Cocktail Snob - quality matters!

In late 1933, one Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt rechristened himself Donn Beach, and opened the first outpost of his Don the Beachcomber chain in Los Angeles. Prohibition had just ended, rum was cheap, and Beach got to work reviving, expanding, and I'd say legitimizing the entire category of cocktails that we now think of as Tropicals.

By the following year, one Victor Jules Bergeron had seen what Beach was up to, changed his own name to Trader Vic, and transformed his Oakland restaurant Hinky Dink's into the first Trader Vic's. Both men did extremely well for the next four decades.

By the 1980s, both Donn and Vic still had a few dozen restaurants between them, but as the Tiki fad faded, Donn's stores all closed up. As the Beachcomber's legacy vanished, so it was that further chains spawned by additional imitators (such as Stephen Crane’s Kon-Tiki Ports and Mariott’s Kona Kai) completely ceased to be as well. There is an attempt underway as we speak to revive the Beachcomber franchise in Hawaii, but they have a long way to go to catch up to what the Trader has been up to. As the competitors were erased, Vic's also closed all but four of their North American operations in the 1980s and 1990s. However, they continued to expand the brand world-wide, maintaining about two dozen restaurants in places as diverse as Thailand, England, the United Arab Emerates, Japan, Oman, Qatar, China, and Germany (some of these have closed, some new ones have opened). Not to keep a good Tiki bar down, Trader Vic’s has staged a major comeback in North America in the past five years, and have jumped back up to ten restaurants in the US of A.

The legacies of Misters Beach and Bergeron are not to be underestimated among Cocktail Snobs.

It is true that many of the dozens of drinks that these two men invented have been mutated and bastardized to the point at which the very thought of them conjures thoughts of syrupy, sticky misery. However, this should not discount the original intentions of these legendary mixologists. Going back to the roots of the best Beach and Bergeron drinks uncovers many (often excellent) drinks that can and should be brought back to their World War II-era glory.

Properly made versions of Beach's Zombie or Missionary's Downfall are wonders to behold (and imbibe). Trader Vic's own Suffering Bastard variant, his Tortuga, and - yes - his legendary Mai Tai are all excellent and unique drinks, on the rare occasion when you can get one made as The Trader intended.

Unfortunately, you have to be pretty good friends with one of a handful of Tropical-obsessed Cocktail Snobs to get a proper Zombie (my pal Jeff Berry comes to mind; there are others), but the Trader Vic's drinks are not hard to get, given their twenty-nine locations around the globe (as of late 2007).

Quality control and bartender skill from location to location can vary, but the worst drink I have ever been served at a Trader Vic's was better than 95% of everything else out there.

I am not sure that Victor Bergeron ever had the high-minded gourmet aspirations for his drinks that the owners of modern bars like Pegu Club or Violet Hour have. But he did come from an era when quality mattered in all things. By all accounts, Trader Vic was a guy who liked to meet his customers, and he was well liked. He is also known to have been a man who enjoyed his food and drink, and I have no doubts that the dozens of cocktails that he invented were simply designed to taste delicious... and perhaps to get you a little drunk*.

That said, perhaps his combinations of rum and fruit juices in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s were just as innovative in their day as the creative uses of bitters, surprising spices, (and who knows what else) that people like Adam Seger and Julie Rainer are using today.

Run then to your nearest Trader Vic's, and revel in a legacy that has been going strong for 74 years, serving Cocktail Snob-approved drinks to someone, somewhere, every single day since just after the end of the evil Volstead act.

Oh, and by the way, here is the ONLY way to make a Mai Tai (with some minimum-quality rum suggestions).

1 oz. rum (try Appleton V/X or Brugal Anejo)
1 oz. rum (try St. James H'ors D'age)
.5 oz Orange Curacao (Senior Curacao of Curacao is good)
.5 oz Orgeat (old recipes also called for simple syrup; modern Orgeat is sweeter so no need for the syrup).
Juice of one lime (I like to measure out a hair less than one ounce).

Shake all with a scoop of crushed ice and half of a lime rind.
Pour all ingredients into a double old fashioned glass.
Garnish with mint sprig (leave the lime rind floating around in there).

If you change this at all (save for amber rum substitutions), it is no longer a Mai Tai.
Rule #4: change the ingredients, change the name.

For example this is a Hawaiian Style Mai Tai:

Pretty much every single bar on the Hawaiian islands makes their Mai Tai thusly:
1.) Mix all ingredients except dark rum (such as Myers).
2.) Float the dark rum on top of the drink.
What the drink actually consists of varies widely.
We recommend staying close to the recipe above, but pineapple juice is almost always added in Hawai’i.
Avoid grenadine.

...do you see how that can get pretty scary pretty quickly in the hands of an amateur?

* = just a little.
His famous quote was:
"Trader Vic's is dedicated to those merry souls who make drinking a pleasure -
Who achieve contentedness long before capacity
And who, whenever they drink, prove able to carry it, enjoy it,
And remain gentlemen."

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Last updated on October 23, 2007

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