Speaker 1: Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to Invention. My name is Robert lamp and I'm
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick. And today we have a special treat. We
Speaker 1: have an interview episode of Invention to share with you,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna be chatting with Jeff beach Bumberry, a mixologist, author,
Speaker 1: um restaurantur, and just an overall expert and historian of
Speaker 1: Tiki culture. He in fact, he's the living authority on
Speaker 1: all things Tiki, having unearthed numerous recipes from the golden
Speaker 1: age of Tiki and helped to bring about its comeback
Speaker 1: from obscurity and stagnation. His books include beach Bumberri Sip
Speaker 1: and Safari and beach Bumberries Potions of the Caribbean, which
Speaker 1: is an excellent, excellent illustrated breakdown of Tiki history and
Speaker 1: the book that made me decide that we needed to
Speaker 1: reach out to the man for Invention. Now, Robert, you're
Speaker 1: the one here that has definitely got a passion for
Speaker 1: this weird cultural artifact of this period known as like
Speaker 1: the Tiki craze. What in short, what is the Tiki Craze? Well,
Speaker 1: it's weird, you know because it's like, uh, you're dealing
Speaker 1: with with what can be an extremely delicious, rich and
Speaker 1: complex cocktail that is also delivered in this kind of
Speaker 1: faux uh Polynesian um uh, you know, rapping. And of
Speaker 1: course all cocktails are you know, like fifty percent ingredients
Speaker 1: presentation at least it may even you know, depending on
Speaker 1: how you look at it, uh, that the percentage of
Speaker 1: presentation is even greater. Um. And yeah, they're also they
Speaker 1: feel like an artifact of the past. At the same time, Now,
Speaker 1: this is gonna be somewhat different than a lot of
Speaker 1: episodes we've done before that we've looked at a lot
Speaker 1: of different kinds of takes on the word invention. Usually
Speaker 1: we're looking at something more like a technology, like a
Speaker 1: piece of hardware that does something you can hold in
Speaker 1: your hand. But today we're gonna be looking centrally, I
Speaker 1: think mostly at a an iconic recipe, the invention of
Speaker 1: a recipe for a drink. The my that's right, the
Speaker 1: signature really the the the superstar of tiki cocktails. If
Speaker 1: no matter what how little you know about tiki, you
Speaker 1: probably know the Ma Tai. You've probably at least seen
Speaker 1: it on the menu somewhere Uh so, Yeah, we're gonna
Speaker 1: be quizzing beach bum Berry about the history the invention
Speaker 1: of the ma Tai and in doing so, you know,
Speaker 1: get I think to the the invention of tiki, but
Speaker 1: also just what we can what we can take from
Speaker 1: the invention of the ma tai and apply to invention
Speaker 1: and technology in general. Uh so, Yeah, I'm excited to
Speaker 1: have have a beach Bumberry on the show. I've been
Speaker 1: a fan of his books for for a while. I'm
Speaker 1: a fan of his restaurant in New Orleans, Latitude twenty nine,
Speaker 1: which you'll find in the French Quarter. And if you
Speaker 1: want to check out his website, uh, it is beach
Speaker 1: bum Berry dot com. So, without further ado, let's jump
Speaker 1: into the interview. All right, welcome to the show. Uh, Jeff,
Speaker 1: would you mind introducing yourself to our listeners. Yeah, my
Speaker 1: name is Jeff Barry aliens speech by Barry, and I
Speaker 1: write books about Polynesian drinks and food and I own
Speaker 1: a restaurant and bar called Latitude twenty nine in New Orleans.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, we're going to be discussing the origins
Speaker 1: of tiki drinks, how the signature my Tai came to
Speaker 1: be and how America fell in love with the Tiki cocktail.
Speaker 1: But first, how did Jeff Barry fall in love with
Speaker 1: tiki and become the beach Bump. The way I fell
Speaker 1: down the Tiki rabbit hole was about oh man, I
Speaker 1: must have been eight years old, maybe younger. UM and
Speaker 1: my parents we looked in the San Frando Valley UM
Speaker 1: just outside of Los Angeles, and at that time, in
Speaker 1: the sixties, just about every town or city had at
Speaker 1: least one UM, you know, Polynesian themed restaurant or bar.
Speaker 1: The fad had to sort of hit its peak in
Speaker 1: the sixties. And the place they took me to was
Speaker 1: called a Fongs and it was just a Chinese restaurant.
Speaker 1: But what they had done was they had taken over
Speaker 1: a failed business called the Bora Bora Room. The Bora
Speaker 1: Bora Room has spent so much money on the core
Speaker 1: that they went out of business. They couldn't recoup their costs.
Speaker 1: So the place was beautiful. It was full of like
Speaker 1: running waterfalls and a canoe hanging from the ceiling, and
Speaker 1: there were these dawn to dusk lighting changes with this
Speaker 1: little miniature island diorama behind the bar, and you had
Speaker 1: to walk through the bar to get to the restaurant.
Speaker 1: So I noticed that, and I just became a Polynesiac
Speaker 1: at that point. And this faux Polynesia, this sort of
Speaker 1: like little movie set Polynesia, actually made me want to
Speaker 1: go to the actual Polynesia, which I did. And of course,
Speaker 1: when I got old enough to drink, I wanted to
Speaker 1: find these places so I can actually drink in them.
Speaker 1: And that was and they were starting to disappear. The
Speaker 1: fat was over, so you could there were still a
Speaker 1: couple of places left. Um the tik Et, a little
Speaker 1: tiny place UM was which is actually still there with
Speaker 1: their generation owners, and then Trader Vix was still there.
Speaker 1: So I went to the places that were there and
Speaker 1: try some drinks, and they kind of blew my mind.
Speaker 1: I mean, the good ones were really really good. And
Speaker 1: this was at a time when uh, this was the
Speaker 1: cocktail dark ages. You couldn't get a good drink anywhere. Um.
Speaker 1: Nobody was using fresh juices. Everybody was using mixes from
Speaker 1: a can or a squeeze bottle, and Um Tiki places
Speaker 1: were the only places that were still doing drinks the
Speaker 1: way they made them in the thirties, forties and fifties.
Speaker 1: They were using fresh juice they were using, you know,
Speaker 1: um house made syrups and premium RUMs, and they were
Speaker 1: mixing all these complicated, um, teasingly elusive flavors. And basically
Speaker 1: what they were doing was they were doing craft cocktails,
Speaker 1: like seventy years before that term even existed. UM. So
Speaker 1: I kept going to these places, not just because I
Speaker 1: love the interiors, um, loved the decor, but because the
Speaker 1: drinks were so good. And it wasn't until like the
Speaker 1: nineties that I actually tried to figure out how to
Speaker 1: make these drinks. Because you could not find them in
Speaker 1: cocktail books. Um. They were top secrets. They were industrial secrets,
Speaker 1: basically trade secrets and very very jealously guarded because you
Speaker 1: didn't want rival teking places making your drinks and stealing
Speaker 1: your market share. Uh. And so you couldn't find them
Speaker 1: in a recipe books. You couldn't find them in a
Speaker 1: newspaper articles, when you went to the library and looked
Speaker 1: up things on microfilm, you couldn't find them. Basically anywhere.
Speaker 1: You could find bad ones. Money of bad ones were printed,
Speaker 1: but the good ones were just still secret. And when
Speaker 1: you talk to the old timers who were making them, um,
Speaker 1: you know, by the nineties, there were very few of
Speaker 1: them left. But when you talk to them, they wouldn't
Speaker 1: tell you anything. You know, You'd say, well, what's what's
Speaker 1: in this drink? It's greating and they go rumman fruit juice,
Speaker 1: sort of like you know, you you knew immediately that
Speaker 1: that was the last question you were going to ask them,
Speaker 1: you know, So that sort of started me on this thing.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to find, um, find find how to how
Speaker 1: to make the drinks, which I had to do of
Speaker 1: necessity because all these places are going into business and
Speaker 1: eventually if I wanted to have a ticky drink, I'd
Speaker 1: have to be able to make it at home. Now
Speaker 1: I know way less about a tiki drinks and tiki
Speaker 1: culture than than Robert does, so I might ask the
Speaker 1: neophyte questions. This might be a stupid question, but is
Speaker 1: it possible to patent to drink recipe? Can you try
Speaker 1: to enforce intellectual property rights on that? Or is that
Speaker 1: just you know, you can't even get started. That's an
Speaker 1: excellent question, actually, and it's a question that's still being debated. Um.
Speaker 1: There's one cocktail book writer, Philip Green, who writes books
Speaker 1: about Ernest Hemingway and drinking in the twenties and all that.
Speaker 1: And he's also a trademark lawyer and he actually did
Speaker 1: a whole seminar about that, because everybody wants to know
Speaker 1: that now during this whole cocktail renaissance, when you know,
Speaker 1: drinks have become currency again for people's careers, and the
Speaker 1: short answers, no, you can't. Um, you can. You can
Speaker 1: trademark a drink name, um, and but you can't actually
Speaker 1: copyright or recipe and people can just do what they
Speaker 1: want once the recipes um out there. It's the same
Speaker 1: thing with food. I mean, there are plenty of chefs
Speaker 1: and restaurant owners out there who would love to be
Speaker 1: able to copyright dishes and only serve them in their places.
