 09:51 ]

(Standing and applauding)

B R A V O ! ! !

Thank the Tiki Gods he pointed out the difference between "good Tiki" and "Bad Tiki".

For an article like that to appear in the Wall Street Journal is a huge deal.

Congratz Martiki.

GREAT article!!
Full page in the hard copy edition that I just finished reading - Page 3 of the "Weekend" section.
Martin, I'm betting you'll get an uptick in traffic after this & maybe some more explorers from out of town, too.
CONGRATS!!!

My Man (along with Buster and The Jab) is famous!

On 2008-10-04 07:51, martiki wrote:
Hell yeah!

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122307378792603773.html

Wow, I'm in the WSJ. 8)

Congrats to Martin and FI!

Actually, that's the second time Tofu Joe and The Jab have starred in a newspaper article about FI, in the far more respectable Contra Costa Times!

Shout out to Buster, Phil Shreeuuruuruueerrrrrr, and CP in there as well!

Eric Felten is a great writer and he TOTALLY gets it, which is great- booze nerds will really enjoy his excellent book, "How's Your Drink?":

http://www.amazon.com/Hows-Your-Drink-Cocktails-Drinking/dp/1572840897/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1223145807&sr=8-1

Tiki Crawl- it's now OFFICIAL!

Wow. Excellent article. I imagine we're going to get an influx of new members in the next few days!
"Campy tiki provides no escape at all."

• another nice quote.

...AKA "Thirstin' Haole the 3rd"

[ Edited by: twitch 2008-10-04 14:53 ]

Nice work Martin - really good article and hopefully an increase in your business!

Eric Felton really does get it and I agree that his book is great.

Now what's that house drink recipe again.....?

Awesome!

Tiki Doesn't Have to Be Tacky
A Polynesian Pop revival is under way, with bars inspired by the best (and worst) of island escapism

Photography by John Lee/Aurora Select for The Wall Street Journal
Patrons line the Forbidden Island bar in Alameda, Calif., where dollar bills stuck to the ceiling are just part of the motif

With the much-repeated words "worst financial crisis since the Great Depression" marking the moment, it seems appropriate to visit that peculiarly American escape -- the tiki bar -- itself born in the depths of the Depression. It was in 1934 that Donn Beach (né Ernest Raymond Beaumont-Gantt) opened Don the Beachcomber in Los Angeles, starting a craze that took roughly 50 years to fizzle. The time seems ripe for a Polynesian Pop revival -- and, in fact, it's already under way.

Starting Thursday, and going through next Sunday, tikiphiles will be descending on the San Francisco Bay area for the eighth annual Tiki Bar Crawl. The Bay Area was one of the original hot spots of tikiana: Victor Bergeron owned an Oakland barbecue place called Hinky Dinks; after visiting Don the Beachcomber's place in L.A., Bergeron promptly bedecked his restaurant with tiki carvings, bamboo and outrigger canoes and rechristened it "Trader Vic's." The Bay area is still home to a remarkable number of tiki bars, big and small, old and new. That's why the community of tiki fanatics -- who normally gather online at aficionado Hanford Lemoore's Web site, http://www.tikicentral.com -- make San Francisco and Oakland their destinations to meet and drink in person. Go to http://www.tikicrawl.com to find out when and where to join them.

Photography by John Lee/Aurora Select for The Wall Street Journal
Customers huddle in a booth at Trad'r Sam's tiki bar in San Francisco as they drink from a communal Scorpion Bowl that looks more like a Sizzler salad bowl
Why all the interest in tiki bars? They've been an icon of kitsch for so long that it's hard to remember that the Polynesian restaurants that proliferated in the '50s and '60s were once power tables for the elite. The Trader Vic's at New York's Plaza Hotel was a favorite of the buttoned-down preppy crowd. And many were the Gotham debutantes who, like journalist Nikki Finke, had their "first drunken evening on Samoan Fog Cutters at Trader Vic's."

Polynesian Pop was also an eminent variety of Americana. When Nikita Khrushchev and his wife visited San Francisco in September 1959, Madame Khrushchev slipped away from her official minders and went off to experience America first-hand. She shopped at Sears and lunched at Trader Vic's. When Queen Elizabeth II visited California in 1983, it was at Trader Vic's that the Reagans took her to dine.

