It would start to rain on the roof of Donn Beach’s bar, and nobody inside got wet. It wasn’t weather. It was a garden hose, rigged by the owner, who had noticed that people stay for another round when it sounds like a storm outside. That owner was a New Orleans-born drifter named Ernest Gantt, and his bar, Don the Beachcomber, started a national craze.
Here’s the thing about tiki, though: it was never from the South Pacific. It was made in America, out of Caribbean rum, Cantonese food, Filipino bartending skill and sacred Pacific imagery. And America loved it so hard it ended up in bowling alleys and laundromats.
Paradise in a Former Tailor Shop
In 1933 or 1934, depending on whom you ask, Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt opened a tiny bar in a former tailor shop just off Hollywood Boulevard. American Heritage puts the room at “just 13 feet by 30.” His pitch was simple: “If you can’t get to paradise, I’ll bring it to you.”
The formula was just as simple. Prohibition was over, Caribbean rum was cheap, and Gantt mixed it into strong, complicated drinks; one early favorite, the Sumatra Kula, cost a quarter. He added Cantonese food and draped the place in South Pacific flotsam. By 1937 he had moved to a bigger spot, and he later legally changed his name to Donn Beach. Commitment to the bit: total.
Notice what’s missing from the South Seas fantasy: the South Seas. As tiki historian and bar owner Martin Cate told Smithsonian, “there’s no rum in the South Pacific, no tradition of cocktails.” The drinks descended from the Caribbean Planter’s Punch. The paradise was a mix-and-match job from the start.
The Men Behind the Bar
The drinks themselves came out of a back room, made by Filipino bartenders that Punch says were known as Beach’s “Four Boys.” One of them, Ray Buhen, joined in 1934 and later opened his own bar, Tiki-Ti, in Los Angeles in 1961. His family still runs it. Punch notes that the hiring partly reflected the racial conflation of the era, which lumped Filipino workers in with an all-purpose “exotic” look, and that these men are rarely named in the story they built. They should be.
Beach guarded his recipes like nuclear codes. Ingredients went into bottles marked with codes instead of names, so rivals couldn’t copy them, and by most accounts even the people mixing the drinks didn’t always know exactly what was in them. The paranoia was the brand.
Enter the Trader
Up in Oakland, Victor Bergeron opened a bar called Hinky Dinks in 1934. After a research trip in the late 1930s that took in New Orleans, Havana and, yes, Don the Beachcomber, he came home and re-themed the place. By the end of the decade it had become Trader Vic’s.
Bergeron was a character. He liked to tell people he lost a leg to a shark. According to American Heritage, it was actually tuberculosis, but you can see why he enjoyed the shark version more.
He also claimed he invented the Mai Tai in 1944, and he wasn’t shy about it: “Anybody who says I didn’t create this drink is a stinker.” Beach’s side disagreed. That fight is big enough to get its own article, and it’s coming soon.
Trader Vic’s grew into a chain and moved into hotels, which carried the fantasy well beyond California.
Why America Wanted Paradise So Badly
During the Depression, a dark room with fake rain and a quarter-priced rum drink was a cheap escape. Then World War II sent huge numbers of American servicemen into the Pacific, and they came home with stories, souvenirs and a taste for the idea of the islands.
Pop culture piled on. James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and became the musical South Pacific. Thor Heyerdahl’s 1947 Kon-Tiki raft voyage put the word “tiki” in headlines. Hawaii became a state in 1959, and two years later Elvis was in Blue Hawaii.
Then Disney made it official. Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room opened at Disneyland on June 23, 1963, and Disney bills it as the first attraction to use sophisticated Audio-Animatronics. A major milestone in American entertainment technology was a room full of singing birds and tiki carvings. That tells you a lot about the country in 1963.
Our read: post-war suburbia wanted a vacation it could drive to after work.
Tiki Everywhere: The Boom Gets Ridiculous
Once tiki caught on, America stopped asking whether a place needed it. American Heritage describes apartment buildings, bowling alleys, trailer parks, laundromats and corner restaurants dressed up with tiki heads, rattan and electric torches. Nothing says island paradise like waiting for the spin cycle under a carved head.