Speaker 1: But UM, I don't know all of the legal intercreases
Speaker 1: of why you can't. But but you can't. Now, there
Speaker 1: have been there have been drinks that have copyrighted or
Speaker 1: or trademark I'm not clear on which their names, like
Speaker 1: the Dark and Stormy UM, Gosling's Rum trademark that drink
Speaker 1: name which is basically just Ginger beer and Goslings Rum.
Speaker 1: They want you to use Goslings Rum and Goslings Ginger
Speaker 1: Beer So if you are a bar and you serve
Speaker 1: a darkened Stormy and you don't use their products and
Speaker 1: you call it a darkens Stormy, they could conceivably come
Speaker 1: after you and see you for trademark violation. So that's
Speaker 1: about as close as it gets to being able to
Speaker 1: protect a recipe. But of course people will do what
Speaker 1: I do at my bar, which is, um, I'll just
Speaker 1: call the dark or in stormy or you know, something
Speaker 1: like the same thing happened with a very popular drink
Speaker 1: served in a lot of t bars called the pain killer.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, um, yeah, they the pusters rum trade marked
Speaker 1: that one. So you have to use pushers rum and
Speaker 1: you're a pain killer, or you can't call it a painkiller,
Speaker 1: so people call it, you know, all kinds of different things. Um.
Speaker 1: But they did actually, um send a cease and desist
Speaker 1: letter to a bar in New York that was calling
Speaker 1: itself pain killer. Um. And if the bar was using
Speaker 1: pushers rum, Pusses would have had no problem with it,
Speaker 1: but they weren't, and it got kind of heated. The
Speaker 1: owners of the bar got all New York and said, hey,
Speaker 1: we're gonna do what we want, and then pusses rum
Speaker 1: said no, you won't, and they basically force them. The
Speaker 1: trade there changed the name of their bar and all
Speaker 1: this other stuff. So people still remember that actually from
Speaker 1: that was about almost ten years ago. Now, you know,
Speaker 1: the fact that you can't enforce intellectual property rights on
Speaker 1: a recipe makes me wonder if like more complicated cocktail
Speaker 1: recipes could be a business decision in addition to being
Speaker 1: a culinary decision. Uh well, the um it does except
Speaker 1: yes and no. Um, yes, you're right. The more you
Speaker 1: can make something difficult to reverse engineer. For example, if
Speaker 1: you have got a drink like the Zombie, which has
Speaker 1: all kinds of like twelve ingredients in it, and it's
Speaker 1: nine four and the drink is a sensation, it's like
Speaker 1: the cosmos halt in its day. Everybody's writing about it. Um,
Speaker 1: And you go to down to Beach Commerce bar and
Speaker 1: you try and figure out how to reverse engineer by
Speaker 1: watching them make the drink. Um, well, good luck to you,
Speaker 1: because the bottles don't have anything on their labels. What
Speaker 1: they did to try and stop people from ripping off
Speaker 1: his recipes was they, uh you know those twelve bottles
Speaker 1: they used, they had like numbers or letters on them,
Speaker 1: so the people who mix the drinks, all they knew
Speaker 1: was like it's a half an ounce of number four
Speaker 1: or a dash of number two, and um, you know,
Speaker 1: if if the if the guy tries to fire away
Speaker 1: that bartender and bring him to his bar and say okay,
Speaker 1: now make these really profit trends for me, and I
Speaker 1: goes okay, fine, and he looks at the back bar
Speaker 1: and as well, where's your number two? Where's number four?
Speaker 1: There's nothing I can do. And this actually, this was
Speaker 1: the thing Dona did do this. The other thing he
Speaker 1: did to stop people from figuring out how to make
Speaker 1: his drinks was he had all of the complicated tropical
Speaker 1: drinks made um in the service bar. So if you
Speaker 1: go into his bar and you order a martini, the
Speaker 1: bartender yesterday and or yesterday, and he'll make it for
Speaker 1: you right there in front of you. But if you
Speaker 1: order zombie, he'll open up a little door um behind
Speaker 1: the bar, open it up a zombie, close it again,
Speaker 1: and then you know they're the team of elves in
Speaker 1: the back bar where nobody who noted that you can see,
Speaker 1: will make that drink. Then they'll open the door again
Speaker 1: and hand it to the bartender and you can still
Speaker 1: see this being done. Um if you go to the
Speaker 1: Macai restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, which opened in fifty six
Speaker 1: and was um it's amazing sort of preserved an amber
Speaker 1: mid century Polynesian palace. That's the way they make their
Speaker 1: drinks at the bar. You don't see anybody doing anything
Speaker 1: so um. But but the no part of the answer
Speaker 1: about making drinks complicated is that it's it adds to
Speaker 1: the poor cost. So the more complicated dish or a
Speaker 1: drink is, the more ingredients you have to have on hand, um,
Speaker 1: which you have to pay for, and the more labor
Speaker 1: it takes to do it, which you have to pay for.
Speaker 1: So um, it's a tricky sort of balancing act there.
Speaker 1: But it's a that's a good question. Though. I want
Speaker 1: to come back to a restaurant you mentioned earlier, Tiki
Speaker 1: t I believe is that the Tiki restaurant in l
Speaker 1: A that is next to currently next to a large
Speaker 1: scientology center. Okay, when I went there about a year ago,
Speaker 1: we were out there for business, and we we made
Speaker 1: a point of like looking up like where did fo
Speaker 1: we go, uh, you know for fertiki in l A.
Speaker 1: And and so we got to experience that place, and
Speaker 1: it was certainly for me un guinny tiki restaurant, Tiki Monity,
Speaker 1: they serve food tiki bar that I'd been to because
Speaker 1: it was just so old and kind of kind of divy.
Speaker 1: Would you say, yeah, it's it's a neighborhood bar that
Speaker 1: I mean, you went to basically my local. I used
Speaker 1: to live not far from the Tik t in Los
Speaker 1: Aelas and when when the Scientology building was a KSET
Speaker 1: public television station, and that place was still one of
Speaker 1: my favorite bars in the world. I love that place.
Speaker 1: And yes, it is sort of like a you know,
Speaker 1: very low um, low fi neighborhood bar that just happens
Speaker 1: to serve tiv drinks. It's also a legendary bar that
Speaker 1: it was opened the n by a guy named Ray Bowen,
Speaker 1: who had worked as one of the original bartenders at
Speaker 1: Donna Beachcomber, one of those guys who was behind them,
Speaker 1: you know, the wooden door, and worked at almost every
Speaker 1: famous tiki place in Eli before he opened his own bar.
Speaker 1: And um, you can still have drinks the way they
Speaker 1: were made them, the way they were making them in
Speaker 1: the thirties and forties. If you go to the tiki
Speaker 1: t raised Raid put his own spin on the recipes.
Speaker 1: But they're very, very close um And then his son
Speaker 1: took over and and now his grandsons and his son
Speaker 1: are running the place. And it's just a fun, friendly
Speaker 1: neighborhood bar. I can get pat If you go at
Speaker 1: the wrong time of the day, there'll be a line outside.
Speaker 1: And uh, you know, it's a tiny place. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: remember when we were there. There were people who I
Speaker 1: just got the feeling they had been regulars for decades.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and everybody has their own area too, Like
Speaker 1: when I was there. When I was going there like
Speaker 1: twice a week or whatever, UM, I was expected to
Speaker 1: sit at a certain part of the I would sit
Speaker 1: near the blenders so I can watch them do what
Speaker 1: they do. But the one time I moved up to
Speaker 1: the other side of the bar to say hello to
Speaker 1: some people and had to see it there looked at
Speaker 1: me like, what did you do? You just crossed into
Speaker 1: North Korea. You know, it's a really weird kind of thing.
Speaker 1: So I I definitely want to come back to um
Speaker 1: to to discussion of of modern and past tiki bars,
Speaker 1: and especially Don the Beach Comber and uh and and
Speaker 1: Trader Vic. But going to back up a little bit first,
Speaker 1: in your in your book Portions of the Caribbean, which
Speaker 1: is a wonderful, just beautiful volume that I recommend to
Speaker 1: anybody interested in the topic, you chronicle five hundred years
Speaker 1: of tropical drinks, taking us on a drink citrinc journey
Speaker 1: through the history of Rome and colonialism in the region.
Speaker 1: As a self professed tiki nerd, when did you realize that,
Speaker 1: despite all the South Seas trappings, the history of tiki
Speaker 1: is a history of the Caribbean. Well, first of all,
Speaker 1: thanks for the kind words about the book. Um and uh,
Speaker 1: the the answer to that is far too late. I've
Speaker 1: been into tiki for years and years and years and
Speaker 1: years before it finally hit me that, hey, all these
Speaker 1: drinks are basically based on the Planners Punch from Jamaica.