But by then the island fad was finally petering out. When Donald Trump bought the Plaza in 1988, one of his first edicts was to shutter Trader Vic's, which he said had "gotten tacky." And he would know. I suspect that the last time a tiki bar was on the radar of most Americans was in the movie "GoodFellas." Joe Pesci unleashes his infamous rant -- "I amuse you?" -- in the Bamboo Lounge, which he and Ray Liotta soon torch. That thatch inferno was a sort of funeral pyre for Polynesian Pop.

But the tiki aesthetic remains embedded in our collective subconscious. How many of us grew up watching "Gilligan's Island" reruns? Nowadays, I share with my 4-year-old son a taste for "SpongeBob SquarePants" (in which SpongeBob and his crochety co-worker Squidward both live in houses that appear to be modeled after tiki-bar mugs). Twenty-somethings have embraced Polynesian Pop in their own way, adorning themselves with Maori tribal tattoos. And even through the lean years of the past two decades, some of the great old tiki joints managed to survive, among them the magnificent Mai-Kai in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and the intimate Tiki-Ti in L.A.

Photography by John Lee/Aurora Select for The Wall Street Journal
Tiki mugs and bottles of alcohol line a wall behind the bar at the Forbidden Island, where fresh ingredients are paired with long-lost recipes
After decades of drifting in the doldrums, tiki finally has some wind in its sails again. At this year's Tales of the Cocktail convention in New Orleans -- where classic-cocktail geeks and "bar chefs" gather to plot the future of high-end drink in America -- the final evening featured a giant tiki party. So oversubscribed was the event, that within less than an hour the thatched bars were plain out of drinks.

The tiki-craze may have reached its zenith in the late '50s and early '60s, but there's a new allure to the escape it promises. What are we escaping now? The financial woes may be the best excuse of the moment, but tiki provides an escape somewhat more fundamental, a vacation from the everyday, even if today's bears little resemblance to the everyday of the '50s. We aren't quite the gray-flannel-suiters we used to be, and who used to be tiki's prime devotees. Richard Nixon -- famous for, among other things, wearing a dark suit and wingtips when strolling the beach at San Clemente -- found solace in the Polynesian fantasy that was the old Trader Vic's in Washington's Capitol Hilton. There was a guy who could use an escape.

Ever since the cultural revolution of the late '60s and '70s, we no longer need an island retreat to loosen our ties (how many of us even know how to tie them anymore?). But that doesn't mean there isn't a place for tiki. In a way, the slacker aesthetic has ruined loafing -- who wants to spend his life clad in dingy sweats living in his parents' basement? Donn Beach's brand of indolence was decidedly stylish by comparison. His was not a lethargy born of surly diffidence. He championed island-style relaxation as a sybaritic art form: "Of ALL Life's Pleasures deeply drink/At every worry give a wink/It's MUCH MUCH later than you think," went the official Beachcomber's Creed.

I suspect Donn would have frowned at the technological tethers -- cellphones, BlackBerries and such -- that bind us to our workaday world. We live in an obnoxiously insistent age, with its relentless blog slog and the Sisyphean ordeal of answering emails. This tyranny of hyper-connection may be why tiki culture has a new resonance -- the promise of being detached from the cyber-grind. A thatched hut on some forgotten atoll is the sort of place alluring in its lack of cell coverage.

Photography by John Lee/Aurora Select for The Wall Street Journal
Diners sip drinks through extra-long straws at the Tonga Room in San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel.
There's good tiki and bad tiki. Anything sleek and postmodern -- say, a steel-and-glass totem -- is bad tiki. Anything you can find in the luau section of your local party store -- think cheap plastic leis and cardboard cutout hula girls -- is bad tiki. I'm also of the opinion that "camp" makes for bad tiki. Ours is an irony-soaked culture, and camp is just a gaudy variety of the old, knowing wink-and-a-nod. Campy tiki provides no escape at all.

