Chow.com article - Zombies Come Back from the Grave!

I did a search and didn't find this already posted.

http://www.chow.com/stories/12093

For posterity's sake I've posted the story below. Apologies for the formatting weirdness but I got tired of fighting it.

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Zombies Come Back from the Grave!
Bartenders shake up some serious tiki drinks
By Roxanne Webber

If you order a mai tai at Smuggler’s Cove in San Francisco, you will not find a paper
umbrella in it. It will not be pink or blended, and it will taste mostly like aged rum. But the
drink will probably be made by a fellow in a tropical-print shirt, who may be goading patrons
into walking around like zombies. There will be blowfish lights overhead, and you will get a
definite Pirates-of-the-Caribbean-ride feeling. Owner Martin Cate’s cocktails are delicious and
easy to drink, and the biggest emphasis seems to be on two things: quality and fun.

While the new wave of young “startenders” who honed their skills making cocktails in the
modern speakeasies aren’t going to trade in their vintage vests and bow ties for Hawaiian
shirts, they are taking notice of Cate’s success, and his skill working with rum: Smuggler’s
Cove has been packed from the start. Neo-tropical drinks are a natural progression for
creative bartenders, says Richard Boccato, of Dutch Kills in New York and formerly of NYC’s
Milk and Honey. “We need to go forward and think about different things, and innovate, and
create, and not stay within the box that a lot of us have built around ourselves,” he says.

The world of Scorpion Bowls seems an unlikely place for craft bartenders to be digging
around for inspiration. But tiki cocktails are a logical extension of how these bartenders
already approach making drinks. Before the genre was turned into a train wreck where
anything put in a blender and served in a hurricane glass with a paper bird on it was a go, tiki
drinks were complex and challenging, made with special spice-infused syrups, fine aged rum,
and fresh-squeezed juices—the same elements we now expect in any artisanal cocktail.

In early spring, Boccato and Giuseppe Gonzalez (also at Dutch Kills and formerly of the
Flatiron Lounge) will open Painkiller in Manhattan. “It’s not going to be the classic Trader
Vic’s or Don the Beachcomber homage theme,” says Boccato. “If you were standing in a
subway station circa 1970s/’80s, looking at the graffiti go by, just imagine there is a thatched
roof above you and a tiki drink in your hand.”

Boccato says they are even going to be working with the blender, an appliance that serious
bartenders have renounced. Some of the drinks they have tweaked so far include the
namesake Painkiller, a mix of homemade cream of coconut, Pusser’s Rum, fresh pineapple
juice, and muddled oranges, garnished with grated nutmeg; and the Mary Pickford, which
they’ll be making with fresh pineapple juice, maraschino liqueur, house-made grenadine, and
white rum. The Cradle of Life, a house original, will be made with two types of rum, orgeat,
mixed citrus, and bitters and garnished with a flaming lime shell full of green Chartreuse.
They are also planning a Scorpion Bowl program, a tropical spin on the punch trend. The
NYC twist: The bowls are inspired by ’70s street gangs from the five boroughs and will have
names like the Imperial Bachelor, the No-No, the Golden Guinea, and the Jolly Stomper.

“The general misconception over the years about guys like us is that we are very uptight.
With this project, we do intend to take our jobs very seriously, but we don’t intend to take
ourselves very seriously,” says Boccato.

Plus, the Vietnam War quelled the enthusiasm for the South Pacific. “When you went to Steve Crane’s Kon-Tiki [chain of] restaurants and there are all these people wearing coolie hats, then you get shipped off to Vietnam and are being shot at by people in those hats, the naiveté dies down,” says Smuggler’s Cove’s Martin Cate. The aesthetic also didn’t fly with the generation of hippie-counterculture kids. “Going to these places and listening to Martin Denny was what your parents would do,” says Berry. “You smoked pot and went to rock concerts.” As tiki went out of fashion, recipes were lost, and what was left were the “blue-collar places that served cheap knockoff versions of the drinks,” says Berry.