Speaker 1: It wasn't. It wasn't until really the probably the twenty
Speaker 1: one century that I that I realized that. I mean,
Speaker 1: of course, you know that when you go to a
Speaker 1: tiki place, there's going to be drinks like the Martinique
Speaker 1: Swizzle or the Barbados Punch or so yeah, you get
Speaker 1: the idea that these are you know, their Daqirie variations
Speaker 1: from Cuba. So you know that some of the drinks
Speaker 1: are tropical drinks from the Caribbean, but they all have
Speaker 1: names like Newik Newi and Tahitian Punch and things like that.
Speaker 1: And then the other thing is, um, they were all
Speaker 1: invented by this guy in Hollywood on the Beast Comber
Speaker 1: and another guy in Oakland, Trader vic Um. So it's
Speaker 1: not like the Caribbean roots of all these drinks really shows.
Speaker 1: It's only when I really really got into Don the
Speaker 1: Beast Comber's secret recipes um, which took me forever to
Speaker 1: get a hold of. But when I finally got some
Speaker 1: of them around two thousand four two five, Um, this
Speaker 1: major d named Richard Santiago. His daughter Jennifer had his
Speaker 1: personal effects he had passed on. But he had a
Speaker 1: little telephone book size. Nope, only when I say telephone,
Speaker 1: but I mean like a dress book because in your
Speaker 1: shirt pocket. Um. So he had like a little notebook
Speaker 1: full of all of Dawn's original recipes from the from
Speaker 1: So I got ahold of that, and I was able
Speaker 1: to study it and pour through it and compare it
Speaker 1: to the drinks that I've had in actual restaurants and
Speaker 1: the resties already knew about, and you start to see patterns.
Speaker 1: You start to see, well, everything is um a variation
Speaker 1: on the Planners punch, which is the simplest drink in
Speaker 1: the world of sweet, sour, strong, and weak. As the
Speaker 1: old recipe goes. You know, um, one of sour, tube, sweet,
Speaker 1: three of strong, four a week. Um. I mean different
Speaker 1: proportions than that, but that's the old poem from the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century. Sour being limes juice, sweet being sugar, strong
Speaker 1: being you know, a Jamaican rum, and weak being either
Speaker 1: water or ice. So Um. What Dawn did was he
Speaker 1: took that very basic formula and I figured out that
Speaker 1: about thirty three of the seventy drinks he invented were
Speaker 1: based on the Planners punch. That was sort of the
Speaker 1: building blocks for almost everything you did. And that didn't
Speaker 1: occur to me until fairly deep into my obsession with
Speaker 1: this stuff. I think I'd written four books by that
Speaker 1: and then that's and that sort of grew into Potions
Speaker 1: of the Caribbean. Was like, well, in order to really
Speaker 1: explain this twentieth century post prohibition phenomenon, you have to
Speaker 1: go back to you now, now, this book, like any
Speaker 1: book that I guess these days, that that covers the
Speaker 1: history of of drink is going to it has some
Speaker 1: recipes in it, but unlike you'll find recipes in potions,
Speaker 1: Unlike any recipes you'll find another books, you start off
Speaker 1: by taking us back to things like the Kalinago syphilis cure,
Speaker 1: as well as pre Columbian Mayan hot chocolate and in
Speaker 1: various other like centuries old mixed beverages. Uh and uh
Speaker 1: and and these these recipes are I'm hesitant to actually
Speaker 1: try any of them, but but or the early ones anyway,
Speaker 1: But I have to ask, did you did you? Don't
Speaker 1: I don't recommend the syphilis cure. That was gonna be
Speaker 1: my question. Did you did you try all of them? What?
Speaker 1: What was the cyphilis cure like? And uh? And then
Speaker 1: what is the oldest mixed beverage you've come across that
Speaker 1: you would actually consider good? Oh? Okay? Um? I yes,
Speaker 1: I tested and um and retested and tweaked just to
Speaker 1: make them as good as I thought I could make them. Um.
Speaker 1: Almost every recipe in the book, with the sole exception
Speaker 1: the only one I didn't taste and and make myself
Speaker 1: was the syphilis cure um a because I couldn't find
Speaker 1: pox would um and be because we have you know,
Speaker 1: penicilla now. But um. The earliest recorded recipe for um
Speaker 1: what we would now call a tropical drink is I
Speaker 1: think it was from two and it was a French
Speaker 1: priest called Parallel Bat and he wrote down a fragment
Speaker 1: of a drink recipe calling for Barbados rum, lime, juice,
Speaker 1: sugar and spy used with cinnamon, nutmeg and clove. And
Speaker 1: that when I said, you know, that's a fragment, it's
Speaker 1: a recipe fragment, so I had to reconstruct it, so
Speaker 1: liberties were taken. Um. But that's the earliest one that
Speaker 1: was that's actually been written down to the point where
Speaker 1: I could recreate it. Um. There were other ones, like
Speaker 1: you know, the pre Columbian beverage atole a, but that's
Speaker 1: not really a tropical it's not really what we call
Speaker 1: it a precursor to a tiki drink because there's there's
Speaker 1: no citrus in it. It's more of a breakfast drink. Actually.
Speaker 1: The hot chocolate was another thing that I know. Basically
Speaker 1: all of the ingredients had been cataloged by various Spanish
Speaker 1: explorers and monks and and uh and there was enough
Speaker 1: there so that I could try to concoct a version
Speaker 1: of it um so, you know, to give you an
Speaker 1: idea of the flavors that went into it. And I
Speaker 1: started off with a um an actual chocolate recipe and
Speaker 1: then started adding the things that they would have put
Speaker 1: into to it back and ye know the con stored
Speaker 1: day is or pre pre pre conquest. All right, we're
Speaker 1: gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back. Okay,
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Speaker 1: I want to get back to one of my favorite
Speaker 1: aspects of of TK history and something you write a
Speaker 1: great deal about in your books, and you've already you've
Speaker 1: already got into discussing some of it here already, and
Speaker 1: that is of course the t k d Ama and
Speaker 1: the wars between the various wizards of tiki during the
Speaker 1: golden age of you know the umbrella drink. Can you
Speaker 1: introduce us um to sort of reintroduce us, I guess
Speaker 1: to Don the Beach comber Beach, and it also introduces
Speaker 1: to Trader Vic. Yeah. The tea bar was kind of
Speaker 1: single handedly invented by Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gant, who opened
Speaker 1: up a place called Don's Beach Cafe the day after
Speaker 1: prohibition was repealed in December ninety three, and it became
Speaker 1: a sensation with the Hollywood crowd because of what he
Speaker 1: called his rum rhapsodies, which were the drinks he served.
Speaker 1: So he not only invented the tiki bar, he invented
Speaker 1: what we now call the tiki drink. He called them
Speaker 1: rum rapsies, which were these um really complex layered um
Speaker 1: tropical punches rum drinks. And by nineteen thirty seven he
Speaker 1: had a hundred and fifty copycats across the country and
Speaker 1: he would be suing he had to sue some of them.
Speaker 1: There was one guy named Monty Roser, a nightclub impressario
Speaker 1: in New York, who opened up a chain of restaurants
Speaker 1: called Monty Proser's beach Comber, and he used the exact
Speaker 1: same font for beach Comber that Dona beach Comber had,
Speaker 1: and he claimed that he he was the home of
Speaker 1: the Zombie, which was a drink that Don Beach was
Speaker 1: most famous for. So Don actually had to sue him,
Speaker 1: and he would sue other places too, and so he
Speaker 1: wasn't happy about being ripped off on such a grand scale. Um,
Speaker 1: other people wanted to cash in on the immense popularity
Speaker 1: and newsworthiness of his place. I mean, when you had, um,
Speaker 1: you know, Marlena Dietrich and the Marx Brothers and Howard
Speaker 1: Hughes and all these like Hollywood Royalty coming in and
Speaker 1: going nuts over Don's drinks, and of course the press
Speaker 1: also went nuts over it. Um, So everybody wanted to
Speaker 1: get in on that, and he had he had people
Speaker 1: like um. Here was a guy called Joe chast Deck
Speaker 1: who just round some kind of a deli in in
Speaker 1: l A and he changed his name to Zamboanga Joe
Speaker 1: chast Deck and ripped off Dawn's drink menu and other Suggie,
Speaker 1: you know, Harry Sugarman open a place called Sugi's Tropics
Speaker 1: and Beverly Hills, and um, right down there, you know,
Speaker 1: three blocks away from Dawn's, this guy Bob Brooks opening
Speaker 1: up the seventh seas so everybody was ripping him off.