The originals boomed too. While Beach was overseas, his ex-wife, Sunny Sund, ran the business and grew Don the Beachcomber into a chain of 16 restaurants. PBS SoCal reports it was sold to Getty Enterprises in 1968. Aloha shirts became the unofficial uniform of all this, and that is its own messy story, told in our history of the Hawaiian shirt.
Some tiki restaurants competed on spectacle. At the Kahiki in Columbus, Ohio, the flaming dishes inspired the Columbus Dispatch, as quoted by American Heritage, to call it “one of the few restaurants in Columbus in which food can injure you.” Fair warning, honestly.
The Florida Stop: The Mai-Kai
Florida got one of the biggest survivors. Brothers Bob and Jack Thornton opened the Mai-Kai on Dec. 28, 1956, in Oakland Park, just north of Fort Lauderdale. Eater reports they spent $350,000, calling it America’s most expensive restaurant project that year. Smithsonian says the bar still serves recipes descended from the Beachcomber’s, and a Filipino bartender, Mariano Licudine, became the face of its bar. The Mai-Kai joined the National Register of Historic Places on Nov. 18, 2014.
Then it nearly ended. The Mai-Kai closed in 2020 after water damage and a roof collapse, and it reopened in November 2024 after a restoration that cost roughly $20 million. A Florida tiki palace coming back from a roof collapse is about as Florida as it gets.
So What Is a Tiki, Really?
Here’s where the fantasy meets real cultures, and the meanings differ from place to place.
In Māori tradition, “tiki” refers to the human form. A hei-tiki is a carved neck pendant, and Te Papa, New Zealand’s national museum, notes that some link the word to Tiki, the first man. Te Ara’s 1966 encyclopedia of New Zealand describes tiki, properly speaking, as large carved wooden human figures that were considered sacred.
In Hawaiʻi the related word is kiʻi. The National Park Service describes kiʻi as images that embody akua and ʻaumakua, gods and ancestors. Across Polynesia more broadly, the Bowers Museum says the term roughly means “image” or “depiction,” used for carvings of ancestors, guardian spirits or deities.
The American tiki bar blended all of that, along with plenty of pure invention, into what Kalewa Correa of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center called a mythical “Isle of Tiki” in an interview with NPR. He compared sacred carvings used as bar décor to a bar themed around Christian imagery, and said “really at the root of it, it’s exploitation.” Kanaka Maoli scholar Stephanie Nohelani Teves put it bluntly to the Los Angeles Times: “Tiki bars are not cute.” She told the paper the mai tais weren’t her problem. The imagery was.
Other Pacific Islanders see it differently. Saipan-born Angelo Villagomez told NPR the bars may get it “completely incorrectly. But I do think it comes from a good place.” Mariah Kunkel, writing in Punch, said that for a few people tiki “allowed for people to open themselves up to Pasifika cultures,” even if most never cared to look past the décor.
And plenty of tiki insiders have long said it was never meant to depict Polynesia at all. C.W. Gross told the Los Angeles Times that tiki “was never intended in any sense to represent it.” Historian Sven Kirsten coined the term “Polynesian Pop” for the whole American style.
Both things can be true at once: tiki was a real, creative American invention, and it was built with imagery that means something very different to the people it came from. Knowing where it came from makes the story better.
Last Call for Paradise
Tiki lasted into the 1970s, which historian Jeff Berry called “an unprecedented lifespan for a drink fad.” Then it got tired. Recipes were passed along in what Smithsonian describes as a game of telephone, and bars took shortcuts, with sour mix standing in for fresh juice. In the 1980s Donald Trump closed the Trader Vic’s at New York’s Plaza Hotel, saying it had “gotten tacky.”
That wasn’t the end, though. How tiki crawled back from the sour-mix years is a story for another day, and so is the full Mai Tai fight. Both are coming to Rad Reads.
Can’t wait that long? The Mai Tai has a card in Rad Palm’s A Drink Through Time deck.
Until then, if you like your bars with a little more history and a lot less bamboo, read In Defense of the Great Florida Dive Bar.
Stay Rad.