It all looks the same. If you’ve seen one beach you’ve seen them all. It’s too hot. There’s nothing to do. These are a few of the common refrains echoed by the tropically uninitiated. Sure, there are common denominators but particulars like flora, fauna, cuisine, and culture identify each tropicale as a unique environmental economy.
As a teenager in Central Florida sabal, queen, and date palm trees were ubiquitous. I thought palm trees were palm trees, till the first time I traveled to Jamaica and saw royal palms or the tall coconut trees of the Yucatan Peninsula. On a jungle trail in Kauai, a shallow plant canopy arching over my head, the thing I noticed most was how the leave’s patterns resembled the weaved striations of Polynesian artwork.
The placid tide of the Caribbean, rolling from underneath itself like a sheet whipped over the mattress, is much different than the white capped growl of Atlantic surf, which separates itself by longitudes from its undulating Pacific brethren.
The soft roasted palate of Cuba, or the rich notes of Jamaican jerk may not appreciate the fruity spice of Mexican breakfast, or delicate umami notes of Hawaiian seared Mahi. However, it’s not the differences, but the similarities that bring the tropics together.
I suppose it’s like a connoisseur. Wine, bourbon, coffee, tobacco, and, of course, rum require a discerning taste to be able to differentiate specific terroir induced flavors. Sort of how if someone doesn’t like a certain kind of music it all sounds the same to them. People like what they like and I’m not here to change anyone’s mind. That being said, within the tropaholic community we occupy a special place here in the U.S. situated between the birthplace of rum, with all its multicultural - geopolitical influences, and the origins of exotica, replete with native history - mythos - and craftsmanship of the Pacific islands. In between there is a vast expanse of Americana that acted like the crock pot necessary to cook up what would become Tiki. In that analogy I suppose Don the Beachcomber was the chef.
If you’ve listened for any amount of time you know I am partial to the Caribbean side of tropical.
When I think Polynesia I think hidden local beaches, trade winds, giant fragrant flowers, and a laid back apathy that almost comes off indignant if one doesn’t know better. Sometimes, even if one does. A group of people minding their own business who got duped into being a state united. It’s no wonder they have thoughts towards interlopers. Reminds me of how the mafia got started. Local Sicilians banding together against oppressive government. Imagine a Hawaiian mafia. With all the vowels it probably wouldn’t sound much different than New York Italian. Aloha, gumbata!
Steel guitars, ukuleles, broadleaf textured plants, wild beaches, humuhumunukunukuapua'a, mahalo and all pau. There’s no way to capture my personal experience of Hawaii in a single podcast, but, as a haole, I appreciate the nuance. Growing up in Orlando, I understand the necessity for a tourist community to maintain an identity of their own. Which is exactly what I love about the Caribbean.
Sweaty linen shirts, panama hats, rum drinks, cuban jazz, slow tides, listless palm fronds, patoi dialects, cigars, Spanish and French architecture, Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Buffett, Hunter Thompson, Ernest Hemimgway, Bob Marley, Che Guevara, Herman Wouk, Henry Morgan, Mayan ruins, Dutch Curacao, Jamaican rum, St, Augustine, hurricane by-plane sugarcane wood-frame, cruise ship bullshit tight lip place to slip when you wanna dip these are a few of my favorite things.
From the time of colonizers the Caribbean has had an air of tropical indulgence amid a rank and file plebeian class of natives and slaves who paid the price for such indulgences. To placate them plantation workers were given rations of molasses, the byproduct of processing sugarcane, which they distilled into a strong, sweet spirit known as rumbustion. As rum hopped from island to island, altered each time by the pervading nationality, it took on unique characteristics for each region. It was traversing these islands centuries later that Donn Beach would garner the knowledge needed to predicate his new vision of exoticism on the use of rum.
In this way, one could argue that Tiki, invented in California, borrowing heavily from South Pacific and Asian cultures could not have happened without the Caribbean. And yet, Florida and the Caribbean became just as infatuated with Tiki’s faux tropicalia, even though they were in the real tropics!
As much as I love Florida it would be remiss of me not to admit that there’s a huge difference in a true Tiki bar and the thatched roof outdoor beach shacks the Sunshine state calls tiki bars. They can pop up anywhere from patio’s to rooftops to strip mall parking lots to one of the many beach bar & grills along Florida’s coast. My Favorite is called Coconuts on the Beach on A1A in Cocoa Beach. Tiki mask imagery decorates the large wooden lanai and for the longest time there were tiki totems lining the walkway down to the beach. The drinks are fruity tropical concoctions that are delicious in their own right, and down right dangerous, but beach drinks would be a more appropriate term. When Tropics Cocktail Bar opened down the street they brought true Tiki drinks to Cocoa Beach, but still with a Vintage Caribbean aesthetic.