Speaker 1: We don't know how close they got to reproducing his drinks,
Speaker 1: except for the fact that there were people like Ray
Speaker 1: Bowen from the t k T eventually of the TIKT
Speaker 1: who started off at Dawn's. He was making thirty five
Speaker 1: dollars a week at dawna beach Commers in ninety seven,
Speaker 1: and Bob Brooks said to him, Hey, why don't you
Speaker 1: come over the seventh season make those drinks for me
Speaker 1: and I'll pay you another fifteen bucks a week. So
Speaker 1: like we did that. And this is one way. This
Speaker 1: was before Don implemented that code. You know, this is
Speaker 1: when he still trusted his original employees. But enough bartenders
Speaker 1: lefts with that secret knowledge so that they can start
Speaker 1: spreading it around in different bars and making a four
Speaker 1: you off of it. Um, knowing these recipes gave you
Speaker 1: a lot of power as an employee. Later on, you
Speaker 1: could dictate terms. When tiki became a huge phenomenon after
Speaker 1: World War Two. I talked to a couple of bartenders
Speaker 1: who told me that when they would apply for a
Speaker 1: job at a restaurant that wanted to serve these drinks
Speaker 1: but didn't know how they would make a deal like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'll make these drinks for you, and I'll tell you
Speaker 1: what to order, you know from your suppliers and and
Speaker 1: and all that. But if I don't like it here, um,
Speaker 1: I'll leave and I'll take my recipes with me. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to tell you what the recipes are. And
Speaker 1: that gave bartenders an extraordinary or about of leverage. So anyway,
Speaker 1: everybody was using this these secrets to their advantage if
Speaker 1: they knew them, and ripping down off. There's only one
Speaker 1: tiki impresario who decided that he wasn't content with industrial espionage.
Speaker 1: He didn't want to just steal away the don's bartenders
Speaker 1: or try to reverse engineer strengths. He wanted to create
Speaker 1: his own original ticky drinks. And that was Victor Bergeron,
Speaker 1: who came down to Dahn's in thirty seven and like
Speaker 1: all these other people, thought Wow, this is great as
Speaker 1: a land office business. I want to get in on this.
Speaker 1: So he went back up to Oakland and turned his
Speaker 1: barbecue shack inky dinks into Trader Vix, and he turned
Speaker 1: himself into Trader Vic Bergeron and he did with a
Speaker 1: lot of people. Did he Um copied Down's sort of
Speaker 1: rafish South Seas persona character like Don dressed like a
Speaker 1: beach comber, like a South Seas guy with a straw
Speaker 1: hat and ripped pants and all that. And Vic took
Speaker 1: on that same persona without ever having actually been to
Speaker 1: the South Seas the way Don had. And he's at
Speaker 1: first he started serving the same drinks Don did. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, he tried to make a zombie, failed miserably.
Speaker 1: It was it's a terrible drink. His version of his
Speaker 1: zombie he wasn't even closed. But the difference between Don
Speaker 1: and Vic and all of the people who are ripping
Speaker 1: Don off was that Vic was a chef and he
Speaker 1: had a really, really really good palette and he used
Speaker 1: that to try to create his own style of tropical
Speaker 1: drink as opposed to just you know, stealing other people's.
Speaker 1: So he Um he went to Cuba, and he went
Speaker 1: to Trinidad, and he went to Jamaica, and he learned
Speaker 1: about tropical drinks the same way Don had, and he learned,
Speaker 1: you know, he got his education and sweet Sower, Strong
Speaker 1: and Weak, and came back to Trader Vix and created
Speaker 1: his own drinks and the three most famous ones of
Speaker 1: the Scorpion, the fog Cutter, and of course to my time, Um,
Speaker 1: those were ripped off by hundreds of restaurants the same
Speaker 1: way that all of Don's drinks, like the Zombie and
Speaker 1: the Navy crogh tohhitand Punch and all of us. Just
Speaker 1: as they had been ripped off, people started putting vixed
Speaker 1: drinks on their menu too, um. And that's a lot
Speaker 1: easier for the to do because Vic, unlike Don, actually
Speaker 1: published his recipes. He started. He was sort of the
Speaker 1: first real post World War two celebrity chef um who
Speaker 1: made a fortune with his own food product line, you know,
Speaker 1: for grocery stores. And he put out cookbooks, and he
Speaker 1: put out drink recipe books, and he put his drinks
Speaker 1: in there. Now, not the my tie though, because that
Speaker 1: was his signature drink, just like the Zombie was don
Speaker 1: signature drink. Um. But he published his fog Cutter and
Speaker 1: Scorpion recipes. In his case, it was a smart business
Speaker 1: decision because people could go to their local grocery store
Speaker 1: and buy Trader Vicks Scorpion mix and Trader Vicks fog cutter,
Speaker 1: um well, not focutters, but Trader ViXS ort syrup to
Speaker 1: put in the fog cutter, and Trader of Vicks white
Speaker 1: rum to put into the drink or uh, you know,
Speaker 1: Trader of Vicks gold rum or Trader Vis brandy to
Speaker 1: put into the scorpion. So he was, you know, having
Speaker 1: it both ways. Um the my tie, though, he kept secret.
Speaker 1: If you wanted to make a Trader Vic my tie
Speaker 1: at home, you bought a bottle of Trader Vic my
Speaker 1: Tai ram and a bottle of Trader Vic my Ti mix.
Speaker 1: He wasn't going to tell you what the actual recipe
Speaker 1: was that they made in the restaurant. Um. So those
Speaker 1: two guys had a quite a rivalry over the course
Speaker 1: of their careers. Um Don really resented when Vic kind
Speaker 1: of stole his thunder and became the most famous tiki impresario,
Speaker 1: largely because of the my Tai which really took off
Speaker 1: and became you know, it replaced the Zombie as the
Speaker 1: most famous sticky drink. Um And Vic was a bit
Speaker 1: of a better businessman than Don. He opened up a
Speaker 1: chain of restaurants across the US and eventually Um Europe,
Speaker 1: in the Middle East and Tokyo, and he got a
Speaker 1: lot more pressed than Don did because Don ended up
Speaker 1: going to Hawaii and was sort of like out of
Speaker 1: the mainland public eye as much as vic was Uh
Speaker 1: And to Don's dying day, he claimed that he invented
Speaker 1: the my Time. It always really bothered him. The trader
Speaker 1: vic Um was famous for creating the May Time, and
Speaker 1: that gets into the heart of the little war they had. Um.
Speaker 1: It gets really complicated and it turns into like a
Speaker 1: Gilligan's Island sitcom plot almost. You know, Don don Beach's widow,
Speaker 1: phoebe I talked to her um well, emailed with her
Speaker 1: and went back and forth on it, because she wrote
Speaker 1: when she put out a book of Don's recipes in
Speaker 1: two thousand and three, which was kind of a revelation
Speaker 1: to see that. But these were all much later versions
Speaker 1: of his drinks, you know, from like the restaurant was
Speaker 1: still around in the eighties. She had a recipe for
Speaker 1: a may tie, which she said Don invented in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty three, and I went, oh, well, that's interesting. So
Speaker 1: and then she said that he invented the my tie
Speaker 1: and you know, Trader vic didn't invent the may tie.
Speaker 1: So I made the drink and it didn't taste anything
Speaker 1: like Trader Vicks My time. UM. And then as I
Speaker 1: got deeper and deeper and got more and more um
Speaker 1: research materials, when I got Dick Santiago's a little recipe book,
Speaker 1: for example, from NY seven, there was no my Tie
Speaker 1: in that recipe book. And when you see a nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty seven beach comer's menu, there's no my Tie on that,
Speaker 1: And there's no my Tie on any beach comer's menu
Speaker 1: until the Kennedy era, which is, you know, well after
Speaker 1: the drink became very famous. So in order to stay current,
Speaker 1: he would have had to have put a my tie
Speaker 1: on his menu. Um it was also a fog hudn't
Speaker 1: a scorpion on his menu? By then, you know, he'd
Speaker 1: taken Vick's most famous drinks and put them on his menu.
Speaker 1: So what happened, Well, Don actually was a beach comer.
Speaker 1: He actually loved Tahiti, and he lived there for a while,
Speaker 1: you know, on the beach, and and he would have
Speaker 1: heard the phrase my time or more properly may take,
Speaker 1: which means basically it's Tahitian for awesome. You know, oh
Speaker 1: that's great, mate, So he would have known that phrase,
Speaker 1: and it would have naturally been something that he would
Speaker 1: have named a drink. He called his drink the Ma
Speaker 1: Ta Swizzle. I believe um, And I kept pressing Phoebe
Speaker 1: about it, was like, well, why isn't it, you know,
Speaker 1: why can't I find any evidence of this drink served
Speaker 1: in his restaurants? Since she said, well, it wasn't one
Speaker 1: of his favorites. So okay, so let's say let's take
Speaker 1: Phoebe at her word, and why shouldn't we She was
Speaker 1: married to Don. I never even met the guy. Um.
Speaker 1: So Don invents a drink he calls the Ma Tay
Speaker 1: swizzle or the my taliane um, and it doesn't end
Speaker 1: up on his menu because he's not one of his favorites.
