The Art of Tiki Showdown Under Moonlit Skies

The year Prohibition ended, Hawaii was still two decades away from statehood, Miami Beach’s Art Deco Historic District was under construction and a fellow named Ernest Gantt taught America to fall in love with the exotic. He’d spent his youth traveling around the South Pacific on freighters, picking up curios, tall tales and a sailor’s taste for drinks that were nearly lethal and fascinatingly fruity. He brought all of that to a small Los Angeles-area bar he called Don the Beachcomber’s. Its motto: “If you can’t get to paradise, I’ll bring it to you!”

The Birth of Tiki

During World War II, the bar owner became a lieutenant colonel in the Army Air Force, got injured in a U-boat attack and spent the rest of the war running rest-and-relaxation centers for the U.S. military across Italy and France. He became, in other words, by inclination and training, a seasoned professional at having a good time and in taking that good time global – or at least, anywhere with palm trees, golden sand and moonlit waves.

The lifestyle Gantt birthed was so all consuming, he even changed his name to Donn Beach, spawned America’s first themed restaurant chain, and inspired a legion of fans and imitators.

There is no record of whether he was a sincere believer in the Polynesian religion that revered a first ancestor named Tiki, but once he moved his base of operations to Waikiki, the lifestyle he championed and the bamboo-clad, flower-filled lounges he franchised were cemented in the global imagination as “tiki.”

From tiki bars to tiki torches to the Magic Kingdom’s fondly remembered Enchanted Tiki Room, from cool to corny and back to cool again, this was a cultural phenomenon that shaped the 20th century. It also sold a lot of rum.

Beach equated rum with wellness, declaring: “Rum holds certain therapeutic values and is the purest spirit made, the greatest of all drinks because it is distilled from sugar cane and is easily assimilated into the body’s system.” But more than real sales or notional health, it made him and his famous regulars, from David Niven to Marlene Dietrich, happy.

So it was with this spirit that bartenders across South Florida – a region blessed with, yes, palm trees, golden sand and moonlit waves – descended on the Kimpton Surfcomber Hotel on Collins Avenue to challenge each other on Feb. 23 at the South Beach Wine & Food Festival "Art of Tiki Showdown.”

Tiki in Miami

The event was thoroughly “Miami,” which is to say, there was a distinctly Caribbean vibe. There were a few leis and some rather nice poke bowls, but even nicer ceviche and several metric tons of high-quality Appleton Estate Jamaica Rum which, in true “therapeutic value” form, sponsored the event.

Traditional tiki was in evidence at the Surfcomber, with none other than Fort Lauderdale’s legendary and recently revamped Mai-Kai Restaurant serving a fruity, spicy something called a Gula Melaka Swizzle. This tropical concoction consisted of two kinds of rum (Appleton Estate 8-Year-Old Reserve and toasted coconut), key lime, pineapple, two unusual syrups (ginger and lime and the titular gula melaka, which is a kind of sugar extracted from coconut palm flowers), Bitterman’s Elemakule Tiki Bitters, and a pineapple leaf and cinnamon stick for garnish.

In classic, over-the-top tiki fashion, service was periodically interrupted by a lei-clad lady calmly banging a gong whenever someone dropped a wooden nickel into a box on the bar. This was how votes were cast; whomever earned the most tokens would win the showdown.

On the other end of the tiki spectrum, the most local of local bars, the Surfcomber’s own Social Club, made Miami-grown mamey a star attraction of its offering. The Final Ritual was made with mamey, kiwi, lime, Aperol and Appleton Estate 8-Year-Old Reserve. Glasses were rimmed with a lightly salted mamey-kiwi purée and served with a smile.

If the main things those drinks seem to have in common are rum, fruit and excess, you’re beginning to get the picture. In fact, excess even extended to the competition’s structure. Unlike showdowns in the Old West, the Art of Tiki Showdown had two official winners, as announced by Duane Sylvestre, the Campari Group spirit specialist who served as emcee and one of the panel of judges.

The victor chosen by those judges was The Bird of Fortune, a tiki original from Beaker & Gray and The Sylvester, sister bars in Wynwood and Midtown. The drink, served by mysterious figures in turbans and capes, consisted of the sponsor’s banana-buttered Coruba rum, Campari, velvet falernum (a cordial made with ginger, lime, almond and cloves), banana oleo saccharum (a kind of maceration made by using sugar to draw essential oils from banana peels), pineapple and lime, topped with flavorful, fresh-grated nutmeg.

The Page of Pentacles over the ballot box only increased the sense that this was some sort of magical potion of indeterminate oracular properties … or at least that it could make you start seeing things.

The people’s choice winner was a surprise, going to out-of-towners from Bar Hana, a new tiki establishment in Sarasota. Tiki fans will know that town for the Bahi Hut, an esteemed old-school lounge that needs no showdowns to burnish its laurels. Bar Hana’s Hawaiian-shirted crew poured a tasty twist on a tiki classic, Frankie’s Mai Tai, which started with the sponsor’s Chinese five-spice-infused rum and built on that with Wray & Nephew Overproof Rum, house curaçao, orgeat (a tiki staple syrup made with almonds and rosewater), lime, passion fruit foam, and an edible marigold and mint for garnish.

Favorites are subjective, and to praise two winners is not to overlook the Cool Runnings served by Broken Shaker, or the Boonoonoonos poured by Better Days under a veil of tiny bubbles from a pair of bubble guns wielded like six-shooters. The art of tiki is the art of excess, and there was, by the end of the night, enough of too much and then more.

Perhaps the best drink (or best antidote) poured that evening was not in the competition at all, but at the Appleton bar. There, mixologists were pouring a classic daiquiri, listing only two ingredients: the sponsor’s rum and lime. It seems like even Beach himself would approve of this simple classic served on the sand and “easily assimilated into the body’s system,” under the natural mystery of a Miami full moon.