The Florida version of tropical drinking isn’t fake, though. Seminole Indians would set up small thatch covered trading posts called chickee huts for selling provisions to the influx of pale skinned invaders. As pilgrims became tourists one can extrapolate that led to provisions of the bibulous sort. The similarity in name and explosion of exotica culture eventually led to ‘chickee’ huts becoming known as ‘tiki’ huts. To this day tiki bars at every Floridian port still serve pale skinned invaders by the boatload.
Rum drinks never left the Caribbean or southeast U.S., but in a way, it took California’s Tiki movement to reinvigorate the waning popularity of prohibition era tropical drinking and give it a new twist with the exotica element. Fair enough since the west coast stole reggae from us.
However, this isn’t a Biggie/Tupac rivalry. This is a story of tropical cohesion brought on by one famous bartender, two entrepreneurs, and a nascent movement that took rum drinks back home with a new and exotic twist that proliferated a genre and revitalized a region. This is the story of how Tiki came to the east coast; and it continues our tale of Mariano Licudine, the brothers Thornton, and the infamous Mai Kai.
Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Tony and this is Pod Tiki.
I try to make these episodes stand-alone for the sake of posterity, but if you haven’t listened to the previous episode, entitled Vicious Virgin, now would be the appropriate time to pause this and do so. I’ll wait here. No, don’t worry about me. I’ve got a cigar and a drink and plenty of research to still do. … Ok, and we’re back. Glad you’re all caught up.
When Jack and Bob Thornton chose Ft. Lauderdale, Florida as the home for their new venture there was nothing like it around. Even nearby Miami could not boast anything quite on the scale Jack and Bob had imagined. Florida and the Caribbean had always been a place for tourists and expats, people trying to really escape. But, when Tiki came to Florida it offered the temporary reprieve of elsewhere while only being a doorway away from dreaded reality. Escapism in itself is an artform later expounded on by the likes of Walt Disney and Jimmy Buffett. However, in the mid-1950’s, while a Cold War raged on and the stench of Cuban Revolution hung thick in the humid air, while our fathers slicked their hair back and wore leather jackets not knowing in a few short years they’d be shipped off to a jungle in Southeast Asia, escapism was an unidentified commodity.
Bob Thornton was a little rough around the edges. I picture club shirts unbuttoned half-way with khakis and boat shoes. His brother Jack preferred the suit and tie approach. One thing they had in common was that they were both the kinda guys you could have a beer with. I don’t know if they were cool guys or not, although I assume so, what I’m referring to is the fact that their father owned a brewery in Wilmette, a few miles north of Chicago. So, in theory, you could’ve literally have walked in and had a beer with them. Another thing they had in common was that neither of them was stoked to go into the family business. Together they had a dream. A Tiki dream. I dream of Tiki.
After Jack taking a trip to Hawaii and Bob becoming a regular at Trader Vic’s while attending Stanford they both fell in love with Polynesia. They considered opening a spot in San Diego but California was already replete with Tiki bars by then. Remembering a spring break in Ft Lauderdale, which is a feat of its own, the brothers decided that would be the perfect spot. Built in tourism, little competition in the genre, and best of all, Florida is actually tropical.
The next step was making sure their place could not only stand up to but surpass even the west coast Tiki giants. They must have had some money in their family because in the words of our former president they “took out a small loan, a fraction of that money”, from mommy dearest and went on tour of Polynesia purchasing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of artifacts and ephemera. 23 tons in all. Their collection ended up filling 5 dining rooms and 2 lounges. One featuring the famous surfboard bar-top. They even took a page out of Don the Beachcomber’s playbook rigging up water flow down the window to give the impression of being sunken under. Tiki gardens, waterfalls, and lagoons blended with natural Florida to complete the illusory experience.
Before all that, they needed to build it. And, they needed a staff who knew how to actually make Tiki drinks. It was about this time Mariano Licudine had worked his way up to number 2 bartender at the Chicago Don the Beachcomber’s, an indispensable position. Mariano was already one of Donn’s inner circle and having trained at the original Beachcomber’s was privy to Donn’s recipes. It was for this reason he was sent to open the Chicago branch. But, Mariano was beginning to experiment with his own ideas, not all of which were copesetic with the strict way Donn ran his bars. This made his decision that much easier when Bob and Jack came calling.
Mariano answered the call with honors. He not only created the bar program, complete with Tiki standards renamed as the Impatient Virgin, Missionary’s Doom, and Deep Sea Diver, as well his own creations like the Demerara Cocktail, but he also had a hand in almost every aspect of the build out. He designed the bars, dining rooms, and decor. In fact, the family got in on it. In his wonderfully insightful book Sippin’ Safari Beachbum Berry cites an anecdote in which Mariano’s son Ron was playing around the waterfall features during construction when he asked the engineer, “where’s the wishing well?”. When the engineer responded, “what wishing well?”, Ron said, “You have water. Where’s your wishing well?”