Speaker 1: Traitor Vick the story. He tells us that he invented
Speaker 1: the my Tai one night at his bar in Oakland
Speaker 1: in ninety four with his head bartender, Fred Frank Poult,
Speaker 1: and they named the drink because a friend of his,
Speaker 1: Carrie Guild, who lived into heat He came into the
Speaker 1: bar and he handed her the first um. You know,
Speaker 1: the final version of the strength, and he'd been working
Speaker 1: all day on with his bartender and she drinks it
Speaker 1: and goes, oh mate, which is you know Againtsian for awesome. Um,
Speaker 1: so you've got a sitcom coincidence here. Um, Don the
Speaker 1: beach Comber claims he invented the may Tie, it is true.
Speaker 1: Trader Vic claims he invented in my time. This is
Speaker 1: also true. Um. But the whole truth is that Don
Speaker 1: invented a drink called the may Tie, put it in
Speaker 1: a drawer, nobody ever knew about it, and Trader Vis
Speaker 1: ma tai is the my tie that we all know.
Speaker 1: And um, you know, he can certainly claim that that's
Speaker 1: his drink, I think, but it it was really a
Speaker 1: source of tension between the two of them. Um. I mean,
Speaker 1: Don gave an interview to some Honolulu paper when he
Speaker 1: was well into his eighties and uh still claimed that
Speaker 1: he invented the may Tie and has really pissed him off.
Speaker 1: Now when one of the things you write about concerning
Speaker 1: them tie is that when it when it first came out,
Speaker 1: it didn't have that initial splash like uh. I think
Speaker 1: you mentioned there was a particular menu where the zombie
Speaker 1: was still very much at the top. The m tie
Speaker 1: was towards the bottom of the page. Uh. And it
Speaker 1: didn't get like the same press, at least initially that
Speaker 1: the Zombie got. How did them tie ascend to become
Speaker 1: this just dominant drink, This this drink that everyone at
Speaker 1: least has some surface level knowledge of. H. That's a
Speaker 1: great question. Basically, Um, as you said, the zombie was
Speaker 1: immediately successful. UM. Part of the reason being that it was,
Speaker 1: you know, advertisers, being a very strong drinked on set.
Speaker 1: It was great at marketing, he said, only to to
Speaker 1: a customer because it's so strong. So radio comedians started
Speaker 1: to um tell jokes about the drink and how strong
Speaker 1: it was, and travel riders said, you have to go
Speaker 1: to ton of beach combers and when you get out
Speaker 1: of the train and the central station downtown and go
Speaker 1: have a zombie down the beach Combers is the first
Speaker 1: thing every tourist has to do. So it was huge
Speaker 1: from the very beginning. Uh. Trader Vic says he invented
Speaker 1: in my time in nineteen four. But nobody's written anything
Speaker 1: about it. There's nothing in the historical record, nothing in
Speaker 1: newspaper databases. Nobody's talking about it um and um. It
Speaker 1: obviously was not a hit right out of the gate.
Speaker 1: There is proof that it was on his menu as
Speaker 1: early as nineteen fifty that's the that's the earliest menu
Speaker 1: I have from Trader Vicks that has the my tie
Speaker 1: on it. But there are earlier menus I don't have
Speaker 1: which might have it um at any rate. In nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty two fifty three, vic Is hired to do the
Speaker 1: cocktail list for the Matson Cruise ship lines. Uh and
Speaker 1: these were luxury cruise liners that went to Hawaii. This
Speaker 1: is before you know commercial jet travel, so most people
Speaker 1: went to Hawaii on a cruise, spent a week on
Speaker 1: a boat, and got into um Montolulu Harbor. So he's
Speaker 1: doing the drinks for the boats, you know those ship bars.
Speaker 1: And Mattson also owns the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and a
Speaker 1: couple of other hotels. Me why so he does the
Speaker 1: same drinks for these hotel bars. The whole idea of
Speaker 1: being that Mattson wants you to pay to take a
Speaker 1: cruise in their ships and then to pay them to
Speaker 1: stay in a Madison hotel. So to build a better mousetrap, Well,
Speaker 1: let's make let's get trader Vick to do these drinks
Speaker 1: for us. One of those drinks that he puts on
Speaker 1: them in you is the my Tie. But as you say,
Speaker 1: it's all the way at the bottom of the cocktail list.
Speaker 1: I've got a nineteen fifty three Royal Hawaiian menu and
Speaker 1: it's like second from the bottom. I think even the
Speaker 1: planners punches above it. So obviously it was not a
Speaker 1: famous drink at that point, but it became famous in Hawaii. Uh.
Speaker 1: I think several reasons. One was that it had a
Speaker 1: great Hawaiian name um, I mean Cetaitian name, but it
Speaker 1: just sounded really Polynesian and really romantic, and the drink
Speaker 1: name was great, just like the Zombie was a great
Speaker 1: drink name. I mean, names are very very important for
Speaker 1: a drink. Is half the selling point for them. The
Speaker 1: drinks started to spread violally through the islands as a
Speaker 1: lu Ou drink um. Everybody went to a hotel Luau,
Speaker 1: every tourist um and they all you know, sat there
Speaker 1: and eight uh you know, kalu a pork and loumie
Speaker 1: loumi salmon off the banana leaf mats and everything, and
Speaker 1: my Ties became the default drink at these luous. Whether
Speaker 1: or not they had Vic's formula, um they were, they
Speaker 1: would improvise if they didn't. Sometimes a ma tie would
Speaker 1: just be pineapple juice and rum as terrible company. You
Speaker 1: go to Hawaii even now and you have terrible Mae
Speaker 1: ties that there are no relation to Vix, but the
Speaker 1: name worked for them, I guess. So the first people
Speaker 1: who start writing about the may Tai are travel writers,
Speaker 1: and they're writing about traveling to Hawaii. UM. And it's
Speaker 1: like fifty three fifty four when people, you know, people
Speaker 1: start writing about a drink. They I don't know why
Speaker 1: I called them Maye Tai. What really sends the mine
Speaker 1: tie over the edge is night teen nine is the
Speaker 1: year Hawaii becomes a state and not just a US territory.
Speaker 1: And it's also the first year of commercial jet travel
Speaker 1: UM passenger jet travel. The Boeing seven oh seven makes
Speaker 1: his debut, and all of a sudden, you can get
Speaker 1: to Hawaii from the west coast of the mainland in
Speaker 1: a matter of hours, you know, four or five hours.
Speaker 1: If you wanted to take a plane. Before you had
Speaker 1: to take a prop um prop plane that took about
Speaker 1: twelve hours to get there. And they had little berths
Speaker 1: that you slept in um or most people just went
Speaker 1: by boat. So all of a sudden, travel to Hawaii
Speaker 1: becomes very easy and affordable. And it's a state. So
Speaker 1: even the most xenophobic American from the Midwest or the
Speaker 1: South or whatever it says, oh, well, it's part of
Speaker 1: the US, I'll go there. And tourism blows up in Hawaii.
Speaker 1: Um it goes from thousands of people to tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of people a year, all going to lue hours,
Speaker 1: all having a my tie and the drink just blows up.
Speaker 1: And by the by the Kennedy era, it's just all
Speaker 1: it's all over the place. It's just the rage. And
Speaker 1: even non tiki bars are serving it or effect similar
Speaker 1: other if they didn't done the rescue. All right, we're
Speaker 1: gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back.
Speaker 1: And we're back, all right. So let's fast forward to today.
Speaker 1: So you you have beach Bumbarri's latitude twenty nine in
Speaker 1: New Orleans. Has it changed the way you feel about
Speaker 1: any of the figures in tiki history? And uh and
Speaker 1: and what is your own relationship with with secret recipes?
Speaker 1: That's great question. Yeah, it's really funny. To go from
Speaker 1: writing about tiki drinks and researching tiv drinks to serving
Speaker 1: them to people. And it's given me a whole new
Speaker 1: um perspective on people like Don and Vic and all
Speaker 1: the bartenders who used to work for them and with them, UH,
Speaker 1: a whole new level of respect for them because it's
Speaker 1: running a restaurant's hard. Fortunately, Mrs Bum takes care of
Speaker 1: most of the work that she's the one with all
Speaker 1: the experience. She kind of dragged me kicking and screaming
Speaker 1: into opening the place, and I'm glad she did. It's
Speaker 1: been great, but UM, you know, there's there's a lot
Speaker 1: of work involved, a lot of people to deal with,
Speaker 1: and um, a lot of things to deal with it
Speaker 1: I never thought about when I was just writing about
Speaker 1: drinks and restaurants, things like insurance, plumbing, electricity, UM, you know, payroll,
Speaker 1: tax um. It just goes on and on. Permits goes
Speaker 1: on and on and on and on and on, and
Speaker 1: it has nothing to do with how great a drink is.
Speaker 1: It's just keep the place open and keep customers happy.
