Every cult cocktail trend comes with an origin story. Tiki may have the best one ever written. A bootlegger gets bored of running rum instead of drinking it. The country he'd been supplying had spent the last 13 years pretending to be sober during Prohibition. He soon realized that the cure wasn't another drink for the masses but a beautiful lie, so strange, so exotic that nobody would dare to ask questions. His name was Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt. By the time he finished rebranding himself, America knew him nationally as Donn Beach, the man behind Don the Beachcomber.

Before the Flood

To understand why tiki culture hit the way it did, you have to know something about American history (or have grown up in that era) and what American drinking habits looked like right before Prohibition began. Before the country even got around to outlawing alcohol in 1920, it had just spent two years getting hammered by the Spanish Flu; effectively the prequel to 2020, if you want to feel old. Prohibition didn’t kill the spirit of drinking (pun intended), rather just killed the craft of it. For 14 years, things like bathtub gin and speakeasies were built for speedrunning through life. And when you consider that before, during and after the Great Depression, life was impossibly difficult, none of this should come as a surprise.

That also meant that by 1933, when the 21st Amendment finally pulled the country out of its self-inflicted misery, American bartending had regressed about two generations. So when Donn Beach opened Don’s Beachcomber Cafe, a Polynesian-themed bar and restaurant in Hollywood right around the end of Prohibition, he wasn’t just selling “drinks” but an entire escape from reality. Rum wasn’t (and to this day isn’t) considered a serious spirit to the average American’s imagination. It’s marketed as “cheap,” “tropical” and at the time foreign enough to feel exotic and familiar enough not to scare anybody off. (The irony is that in the days of the Founders, rum was the most popular booze in America.) As such Donn built an entire aesthetic universe around it – from faux rain on a tin roof to stolen nautical junk from movie sets, and an entire menu of multi-rum blended drinks built to disguise how much booze was actually in your glass. It worked exceptionally well. Because escapism was the best way to combat the horrors of life, Americans back then were fascinated by “exotic travel.”

The Rise: A Bartender, His Ex-Wife, and the Invention of the Chain Restaurant

The part of the story that gets flattened almost every time about Donn Beach’s history of being the “founding father of tiki” is that while he was the visionary, his empire belonged to a woman who is often a footnote in historical texts as “his wife.”

Cora Irene Sund was a schoolteacher from Minnesota who reinvented herself as “Sunny” Sund, married Donn, and by 1937 had helped grow their little tropical cafe into a full scale restaurant. World War II pulled Donn overseas, running R&R hospitality for the Army Air Forces in Capri, Venice, and the French Riviera. Sunny on the other hand continued to run the business and grew it to new heights: 16 locations to be precise. As far as I can tell from every reliable source I trust on the matter, this is the actual invention of the modern themed restaurant chain, and the person who did it gets a parenthetical in most cocktail history books or articles. Chew on that for your next “women in the industry” panel.

By the time Donn returned home, he’d essentially been outgrown by his now ex-wife’s management. He recognized his powerlessness and had little to do but sit at the bar and cash his checks.

The 1940 divorce split the empire clean: Sunny kept the mainland concept. Donn took himself to Waikiki, deliberately outside her territory since Hawaii wasn’t yet a state, and opened his own unaffiliated Don the Beachcomber there. Meanwhile, up in Oakland, a one-eyed restaurateur named Victor Bergeron, later known as Trader Vic, had been watching Donn’s Hollywood success enviously. A permanent fixture at Don’s bars, he conducted his own corporate espionage, the kind that usually precedes a lawsuit. Victor transformed his existing bar, Hinky Dinks, into Trader Vic’s, and the two men spent decades as amicable, albeit later litigiously less amicable, competitors, both claiming credit for the Mai Tai that we know today. In the end, it was Victor who laid claim to the original recipe.

By the 1950s a third empire joined the fray: The former actor Stephen Crane, who parlayed a brief marriage to Lana Turner into a Beverly Hills restaurant called The Luau. It was that move that catapulted into the Kon-Tiki chain of restaurants, partnering with Sheraton hotels to plant a Polynesian fantasy in cities like Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Boston that had never seen a palm tree that wasn’t potted. Tiki wasn’t a niche anymore in this country, it was the infrastructure of hospitality.

The Fall: Vietnam, Brown Spirits, and the Kingston Joint That Didn’t Get the Memo

Inevitably every good empire needs a war to kill it in its tracks, and tiki’s war was Vietnam. There’s several versions of this story, and the one most people know from history classes in high school is purely aesthetic – that America simply got tired of the tropical kitsch and that disco balls replaced tiki torches the way trends come and go. That’s partially true, but very much incomplete. A genre that was built on a cheerful, sanitized fantasy of the South and Central Pacific islands got very hard to sell once a region that looked like it (Vietnam) was waging war and chronically ablaze on the evening news every night. The fantasy didn’t age out gracefully; it got embarrassing.