By the time The Mai Kai opened in December 1956 it featured a 40 foot high A-frame Tiki longhouse, tropical gardens, hand carved totems, water effects, thatched canoe roofs, a vast array of nautical and Polynesian decor, a high-end dining experience complete with the only place in the sunshine state to get authentic Tiki driks. Oh, and a wishing well.
These days, in the instagram era, it seems every time a new bar or restaurant concept opens everyone swarms like ants on a discarded apple core. Back then, folks didn’t take so eagerly to new things. Bringing faux exotica to the tropics was a little like a kid bringing their tablet to an IMAX theater. Or, like listening to a band in your earbuds while they’re playing live in front of you. The thing is, if you’ve ever paid an exorbitant amount for tickets to a concert with bad sound and the center for the Orlando Magic is standing right in front of you, you know that sometimes earbuds are a better experience.
There’s a place for faux escapism. Like the first time I left the tourist area of a Caribbean island looking for an authentic experience just to discover the islands of Hemingway, Thompson, and Buffett are in the long distant past. The authentic Caribbean is a militant third world country. That is an extreme way of making the point that eventually, amid geopolitical uncertainty, a counterculture movement, and the looming civil rights unrest, the American South was ripe for some escapism.
The Mai Kai answered the call and exploded like gangbusters, clearing $1 Million in its first year. That’s in 1956 money. So many celebrities showed up that the restaurant began confiscating cameras at the door. Next time you attend a show and they make you put your phone in a bag realize this has been happening for a century.
Another Beachcomber alum the brother’s Thornton poached was Chef Kenny Lee. Kenny’s $150 suckling pig luau meal was written about in Holiday and Esquire magazines fighting the stereotype of Tiki restaurants just rebranding Chinese food. As profound of a statement Kenny Lee made the source of adulation soon shifted to the bar. Mariano’s prolific drink menu not only captured the hearts and livers of patrons, but earned him a place among Caribbean mixology royalty. Soon he was traversing the West Indies giving seminars on how to mix rum drinks to the people who invented rum drinks!
Listen back to the last episode for a more in depth revue of Mariano’s life and career, including his $100,000 daiquiri. One highlight that must be reiterated is that Mariano Licudine created the Mystery Drink. Upon ordering a Tahitian “Mystery Girl” would dance the drink over to the table, all pendulum hips and sultry eyes, place a lei around your neck, salaamed, and hula’d away to whence she came. Say what you want about exploiting and objectifying, this is just cool. Here in Nashville we have a robot themed Tiki bar called Chopper. If a scantily clad Polynesian chick delivered my drink doing the robot!; I would order that every time simply for the novelty factor!
Mariano’s seminars, by way of the Mai Kai’s popularity, teaching how to turn the Caribbean’s native spirit into Tiki drinks spawned a movement that brought tourism back to the region. 20 years after the Mai Kai opened, in 1976, Vic Bergeron and our old pal Conrad Hilton even opened a Trader Vic’s in the Caribe Hilton in Puerto Rico where Mariano gave lessons to the inventors of the Pina Colada and Suffering Bastard. Mariano Licudine was the first celebrity Tiki bartender on the east coast.
Eventually, the trend caught on as Florida overtook California as the epicenter of Tiki and tropical drinks. The diaspora of Tiki spread throughout Florida from Tampa to Key West to Orlando’s Trader Sam’s at Disney’s Polynesian Resort, where I first encountered the phenomenon as a child. But, Polynesian pervasion didn’t stop at bars. Growing up there, I can attest. Tiki iconography emblazoned hotels, apartment complexes, shopping centers, gift shops, beach shacks, and 3 for $10 knock-off t-shirts. It was an easy adoption as the essence of tropicalia already lived there. In some ways Tiki inspired the ho-hum of everyday Florida life to lean into its nature. Large tropical atriums sprang up in airports, businesses, and non-Tiki restaurants. Tropical became synonymous with Tiki. In the words of Beachbum Berry the Jack and Bob Thornton along with Kenny Lee and Mariano Licudine brought, “the faux tropical drink to the home of the real tropical drink.”
In 1970 brother Jack suffered an aneurysm and sold his half of the Mai Kai to Bob. Under Bob’s reign the restaurant underwent massive expansion including more dining rooms, a stage for live luau’s, a gift shop, and the famous Molokai Bar - an island saloon. Its popularity garnered the Mai Kai a designation on the National Registry of Historic Places. Not bad for a made up paradise.
