The Golden Era and What Came After

Postwar boom, seventies collapse, and the long slow revival that brought the drinks back.

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Tiki’s peak wasn’t the thirties. It was the two decades after the Second World War, when several million Americans came home from the Pacific and the country developed an appetite for a romanticized version of where they’d been.

The boom

By the fifties and sixties there were Polynesian restaurants in every major American city, and chains — Kon-Tiki, Trader Vic’s, the Mai-Kai — operating at a scale that’s hard to picture now. Hotels built them. Bowling alleys had them. Apartment complexes were designed with A-frames and lava rock.

It was mainstream in a way that no cocktail movement has been since.

The collapse

By the mid-seventies it was over, and the reasons are not mysterious.

Costs went up and quality went down. Fresh juice became bottled mix, real rum became well rum, and drinks that had been carefully built became sweet and uniform. The category ate its own reputation — the phrase “tiki drink” came to mean “sugary and cheap,” which by then it usually was.

Taste moved on. The generation that had found it exotic aged out, and the one following it found it embarrassing. Then came a broader reckoning with the appropriation baked into the whole aesthetic, which was overdue and correct.

Buildings were demolished or remodeled. Enormous quantities of carved work went into dumpsters.

The revival

What brought it back was research. Beachbum Berry’s recipe archaeology in the nineties and 2000s made the original drinks knowable again, and it turned out they were genuinely good — dry, complex, technically demanding. That was a surprise to almost everyone.

The revival that followed is different from what it revived. It’s rum-literate in a way the Golden Era mostly wasn’t. It’s more careful about the imagery. It treats the drinks as craft cocktails that happen to be tropical rather than as novelties.

What’s worth keeping

The escapism, the theatricality, and the hospitality. The idea that a bar can be a destination rather than a room with alcohol in it.

What isn’t worth keeping is the pseudo-anthropology and the sugar. Neither was ever the point.