Drinking habits shifted alongside it. Scotch, bourbon, and vodka took over as the decade’s spirits of choice. The three-martini power lunch took hold over the elaborate Sunday luau. Rum got demoted for a while; by the time disco fully took hold, the bar was different entirely. The rise of sour mix, soda guns and convenience further knocked down tiki’s actual craft to being “too much work.” The thing that made craft cocktails good in the first place, fresh juices and hand made syrups, had been abandoned for shortcuts and sugar.

It was a national movement, except in the places nobody was paying attention to.

There’s a strange, under-told footnote to the tiki-decline story that I wanted to spotlight. If you ever looked at the back half of thousands of American Chinese restaurants of that time, the places with a neon sign and a laminated menu that’s sticky and never quite modernized, you’ll note that tiki and Chinese-American food had become a package deal by the postwar years. Restaurants across the country who were serving Cantonese-inflected menus were also peddling Scorpion Bowls and pupu platters. Because the two aesthetics were selling the same fantasy to the same customer, Chinese food was deemed “exotic,” vaguely Pacific, built for a night out. It wasn’t geographically accurate and nobody cared back then (or now) about the term cultural appropriation. It just worked, commercially, for about 20 years, from a Boston joint called the Kowloon slinging free Scorpion Bowls to touring musicians, to strip-mall spots nobody remembers the names of anymore as they faded away into obscurity.

Kingston has its own quiet version of this. Eng’s, the city’s first Chinese restaurant, opened in 1927 on Wall Street and moved into its current Broadway home, the one with the iconic neon Chop Suey sign, in 1966. In fact a Chinese restaurant expanding into a bigger space in 1966 without a tiki-adjacent drinks list would have been the outlier, not the norm. Incidentally, that’s the same exact year Sheraton was bolting Kon-Tiki restaurants onto hotel lobbies from Cleveland to Boston. So with that logic, Eng’s picked up the same package deal everybody else did, from fish-bowl cocktails to parrot glassware with a pupu platter alongside the egg rolls. Because that’s simply what a Chinese-American restaurant did back in 1966 if it wanted to feel like an occasion.

What makes Eng’s worth mentioning isn’t that it had tiki drinks. Almost everyone did. It’s that they never took them off the menu when the rest of the country chose to. Those same fiery fish bowls and colorful glassware that were standard issue in 1966 were still coming out of that kitchen decades later, at prices that never seemed to notice inflation happening around them.

Trader Vic’s licensed itself to Hilton and eventually shuttered most of its locations, with the last one being closed in 1989 when Trump purchased the Plaza Hotel and demanded it be shut down because it was “tacky” and didn’t fit his aesthetic of “luxury.” All the while Kon-Tiki dissolved into whatever replaced their Bronze Room. All throughout this time, a family-run restaurant on Broadway in a small Hudson Valley city just kept doing what they had always done, because nobody in Kingston was paying attention to what was popular in major cities that were leading in food and beverage.

The Resurrection: Dale, the Cocktail Renaissance, and Tiki’s Second Act

The craft cocktail revival that clawed its way back in the 1980s and ‘90s didn’t start as a tiki revival. It started as a rejection of the cheap sour-mix, well-vodka wasteland of god-awful disco-era bartending that had been left behind. Dale DeGroff, tending bar at the Rainbow Room in the late ‘80s, is the name you must know, because he’s the one who dragged fresh juice, proper mixing techniques, and pre-Prohibition-era rigor back into American bars when most guests didn’t seem to care. While Dale didn’t build a tiki program, he certainly helped rebuild the floor tiki had once stood on firmly. He has stated in conversations I’ve had that cocktails and bartenders deserved the same seriousness as a plate of food and its respective chef.

That rigorous training is what eventually let tiki come back into the spotlight, not as kitsch, but as archaeology. People like Jeff “Beachbum” Berry spent the ‘90s and 2000s reverse-engineering Donn Beach’s deliberately obscured recipes, decoding his code-named syrups (Don’s Mix, Don’s Spices No. 4, etc.) the way you’d crack a safe. What he helped bring back in the 2000s and 2010s wasn’t disco-era tiki drinks or even ‘50s Sheraton-chain tiki, it was actually a scholarly, craft-driven revival that took rum as seriously as the whiskey world had learned to take bourbon, rye, scotch and Irish whiskey.

Where That Leaves Us

What’s presented today is tiki with the myth mostly intact and the worst of its caricature of culture sanded down. There are plenty of cheap imitations out there still lining the beaches pouring neon red, green or blue “cocktails” that are more sugar than craft. There’s also a handful of tiki and rum bars that evolved to care about balancing ingredients, flavors and utilizing the best technique to showcase the category. Somehow underneath all of that restoration work that was done, in a Chinese restaurant on Broadway in Kingston stands a snapshot of tiki history locked in time.

The hospitality industry is built on one of three versions of the same story – viral trends like the ubiquitous Espresso Martini’s annual resurrection on everyone’s menu, or the slow-moving ones like the lethargic American appreciation of rum beyond cheap swill like Captain Morgan or Bumbu. Eng’s is the third version of the story that isn’t discussed often enough: Sometimes a thing survives not because anyone’s fighting for it, but because nobody stopped to ask whether the flaming Scorpion Bowls and parrot glassware still made sense in today’s world.