Happily, those making the crawl this next week in the Bay area will enjoy a remarkable amount of good tiki. In Oakland there is the Conga Lounge, where the house special is a decent coconut-rum drink called the Gilligan's Island, in keeping with the kooky castaway atmosphere of the bar. Far more polished is the vibe you get at the Kona Club. Not much to look at from the outside, it is a bamboo palace on the inside, dignified by a life-size bronze mea hula whose grass skirt swivels on mechanical hips. Dangerously close to camp? Perhaps -- but it is done with such grace and elegance that all thoughts of glib postmodernism melt away. If only the drinks at Kona Club were up to the standard set by the metal goddess. By way of soliciting a recommendation, I asked the bartender her favorite among the tiki quaffs on the menu. "I don't drink these drinks," she replied. "I don't like rum."

You won't have that problem at Forbidden Island, out in the San Francisco Bay on the island of Alameda. Though it is only two years old, Forbidden Island is as close as you will come to a tiki bar of World War II vintage, right down to the dollar bills pinned to the ceiling above the long bar. (Soldiers and sailors about to ship out would traditionally write their names on bills and stick them to the wall of a bar to be sure to have the money for a drink on their return.) Forbidden Island has a shipwreck subtext, as if constructed out of the remains of a string of reefed tiki bars. And indeed, the cozy place is awash with flotsam salvaged from all the great Polynesian palaces that sank decades ago.

But what makes Forbidden Island a thing of beauty are the drinks. Long before tiki became officially tacky, it lost its emphasis on good taste -- that is, on the taste of the drinks. Donn Beach and Trader Vic both jealously guarded the secret recipes for the fantastical concoctions they served across their bars. But that didn't stop imitators from throwing any and every tropical juice together with some rum and calling it a Zombie or a Mai Tai. The "umbrella drink" became an icon for sugary slop.

The best tiki drinks are, like any good cocktail, balanced. They are also complex. Tart citrus leavens the sweetness of tropical fruits; island spices like cinnamon, nutmeg and all-spice add mystery; and rums of various weights, potencies and flavors are combined to create depth. All this, served in a grimacing, flower-festooned totem pole of a mug.

Forbidden Island proprietor Martin Cate has applied the new high-end-cocktail-culture insistence on hand-crafting and fresh ingredients to old, long-lost recipes unearthed by tiki-drink archaeologist Jeff "Beachbum" Berry. The results are fantastic, such as the Nui Nui, a delicious Don the Beachcomber original that has been reborn at Forbidden Island. Mr. Cate is also building on the tiki tradition of creating proprietary drinks with secret recipes. My favorite quaff at Forbidden Island is the eponymous house special. Sadly, copious pleading failed to wheedle the recipe out of Mr. Cate's hands: To enjoy a Forbidden Island, you'll have to visit the Alameda oasis of the same name.

Mr. Cate has found the formula for a successful tiki revival, with brilliant drinks as the main ingredient. Even so, some tiki joints have survived on sheer nostalgia, in spite of the drinks. Trad'r Sam's on Geary Street in San Francisco may well be the oldest continually operating tiki bar in the country, having opened in the first flush of Polynesiana. The bamboo is sparse and tattered, but it helps make for a cheerful dive. The house specialty is a bland version of Trader Vic's Scorpion Bowl served in clear plastic bowls that might well have come from the salad bar at a Sizzler.

The drinks are better at San Francisco's grandest tiki institution, the Tonga Room, established in the basement of the swanky Fairmont Hotel after World War II. I enjoyed a perfectly respectable concoction served in the shell of a fresh pineapple, and proceeded to soak up the dramatic atmosphere -- the impression of being in the high-vaulted thatched hut of an island potentate, complete with lagoon and the occasional indoor rainstorm. But the spell was broken before it was cast. I wish I could say that the sullen service was the only sore spot; but, alas, the waiters had good reason to scowl, regularly subjected as they are to the deafening band that floats out on a launch in the lagoon. Savvy tiki drinkers have learned to visit the Tonga Room early in the evening so as to escape before being assaulted with such wedding-band atrocities as "Brick House."

This year's Tiki Crawl will conclude, appropriately enough, at the flagship Trader Vic's on the San Francisco Bay in Emeryville. When I visited a couple of weeks ago, I tried the Trader Vic's Grog -- a drink that is a favorite of the bar's crew -- and I was pleasantly surprised by how well-made it was, with island spices nicely balancing the fruit, and neither eclipsing the rum. But if you make it to next week's official Tiki Crawl, or just engineer a crawl of your own when time permits, you may want to indulge in the quintessential rite of tiki exotica and order the Trader's Scorpion Bowl for four -- slurped communally through impossibly long straws.