Speaker 1: The other thing that was really interesting to me about
Speaker 1: opening a place is um, I no longer after we've
Speaker 1: been opened five years now, and for me, the most
Speaker 1: important thing to hear when I'm walking through the dining
Speaker 1: room and touching tables and asking how everything is is
Speaker 1: when not when a customer says, oh, we love this drink,
Speaker 1: this is a great drink, thank you so much. It's
Speaker 1: when they say, oh, um, you know, we love Sam,
Speaker 1: or we love Alexandro, we love um Brad. They're they're
Speaker 1: great and those are our staff. So if a server
Speaker 1: or a bartender is making them, first of all, if
Speaker 1: they know them by name, and if they're raving about
Speaker 1: them to the boss like that makes me happier than
Speaker 1: anything they could say about the drinks. It was like,
Speaker 1: if you have a good experience and if our people
Speaker 1: show you a good time and make you feel welcome
Speaker 1: and happy, that's you know, a loha bartending, if you will, Um,
Speaker 1: that's something that you know that's very very important. I
Speaker 1: never really grasp that when I was just a customer
Speaker 1: at these places. Um. But so there's so many more
Speaker 1: dimensions to dealing with with the drinks and with the
Speaker 1: creation of the drinks as well. UM. One technical note,
Speaker 1: one of the things that was very eye opening to
Speaker 1: me was when I was researching recipes or tweaking recipes
Speaker 1: or trying to reverse engineer them based on you know,
Speaker 1: bartender's notes or whatever or fragments. If I wanted to
Speaker 1: spend half an hour to make a drink, UM, I
Speaker 1: could do it. And if I wanted to spend eighty
Speaker 1: dollars on one particular bottle of room that would taste
Speaker 1: best in the drink, I could do that too. And
Speaker 1: you can't do that when you've got customers who want
Speaker 1: to be served. You have to work out. I had
Speaker 1: to look at every single recipe that I wanted to
Speaker 1: put on my menu at lata UM. You know, first
Speaker 1: of all, they were like three I wanted to put on,
Speaker 1: but I had to cut that down thirty because you
Speaker 1: can't have too many recipes on your menu or your
Speaker 1: bartenders can't do them, they can't be executed and also
Speaker 1: will get just get confused. I think, UM, thirty is
Speaker 1: about as much as you can cram onto the menu anyway. UM.
Speaker 1: That was part of the learning curve as well. But
Speaker 1: when I was doing revamping the recipes for service for
Speaker 1: actually being served at leut to twenty nine, I had
Speaker 1: to go through every single one of them and rebalance
Speaker 1: them and retweak them because I was no longer just
Speaker 1: trying to make the best possible drink. My goal when
Speaker 1: I was writing the books was just a very singular goals,
Speaker 1: like how do I make the best possible drink? Well,
Speaker 1: that becomes like three dimensional chess from Star Trek when
Speaker 1: you're trying to I realized that that's that's what I
Speaker 1: had to do from watching other cheeky places, other new
Speaker 1: two places like if it took ten minutes to get
Speaker 1: a drink, no good, you know, and and if a
Speaker 1: drink costs twenty that's also no good. So I had
Speaker 1: to go from first level, how do I make the
Speaker 1: best possible drink? Too? How do I make the best
Speaker 1: possible drink in the least amount of time? And then
Speaker 1: the third thing was how do I make the best
Speaker 1: possible drink in the least amount of time for the
Speaker 1: least amount of money, um, not without sacrifice and quality,
Speaker 1: but still making it so that I could afford the
Speaker 1: drink and I could afford to not charge people on
Speaker 1: arm and a leg for it. So I had to
Speaker 1: work out systems and one of them was as you
Speaker 1: as you know if you've made any of the drinks
Speaker 1: from these books, they were all. Most of these drinks,
Speaker 1: especially don the beast Comers drinks were flash blended. In
Speaker 1: other words, um, they would be put into a you know,
Speaker 1: a top down Hamilton's beach mixer with a certain amount
Speaker 1: of crushed ice and blended for like three to five seconds,
Speaker 1: not to make a slushy drink, but to sort of
Speaker 1: swizzle it in a way that no human possibly could
Speaker 1: without Marvel superhero strength. Um. And it gives the drink
Speaker 1: a very unique texture, and it dilutes instantly, and it
Speaker 1: chills instantly, and it's it's much better than shaking. But
Speaker 1: the problem is that when I was making doing the
Speaker 1: drinks for the book and guests saying how much crushed
Speaker 1: ice to put into each drink, because that was never
Speaker 1: indicated on any of the old vintage recipes that I
Speaker 1: had nerved, UM, I had to guess at it. And
Speaker 1: some drinks tasted good with four ounces of crushed ice,
Speaker 1: like a half a cup. Some drinks tasted great with
Speaker 1: a cup and a half like twelve ounces of crushed dice.
Speaker 1: Some were perfect with one cup of crushed ice. And
Speaker 1: if you look at my books, that's the way they are.
Speaker 1: I mean, they all call for a different amount of
Speaker 1: crushed ice. Well, the first thing I realized was that's
Speaker 1: going to slow down the bartenders if they have to
Speaker 1: a remember how much crushed ice goes into every drink
Speaker 1: as well as remember this complicated recipe. Um, that's not good.
Speaker 1: So what I did was I had to rebalance each
Speaker 1: drink so that they all used the exact same amount
Speaker 1: of crushed ice, so the staff never had to think
Speaker 1: about the amount of ice they were putting into the blender.
Speaker 1: I just went into a restaurant supply store, got a
Speaker 1: long handled, six ounce scoop, and I rebalanced every drinks
Speaker 1: so that they all worked with six ounces of crushed ice.
Speaker 1: And that's all they have to do now is just
Speaker 1: like dip the scoop into the ice, well, level it off,
Speaker 1: put it in and not think about it. And things
Speaker 1: like that shave precious time off the making of a drink.
Speaker 1: And also it eliminates mistakes. You're not gonna guess, you're
Speaker 1: not gonna get the wrong amount of crushed ice in
Speaker 1: there because you don't have to think about it. And
Speaker 1: that's just one example of some of the things I
Speaker 1: was doing on that second level of how to make
Speaker 1: a drink in the least amount of time, um, and
Speaker 1: the least amount of money. Part is you know you want.
Speaker 1: Of course you're using quality ingredients, but you're not going
Speaker 1: to use a bottle of twenty year Appleton Jamaican room
Speaker 1: to make your my tie. But it's just not you
Speaker 1: can't do that. You can't charge people fifty dollars for
Speaker 1: my time, UM. So you have to come up with
Speaker 1: other RUMs and mix, you know, mix less expensive RUMs.
Speaker 1: They're still going to give you that depth of flavor.
Speaker 1: So it's just a couple of, you know, examples of
Speaker 1: the kind of uh much. You know, you could go
Speaker 1: much much deeper and much broader into this whole phenomenon
Speaker 1: than I ever did when I was just writing the books,
Speaker 1: when I would look back on some of these recipes
Speaker 1: and see things that had never occurred to me before
Speaker 1: I owned a restaurant, before I ever had to make
Speaker 1: a menu for a for paying customers. If you look
Speaker 1: at Dawn's early recipes from that ninety seven book, they're
Speaker 1: all in very jagged proportions, at one and a half
Speaker 1: ounces of this, um, quarter ounces of that, three quarter
Speaker 1: ounces of this, half an ounce of that. And if
Speaker 1: you look at that same recipe from a notebook from
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties, you know, thirty years later, when he
Speaker 1: had thirty years more experienced that same drink, he real
Speaker 1: he refigured it, reconceived it with the same ingredients to
Speaker 1: be three quarter rounds, three quarter rounds, three quarter rounds,
Speaker 1: three quarter around, three quarter rounds, all the way down
Speaker 1: the line, and that speed. He did that purely so
Speaker 1: that the drink could get out there faster. Because he
Speaker 1: was dealing with a more high volume situation instead of
Speaker 1: making a drink at his tiny little bar in Hollywood,
Speaker 1: he was he had to come up with recipes that
Speaker 1: could be made, you know, serve seven thousand drinks a night.
Speaker 1: So you see that he wasn't just thinking about taste
Speaker 1: and flavor. He was. He was thinking about those things,
Speaker 1: but he was also thinking about speed, which was kind
Speaker 1: of a fascinating revelation which I which never would have
Speaker 1: occurred to me if I hadn't actually done a menu
Speaker 1: from my own place. This is funny how well it
Speaker 1: parallels a lot of inventions we look at that are
Speaker 1: more traditionally the kind of thing you think of as
Speaker 1: an invention, you know, a new piece of technology where
Speaker 1: when we think about invention in a zoomed out way
Speaker 1: where you're you know, not looking at it very hard.
