History
The first tiki bar was named "Don the Beachcomber", and was created in Los Angeles in 1933 by Ernest Gantt (aka "Donn Beach"). The bar served a wide variety of exotic rum drinks (including the popular "Sumatra Kula" and "Zombie cocktail") as well as Cantonese food, and displayed many artifacts that Gantt had collected on earlier trips through the tropics. When Gantt was sent to World War II, Don the Beachcomber flourished under his ex-wife's management, expanding into a chain of 16 restaurants.
When Gantt returned from the War, he moved to Hawaii and opened "Waikiki Beach", one of the two canonical tiki bars. The bar was designed to evoke the South Pacific, with palm trees, tiki masks on the walls, a garden hose that showered a gentle rain on the roof and a myna bird that was trained to shout "Give me a beer, stupid!" The bar was located on the beach, lit by tiki torches outside which enhanced its primitive ambiance.
The other canonical bar is Trader Vic's, the first of which was created by Victor Bergeron in Oakland, California, in 1936. The quintessential tiki cocktail the "Mai Tai" was concocted at the original Trader Vic's in 1944. Bergeron expanded the business to eventually include branches all over the world, as well as marketing cocktail mixes and other products for retail sale. Members of the Bergeron family still have a hand in the operations of at least one branch. The original Oakland location is gone, but there is still a Trader Vic's located a few miles away in Emeryville, California.
The Tonga Room of the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco is an iconic tiki bar operating since 1945, and undergoing a number of facelifts over the years.
The original tiki bars flourished for about 30 years, and then soon fell out of vogue. In the 1990s, the Tiki culture was revived by a new generation of fans and new tiki bars were founded all over the world that often looked to Trader Vic's and Don the Beachcomber for inspiration.
Read more about this topic: Tiki Bar
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