Will the tiki-revival flourish? Perhaps -- especially if more places follow the lead of Mr. Cate and his Forbidden Island crew, concocting compelling drinks that can't be found anywhere but at a tiki bar. I certainly hope it will, because goodness knows we could all use an escape. For those of us not quite ready for the full Gauguin, a respite at Forbidden Island will do the trick nicely.

The Nui Nui at the Forbidden Island bar. The Forbidden Island at the Forbidden Island bar. The Pineapple Royal at the Tonga Room. A version of the Scorpion Bowl at Trader Vic's.

Recipes
Nui Nui
(from Don the Beachcomber, circa 1935)

2 oz medium-bodied aged rum½ ?189 oz fresh lime juice½ oz fresh orange juice¼ oz cinnamon-infused syrup¼ oz vanilla-infused syrup¼ oz allspice liqueur1 dash Angostura bitters.Shake vigorously with ice and strain into a tall Collins glass with crushed ice. Even better if you give it just a couple of seconds in the blender. Garnish with a sprig of mint and an orange twist. For the syrups, try the Sonoma Syrup Co. (www.sonomasyrup.com) or your local Starbucks. If your local liquor store doesn't have allspice liqueur, ask them to check with importer Haus Alpenz.

Scorpion Bowl (for 4)
(from Trader Vic's)

6 oz white rum2 oz brandy1 oz gin3 oz fresh lemon juice3 oz fresh orange juice2 oz orgeat (an almond-flavored syrup)Shake with ice and strain into a bowl with fresh ice. Garnish with a gardenia floating in the middle of the bowl. Drink through impossibly long straws that allow all four of you to access the bowl at once. It's an instant tiki party!

Mr. Felten is the author of "How's Your Drink?: Cocktails, Culture and the Art of Drinking Well" (Agate Surrey). Email him at [email protected].

Thanks for the post...some good news is sure nice.

Great article!! We have arrived!!

SELL!....No, BUY!!!...Wait, drink! Yes, DRINK!!!

So, a well written article on the "revival of tiki" was not bullish for the market. Must be a lot of short-selling Buffett fans, Jimmy not Warren. Bastiges! Still, the Wall Street bail-out/rescue plan even had provisions for tiki:

$192 million in rebates on excise taxes for the Puerto Rican and Virgin Islands rum industry

Pork for rum, baby. Gotta love it. Life is still good, don't jump!
100% cash, but looking to buy midnite

Well, I was hoping to pick up a hard copy of the WSJ in the city on Saturday night, but was unable to find one in the neighborhoods I visited. I was bummed.

Then this morning, I came in to the office to find that my boss had taken the article from the WSJ he gets at home, and put it on my desk for me. :) Thanks, Boss!

The back of my head is famous! Haha!

The author gets it right! Congrats Martin and all the Forbidden Island owners and staff, and to BambooBen (who should have got mentioned for his two masterpieces) and Hanford and TofuJoe!

I loved this line about the Tonga Room: "I wish I could say that the sullen service was the only sore spot; but, alas, the waiters had good reason to scowl, regularly subjected as they are to the deafening band that floats out on a launch in the lagoon."

I tell you, the people I work with don't think I'm so weird now. (Of course, I am kinda weird but that's not the point.)

Kind of not the right time to be favored by the WALL STREET journal, ain't it? :)
No, really, great article, and again proof of my observation that the current phase of the Tiki revival is fueled by a current interest in mixology, --not so much by the appreciation of the ART of Tiki, which is still considered tacky by the media, while cocktail culture, just like food TV, can be presented as classy and "tasteful" (which of course it is!)

Great article! Congrats!

On 2008-10-04 14:48, twitch wrote:
Wow. Excellent article. I imagine we're going to get an influx of new members in the next few days!

Don't count on it. To borrow a quote from the special forces, "People don't join us because were different, they join us because they are."

I don't know how many people see an article like that and go where has tiki been my entire life. I may be wrong and if I am it will not be the first time.

[ Edited by: captnkirk 2008-10-08 03:48 ]