Speaker 1: We tend to think of invention as the space of,
Speaker 1: you know, discovering what's possible, whereas when you zoom in
Speaker 1: on the process of invention is it is much more
Speaker 1: often about what is practical? Yeah, absolutely, that's that's a
Speaker 1: perfect way to encapsulate it. Um, And that was my
Speaker 1: learning curve. It's like, and you're absolutely right with whether
Speaker 1: the invention is uh, you know, uh, the internal combustion engine,
Speaker 1: whether the invention is a zombie cocktail, um, whether the
Speaker 1: invention is like a paper cutter. It's all about, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: you've invented this thing. Now you have to be able
Speaker 1: to replicate it, you know, and you have to be
Speaker 1: able to make it faster and cheaper and uh and
Speaker 1: streamline it and you know. So yeah, you're absolutely right,
Speaker 1: it's the same process. I never thought of it that
Speaker 1: way until today. Now you you have also invented some cocktails.
Speaker 1: So I'm curious, like, what is what is your your
Speaker 1: mindset like today? If you're if you're seeking to to
Speaker 1: come up with a new cocktail, are you doing are
Speaker 1: you engaging in this exercise as Jeff Barry the the
Speaker 1: the author and UH and tiki historian, or is it
Speaker 1: more in the mindset of of Jeff Berry the restaurant owner. Um,
Speaker 1: that's a great question. Um, it's all of that has
Speaker 1: to be thrown out of your head when you're trying
Speaker 1: to create something. Um. I mean I used to work
Speaker 1: in UH screenwriting and journalism and advertising other forms of writing.
Speaker 1: And the best piece of advice I ever got about
Speaker 1: writing anything was right with no attachment to outcome. Don't
Speaker 1: think about who's going to want to buy this or
Speaker 1: even who's going to want to read it. Just write it,
Speaker 1: just get it done and and then worry about all
Speaker 1: that other stuff later. And the drink making process has
Speaker 1: always been like that for me, and it hasn't changed.
Speaker 1: Owning the restaurant hasn't changed it. Um, you know, writing
Speaker 1: these books hasn't changed it for me. I wasn't. I
Speaker 1: wasn't in many ways. Still I am an amateur in
Speaker 1: the in every sense of the world. I mean I
Speaker 1: an amateur as someone who loves, um, whatever it is
Speaker 1: they're obsessed about. So for me, it was a hobby.
Speaker 1: All this drink stuff, all through the es and nineties,
Speaker 1: and in writing these books until we actually opened Latitude,
Speaker 1: it was it was a hobby. It was it was
Speaker 1: I was coming at as an amate, tried no professional
Speaker 1: training whatsoever. Um, you know, no mentors, no guide books,
Speaker 1: nothing to go on about how to make a drink
Speaker 1: that was that wasn't ye know? That was mine. I
Speaker 1: have plenty of guide books about how to make a
Speaker 1: drink that wasn't mine. But as far as creating a drink,
Speaker 1: that all started to happen kind of accidentally. UM. I
Speaker 1: was researching these recipes. I was uncovering all these long
Speaker 1: lust drinks, and and very often the recipes were either
Speaker 1: in code, which we talked about earlier, and I had
Speaker 1: to crack the code UM, or there were fragments, or
Speaker 1: they were like bartender's notes to self. UM. We already
Speaker 1: used example of how they wouldn't indicate how the drink
Speaker 1: was actually put together, whether it was shaken or blended,
Speaker 1: and if it was blended how much ice. So there
Speaker 1: was a lot of guesswork involved, and over time, without
Speaker 1: realizing it, bias mosis I was sort of like getting
Speaker 1: an education in tropical mythology just by trying to recreate
Speaker 1: these drinks. That already existed in one form or another.
Speaker 1: And it's gradually got to the point where I felt
Speaker 1: confident enough to try and invent my own stuff. But
Speaker 1: it was always just noodling around, you know. It was
Speaker 1: just like tinkering with something in the garage pretty much. Um,
Speaker 1: I never developed a method for making a drink. It
Speaker 1: would always just be, Okay, here's this bottle, what's what's
Speaker 1: this stuff? Some very herbal charge troos is some very
Speaker 1: horrible ma cure sounds. What other drinks have been made with? Chartroose?
Speaker 1: Have looked at it? Okay, I wonder what it works with.
Speaker 1: And it would always just be messing around with no
Speaker 1: attachment outcome. It's like maybe something will happen, maybe it won't.
Speaker 1: And that's still kind of way I do things. It's
Speaker 1: the only way I know how to do things. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't start with this. You know. Some some people
Speaker 1: have proportions in their head, like you will talk to
Speaker 1: some um bartenders and cocktail makers to say, well, there's
Speaker 1: a golden mean for um, you know, for a Jacii,
Speaker 1: or it's it's three quarter ouns, three quarter rounds two ounce,
Speaker 1: or it's half ounce, half ounce, one or half ounce
Speaker 1: stor its. I don't believe in that. It's just like, um,
Speaker 1: it doesn't work. It just doesn't work for me. I
Speaker 1: just sort of like get in there and mess around
Speaker 1: and and just just make a mess and um and
Speaker 1: see what happens. Um. It's much more fun that way
Speaker 1: for me. Anyway, I would feel very constricted if there
Speaker 1: was some sort of methodology that you have to follow. Now.
Speaker 1: Of course, the fact is that I'm no longer making
Speaker 1: drinks just to drink for myself and my friends in
Speaker 1: my house and maybe put them in a book if
Speaker 1: they're any good. Now, whenever I make a drink, it's
Speaker 1: for for a reason, you know. Either I have to
Speaker 1: go do a cocktail seminar somewhere and I have to
Speaker 1: use uh sponsor ingredients, so I have to come up
Speaker 1: with a drink that uses those, or maybe the latitude
Speaker 1: needs a new drink on the menu, or some magazine
Speaker 1: or newspaper wants me to create a drink for them.
Speaker 1: So that's a very specific outcome that needs to be met.
Speaker 1: And that actually is helpful because when you have a frame,
Speaker 1: when you're put in a box and you have to
Speaker 1: do something that uses this or that ingredient, um, and
Speaker 1: it has to be done by such and such a date.
Speaker 1: Those limitations are very freeing, paradoxically ironically, because you can
Speaker 1: only go down that road and not down the fifty
Speaker 1: other roads that you might have ventured down and reached
Speaker 1: the dead end at um. So if you if you
Speaker 1: know what I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of
Speaker 1: like a writer's prompt imagine yeah. So um. I know
Speaker 1: I've been going on and about this, but of course
Speaker 1: it's it's always been an obsession of mine. And it's fun.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's fun to do it without any restrictions
Speaker 1: or worrying about outcome. But also you don't come up
Speaker 1: with that many drinks that way, you know. It's uh,
Speaker 1: it's like I just did a bunch of drinks for
Speaker 1: this uh pure company called Real Real Sarah Coconut and
Speaker 1: Passion Food and all these are things, and and they
Speaker 1: wanted seventeen recipes, one for each one of their expressions,
Speaker 1: one of these one of their flavors. I thought, oh
Speaker 1: my god, that'll take me five years. You know, I
Speaker 1: come up with one drink every three years. But having
Speaker 1: those restrictions just I zoomed through it like I did
Speaker 1: it in about five days and it was very freeing
Speaker 1: to be put in this box where Okay, you have
Speaker 1: to use this raspberry pure to drink um. You know
Speaker 1: that's that's that's job one. Uh, and you can't. You
Speaker 1: can't use rum and every single one of these seventeen
Speaker 1: drinks what will work with the raspberry isn't rum. So
Speaker 1: then you you have a different based spirit. You lock
Speaker 1: into that and okay, what citrus works with raspberry? Does
Speaker 1: lime work? Does lemon work? What's the best one? So
Speaker 1: you get it done faster um, and it narrows your
Speaker 1: focus to the point where you can actually complete something.
Speaker 1: So one of my favorite facts that stood out from
Speaker 1: SS of the Caribbean was just this weird bit where
Speaker 1: you mentioned that I think it was Jackie Kennedy's recipe
Speaker 1: for a DACII involved frozen lime made. It was store
Speaker 1: bought frozen lime made. UM. That makes me wonder do
Speaker 1: you have thoughts about and and again this is going
Speaker 1: to involve, you know, subjective things about taste, but from
Speaker 1: your perspective, what leads to the proliferation of bad recipes
Speaker 1: for things um? That's a great question. And in the
Speaker 1: case of Jackie Kennedy's dacherie, which was frozen lime maide
Speaker 1: and a few drops of flam rum. It's very often
Speaker 1: um economics. Now, of course, Jackie Kennedy came from a
Speaker 1: very wealthy family and she was married at the president
Speaker 1: United States. They could afford fresh lime juice, They could
Speaker 1: afford to pay uh an in house chef to make
Speaker 1: their dacories for him. But you have to remember the times.
Speaker 1: This was during the beginning of the industrial food complex,
Speaker 1: where who had frozen TV dinners, frozen juices, frozen everybody
Speaker 1: had a refrigerator and a freezer and all the kitchens
Speaker 1: with appliances. Suburbia was growing and convenience was the order
Speaker 1: of the day, and food companies responded to that. So
Speaker 1: all of a sudden everything was frozen. Everything was pre
Speaker 1: mixed and in a bottle like Trader Vix, Trader of X,
Speaker 1: my time mix. You know, why why mess around with
Speaker 1: all this other stuff, Just pour two ounces of that
Speaker 1: into your glass. So convenience um industrial mass production methods
Speaker 1: for food and drink. And that's really what killed the cocktail,
Speaker 1: was this um uh the convenience. It was killed by convenience.