In its heyday the Mai Kai was the largest independent user of rum in the U.S. The Tiki-Ti in California and the Mai Kai in Florida were the last two places in the country to get Don the Beachcomber’s original Tiki drinks. Until 2020.
Here in Nashville tornados ravaged the east side, a car bomb exploded on 2nd Avenue on Christmas Morning, and the Pandemic kept us in solitude and kept my wife and I alighted on many rum punches. Even though the first episode of Pod Tiki dropped as an experimental side project in 2019 it was during lock-down that I dedicated serious time to making it an official show. It was also the time when a leaky roof finally gave way at the Mai Kai and in October of that year the Mai Kai was forced to close its doors. Thus, closing the entrance to Polynesian escapism that created a Tiki anomaly.
After much outcry from the community the Thornton family sold into a partnership with the Barlington Group, an investment company known for its work in historical preservation. Beginning in 2022 they broke ground on a refab and restoration project to reopen the Mai Kai. There is a wonderful article on FloridaRambler.com that I will link to in the sources that goes in depth on the progress and what to expect. I will say here that fans both old and new will be very happy with the outcome. Dining rooms, gardens, and the infamous Molokai Bar are being built out to not only match, but exceed, the previous offerings.
Like most construction the project slated to open this summer has been delayed many times. I don’t know who’s slated to run the bar program but one things for certain. If they put as much care, love, and effort into the drinks as they are to proper restoration I believe we are all in for a treat. I hope to meet you all there for the grand opening where I’ll be enjoying one of Mariano’s Original tropical cocktails.
Of which he created many. The recipe the royal we bring you tonight was created by Mariano around the time of the Mai Kai’s opening in 1956. One can see Donn Beach’s influence in its construction. A daiquiri split into its components - sugar, fruit, spirit - and and reimagined as a Tiki. I give you the Demerara Cocktail.
Let’s make a Mariano Licudine fucking Tiki drink!
For rums we’ll need a Demerara and a gold Puerto Rican. My favorite Demerara, one that I’m actually sipping right with a cigar as a write this, is Hamilton 86. I am lucky enough to have it available near me. If it’s not by you, first reach out to Ed and have him get it there, but Lemon Hart and El Dorado 8 yr are viable options. As far as gold PR, I usually go with Bacardi 8 yr, as it’s my favorite for sipping and mixing without breaking the bank. This time I chose the Puerto Rico version of Havana Club. It’s a solid 3 yr aged amber rum. It’s purportedly made in the style of the old Cuban Havana Club. It doesn’t hold up to the Cuban, but it does offer that fruity Caribbean rum flavor one should expect with a touch of age. There are some heavier flavors here that ensconce the rums so whatever your choice will suffice as long as it’s Puerto Rican. The crisp light notes are necessary to reach the desired flavor. If you’re looking for something bolder try a Barbados like Real McCoy or R.L. Seale. I don’t think Mariano would mind. He’s dead after all.
The heavier flavor alluded to is passion fruit syrup. If you prefer to purchase a ready made may I suggest Liber & Co. But, if you’re a cheapass, like me, I make my own. Procure some frozen passion fruit puree from the supermarket or Spanish grocery, let it melt to a thick liquid, and mix it with equal parts simple syrup - a 1:1 water:raw cane sugar blend.
Then we’ll need fresh lime juice and crushed ice.
Mariano takes a simple daiquiri recipe, splits the rums, subs passion fruit syrup as the sugar, and adds lime and blends it with ice to dilute and cool the concoction. Here the recipe:
1 oz Demerara Rum
½ oz Gold Puerto Rican Rum
½ oz Passion Fruit Syrup
½ oz Lime Juice
4 oz Crushed Ice
Blend it all for no more than 5 seconds and double strain into a coup, cocktail glass, or small snifter. The secondary strain through a wire sieve is essential to keeping pesky ice chunks out of the drink. There’s no traditional garnish for this one. A few cherries on a pick works but it’s unnecessary.
First impression is a quick cold snap followed by the great balance of fruit and rum. As it warms the drink thickens with flavors of ripe fruit, a familiar passion fruit bite that’s almost like mild spice, and the crisp but soft notes of Puerto Rican rum.
I think the point I was trying to make in the intro is that many very different versions of the tropics had to come together to create Tiki. Mainly Polynesia and the Caribbean, represented by California and Florida. The Mai Kai completed the cross-country Tiki railroad that finally unified the entire country, under rum, with barstools and Tiki for all.
And to the people who say all the tropics look the same I say, If I’ve seen one beach I want to see them all.
My name is Tony and this has been Pod Tiki.
Sources: thefloridarambler.com article - Mai-Kai Restaurant: Lovingly restored treasure to open late summer by: Deborah Hartz-Seeley, Sippin’ Safari by: Jeff “Beachbum” Berry