All this led to the artisanal tiki drink becoming a lost art by the mid-’70s/early ’80s. “Nobody was making the drinks anymore. It was white wine spritzers and chocolate martinis,” says Berry.

Credit for rescuing and decoding many of the lost tiki drink recipes goes to the aforementioned tiki sleuth Jeff Berry. Around the mid-’80s, as the last few holdout tiki bars were giving up the ghost in Los Angeles, he started trying to piece together the recipes for the lost drinks. In 1998 he published Beachbum Berry’s Grog Log, and in 2002 followed it up with Beachbum Berry’s Intoxica! But Beachbum Berry’s Sippin’ Safari in 2007 was the real culmination of his historical research and decoded recipes, such as the long-lost Donn Beach Zombie. “Once I published them, it opened a lot of eyes, and people realized they really weren’t crap drinks. They were culinary, and even more challenging than some of the classic drinks,” says Berry.

With the early ’90s swing/rockabilly trend, a few people started opening new tiki bars, but “they got the look and didn’t follow through to the next step: to do the drinks right,” says Martin Cate. Meanwhile, a few original tiki joints weathered the storm—such as the Mai-Kai in Fort Lauderdale, Florida—and folks like Blair Reynolds, maker of the Trader Tiki’s line of artisan cocktail syrups, were doing tiki revival nights at various bars.

Now, with bartenders very much into exploring the world of rum, it looks like tiki drinks—real, artisanal versions—are going to keep the spirit of fun flowing through bars. And this time they are going to be a hell of a lot better documented: Dutch Kills’s Richard Boccato says they will be publishing an online database of all their cocktails.

Blair Reynolds sees tiki snowballing this year. “As it gets a better sense of legitimacy, and people understand how much it can be enjoyed, it will keep growing,” he says. “Tiki is ready to take its place again, for people to be welcomed around the volcano bowl.”

[ Edited by: fez monkey 2010-04-01 00:08 ]

It IS indeed hard to remember which of the many Tiki Cocktail revival articles published recently have been posted here already.

What a well written article! Among the many put in print recently, this one really packs a punch. This piece again proves how the cocktail craft revival has become the new ambassador of Tiki culture. I especially appreciate how it clearly places Jeff Berry at the nucleus of it.

One of the reasons for mixology standing for Tiki culture these days might be that not only has the media become tired itself of announcing a Tiki revival every year now for ten years, but that the gourmet cocktail genre might be least un-p.c. element of Tiki. Alcohol and cocktails are clearly part of party culture, and so one can "seriously" engage in and discuss the craft of gourmet mixology, without stepping on the slippery slope of aesthetic good/bad taste, (and such questionable outgrowths as Witco), or even worse, the use of religious icons in a recreational context.

One indicator of that is that many of the new bars seem to take great pains to explain that their version of Tiki will not be the "old stodgy" Tiki bar that some of us know and love as "classic Tiki", as if that label has already become outdated for the second time. It seems the Tiki revival itself has become an old hat.

I believe there are two reasons for this:

1.) Financial: Nowadays it has become unaffordable for many proprietors to build a floor-to-ceiling Tiki restaurant, so for new Tiki bar owners to explain that "This is OUR version" of the style allows them to go more lightly on the the decor and the money spent.

2.) Lack of public awareness and subsequent appreciation: While many on this board are specialists and aficionados of the style (case in point: TC's new Home Bar section), the general public often cannot tell a Trader Vic's from a Trader Joe's. Many of the newly built fully decked out Tiki revival bars of the Tiki revival have lasted only a few years, but not because the choice of style was "wrong", it just did not suffice to create a steady flow of clientele, because the majority of said clientele is generally not "educated" about Tiki and can thus not enjoy it as we can.

All this is not a critique of "classic" vs "nouveaux" Tiki, merely one of my many observations of the state of things in Tikiland.