Speaker 1: It was killed by like canned and bottled mixes and
Speaker 1: by frozen this and frozen that. And you know, every
Speaker 1: restaurants realized they could cut their costs tremendously by not
Speaker 1: using fresh citrus um and by you just not having
Speaker 1: to buy five ingredients, just buying trader Vicks My TIMEX.
Speaker 1: You would go into a lot of places in the
Speaker 1: seventies and eighties and you would see Trader Vicks My
Speaker 1: Time mix behind a bar of even a really good,
Speaker 1: expensive restaurant. They would just use that stuff. Um. Great
Speaker 1: for Vick, not so great for the Well. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: not an expert at this, but I mean, am I
Speaker 1: correct in thinking that citrus juice just does not age well?
Speaker 1: That is not something that that sits around on the
Speaker 1: shelf and stays good. There's a There are a couple
Speaker 1: of um bartenders in New York who are very very
Speaker 1: scientific in their approach these things, Donne Lee and Dave Arnold,
Speaker 1: and they have conducted tests under laboratory conditions, UM trying
Speaker 1: to figure out what the shelf life of fresh queeze
Speaker 1: citruses and when it's at its peak and UM, I
Speaker 1: don't remember the specifics, but I think after four hours
Speaker 1: it starts to lose its Christmas and it's uh, it's
Speaker 1: you know, it's best flavor. I've found that you can
Speaker 1: keep it refrigerated fresh juice for two or three days. Um,
Speaker 1: but it's not going to taste the same the third
Speaker 1: day as it did when you fresh squeezed it. It's
Speaker 1: kind of interesting oxygen oxygen eating it. Um. Like there
Speaker 1: are other bartenders to say, well, I don't think fresh
Speaker 1: squeeze juice is that when when you're taking when you're
Speaker 1: cutting a line open, when you're making a jackary for example,
Speaker 1: round line and sugar. Um. Okay, if you're at the bar,
Speaker 1: you cut a line open, you're squeezing it into the shaker,
Speaker 1: so it's as fresh as you could possibly get. It's
Speaker 1: just been cut and squeeze. Um. There are bartenders who
Speaker 1: will tell you that that doesn't taste as good as
Speaker 1: lime juice that's been in the well for about two
Speaker 1: or three hours, which is ox which is oxygen eated
Speaker 1: a little bit. Um. You know, So it's a there's
Speaker 1: a there's actually a lot of You scratch a bartender,
Speaker 1: You scratch any bartender, and you're gonna find somebody who
Speaker 1: was a medical student or an architecture student or um.
Speaker 1: You know, a science whiz. Um, there are people avotate
Speaker 1: to bartending for all kinds of reasons. But you people
Speaker 1: get people with a technical bent and with a scientific
Speaker 1: background have really really gotten into this stuff. It's kind
Speaker 1: of cool to see. I basically flunked chemistry in high school,
Speaker 1: so for me, a lot of the stuff just goes
Speaker 1: right over my head. But but it's fascinating to see
Speaker 1: that approach being taken to something like cocktails. So is
Speaker 1: it safe to assume that the pre mixed Trader Vix
Speaker 1: My Time Mix was bad? Is that? Is that the case?
Speaker 1: You know what, That's a good question because I've actually
Speaker 1: used it when I'm on vacation, like in Hawaii, for example,
Speaker 1: you go into like the ABC store, which is like
Speaker 1: there's seven eleven or uh, you know, convenience store, and
Speaker 1: they all have Trader Vick My Time Mix uh in
Speaker 1: there for tourists who want to make my kind of
Speaker 1: hotel room. It's not bad, it's actually okay if that's
Speaker 1: what you've got to work with. Um, you know, when
Speaker 1: you're when you're staying in a hotel and you're a
Speaker 1: tourist in Hawaii, it's the only game in town, Like
Speaker 1: It's either that or you're gonna have to try and
Speaker 1: track down orege out syrup on you know, orange curse
Speaker 1: ow and all this other stuff and just start turning
Speaker 1: your hotel into a bar room. Um so um hey,
Speaker 1: you know when in Rome's I do not wish to
Speaker 1: um to dis trade to Vix my time makes. It's
Speaker 1: one of the better ones out there, But um is
Speaker 1: it as good as a fresh made in my time?
Speaker 1: I don't think, you know, not even Trader Vick would
Speaker 1: argue with me there all right? Uh, Jeff the beach
Speaker 1: bum Barry, thanks for coming on the show and chatting
Speaker 1: with us about tiki history, my Thai history. Uh. The
Speaker 1: books are all out there. The app total tiki is excellent.
Speaker 1: I I am proud or ashamed to admit that I
Speaker 1: use it almost in a daily basis. And uh and
Speaker 1: and also I'm a huge fan of of your restaurant.
Speaker 1: I only make it down to New Orleans once a year,
Speaker 1: but when I go, I make sure it come by
Speaker 1: for at least a couple of drinks. But what else
Speaker 1: is going on in the world of of of the
Speaker 1: beach bumb What do you have coming up? Or anything
Speaker 1: else you want to Uh? Tell our listeners about. Well,
Speaker 1: the one thing which it's a little early to talk
Speaker 1: about is it just ended. But I've partnered up with
Speaker 1: Cocktail Kingdom about doing some pop up bars UM Sip
Speaker 1: and Santa's serf Shack, which they've shortened just to Sip
Speaker 1: and Santa. It's a mash up of Christmas decor and
Speaker 1: flavors and tiki de corn flavors, and we had twenty
Speaker 1: seven bars across the country this past season participating in it.
Speaker 1: So we come up with like, um, tiki drinks, tropical drinks,
Speaker 1: but have like what you associate with the holidays flavors, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, cinnamon and cranberry and things like that. And
Speaker 1: then there's Christmas decor overlaid on top of TV. To course,
Speaker 1: we have two over the top uh decor themes graphed
Speaker 1: onto each other. And I mentioned it now because I
Speaker 1: start working on this pretty much in January, once Christmas
Speaker 1: is over. So when you're asking what's next to me,
Speaker 1: what's next is coming up with the sipes for the
Speaker 1: Sitting Sama pop ups, which aren't going to happen until
Speaker 1: after Thanksgiving. But that's what's gonna be occupying me now. Um.
Speaker 1: And then it's just running latitude and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: trying to get in there whenever I can. And we've
Speaker 1: got such a great crew now um got our sea legs,
Speaker 1: which there's really not much for me to do there anymore,
Speaker 1: which I love. I'm basically just picking stuff up off
Speaker 1: the floor that you like, Oh there's a plastic monkey
Speaker 1: that fell from the table. That's basically my job now
Speaker 1: because everybody else has got it all together. Um so
Speaker 1: so yeah, and a lot of traveling. I've been doing
Speaker 1: a lot of traveling, going to a lot of cocktail festivals,
Speaker 1: giving drink seminars. I'll be in UM Sacramento next week
Speaker 1: for the Sacramento Cocktail Conference, and I'm going to be
Speaker 1: in Atlanta actually UM for the March Tiki Festival in Awayle,
Speaker 1: I believe it's called UM, so you know, Florida than
Speaker 1: London and all kinds of one of the places. It's
Speaker 1: interesting with the whole cocktail n usense that cocktail festivals
Speaker 1: and cocktail conferences sprung up everywhere, so I spent a
Speaker 1: lot of my time just going to those. At this point, awesome, well,
Speaker 1: we'll safe travels as you you make your way around
Speaker 1: the map for all of this and we'll be looking
Speaker 1: forward to Christmas. All right, all right, thank you, thanks,
Speaker 1: all right, So there you have it. Thanks once again
Speaker 1: to Jeff beach bum Berry for chatting with us again.
Speaker 1: He's the author of several books that you'll find in print,
Speaker 1: including beach Bumberry Sip and Safari and at beach Bumberri's
Speaker 1: Potions of the Caribbean Again. His restaurant is beach Bumberry's
Speaker 1: Latitude twenty nine in the French Quarter of New Orleans,
Speaker 1: and if you want to check out his website, it's
Speaker 1: beach bumberry dot com. Oh and the app Total Tiki.
Speaker 1: That's the app that I use way too often, but
Speaker 1: it's a wonderful app. It's you just right there on
Speaker 1: your phone. You have all these different um tiki cocktail
Speaker 1: recipes you can pull up, you can you slide through,
Speaker 1: like all the different versions of say The Zombie or
Speaker 1: the My Tai and they're right there your fingertips. Huge
Speaker 1: thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
Speaker 1: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 1: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 1: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 1: you can email us at contact at invention pod dot com.
Speaker 1: Invention is production of i heart Radio. For more podcasts
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