Sparks fly and lights flicker as a volcano rumbles. The scent of burning cinnamon fills the air. And then there is applause.
It’s the moment at which a Rum Barrel – one of the signature “show drinks” at Tiki Tatsu-ya – has been delivered to an expectant and enthralled group, gathered under the watchful eye of the giant Tiki god in the underground grotto.
Matt Williams, the general manager, is also keeping an eye on proceedings, like a ship’s captain happily marooned on a beach you’d never want to leave.
To enter Tiki Tatsu-ya feels like an adventure to a Pacific paradise in a bygone era, one booked at the purely fictitious Aikawa Tropical Tours whose signs hang outside. Visitors descend through a cave, past a flowing waterfall, and into a room of mellow enchantments where every space is filled with details and wonder. As the guest is taken to their seat, the traditional Japanese greeting of Irasshaimase! comes from the bar, an homage to the roots of Tokyo-born founder Tatsu Aikawa. In one corner of the grotto, war clubs lined with animal teeth; in another, blown glass fishing floats. “Sometimes it feels like looking after a museum,” Williams said. “I’m here more than any of our guests have ever been, and the interesting thing is that it’s still impressive when you sit down at table and go, ‘Oh my god, you can see the dragon tail.’”
However, it’s still a working bar and restaurant, and while the look is important, so are the drinks and the food. Plus there’s that indefinable element – “the aloha spirit,” Williams dubbed it. “In our version of it, it’s Southern hospitality. Austin is constantly referred to as one of the friendliest cities in the country, and I think that shows in our space.”
Tiki Tatsu-ya is part of a new national wave of bars that celebrate the elaborate and fantastical traditions of Tiki, a midcentury American pop art movement that sprung out of a fascination with the cultures of the South Pacific. It’s also far from the only place to serve Tiki drinks to Austinites. The Roosevelt Room has a dedicated Tiki section on its cocktail menu, the Long Goodbye has its summer Tiki Thursday pop-ups, while Nickel City is known for its Tiki-meets-dive-bar tendencies. For those prepared to appoint a designated driver, there’s Hugman’s Oasis on the River Walk in San Antonio, and the newly opened Sushi Tiki at the end of Fredericksburg’s main street. Yet out of all of them, Tiki Tatsu-ya has become a destination bar for Tikiphiles nationwide. Mention its name at Strong Water in Anaheim or the Sunken Harbor Club in Brooklyn, and they’ll nod approvingly. Williams said, “To be on people’s radar as enthusiasts, that’s pretty special.”
Tiki Tatsu-ya is also the epicenter of the growing Austin Tiki scene, one that brings together amateur and professional mixologists, artists, musicians, and interior designers. It’s a big tent – or rather, a big Hale Wa`a, the traditional open-sided A-framed structure of Hawaiian architecture.
It’s not often you can pinpoint the exact date that an art form was born, but you can with Tiki. December 5, 1933. That’s when Prohibition officially ended, and Don’s Beachcomber opened in the lobby of McCadden Hotel, just off Hollywood Boulevard. Owner and founder Donn Beach was a former deck hand who’d gathered trinkets and ornaments during his time in Hawaii and the South Pacific, and when he moved to L.A. in 1931 he opened a prop house, leasing items from his collection to the movie studios for an air of authenticity. When Prohibition ended, he decided to open a bar that could become a permanent home for some of those decorations.
Actually, Tinseltown legend has it that Beach had actually been running the bar as a speakeasy during Prohibition and merely quickly added the decorations he had on hand for showmanship. Beach had a flair for drama and wonder, and here was a chance to create what many see now as the world’s first immersive bar experience. He installed equipment to simulate the sound of a tropical storm outside. On the food menu were Cantonese dishes reworked with local ingredients and a Polynesian twist. For the drinks, he crafted dozens of new cocktails where Caribbean rum – long seen as just something sailors drank – was the base spirit.
That one bar became a model for a movement that became known as Polynesian or tropical. More Don’s Beachcombers would open across the nation. Then there was Trader Vic, aka Victor Jules Bergeron Jr., who had his own branded chain; Stephen Crane’s Kon-Tiki found inside Sheratons, and their rival Kona Kai in Marriotts; and, of course, dozens of smaller bars and restaurants across North America, including Texas.
The truth is, there’s no Tiki without the Lone Star State. Donn Beach, the godfather of the whole movement, was actually Ernest Raymond Beaumont-Gantt from Limestone County, a farming community about 100 miles south of Dallas. A noted fabulist, any truths of his actual life story were subsumed into the myth of Donn Beach, but the mythology and mixology of the aesthetic he created inevitably made it back to his home state.
Over the three decades after Beach popped his first legal cork, Texas got its share of now-legendary Tiki bars and restaurants. Ren Clark’s Polynesian Village in Fort Worth. Ports O’Call in Dallas and Dobbs House Luau Room out at Love Field. The Balinese Room on Galveston, where vacationing stars would rub shoulders with the island’s infamous rum runners and crime bosses, the Maceo brothers. And then there was the Lahala House, later known as Steak Island, in Austin. If you ever sat on the back terrace at Joe’s Crab Shack, you were actually sitting on the remains of the artificial island constructed over what was then called Town Lake for this Polynesian-themed establishment where LBJ used to dine.
All of them are gone now, fading as tastes turned against Tiki and it became seen as chintzy and dated. A handful of bars still carried the banner, like Trad’r Sam in San Francisco and Mai-Kai in Fort Lauderdale, while generations of families sang along with mechanical birds in Disneyland’s Enchanted Tiki Room. Then in the 1990s and early 2000s began the first stages of a revival under the banner of Tiki. That’s when Julie Perkins – better known as Aloha Julie – became fascinated by the look and flavors.
An interior designer by trade and training, she was drawn to the immersive nature of Tiki and collected every book and magazine on the topic she could, and soon connected with arguably the original Austin Tiki revival artist, Cindy Raschke, “who was into painting cars with hibiscus.” Perkins recalled that, through Raschke, she was introduced to the broader national scene, attending her first Tiki weekend in Florida, and then building one of Austin’s first modern Tiki backyard bars, “and that seemed like the best and cheapest place to throw a party,” she said. Those parties became the annual Texas Tiki Roundup, which ran between 2008 and 2016, “with vendors, musicians, someone doing fire hoops. There was even a burlesque show one time.”
Yet she acknowledges that Tiki’s escapism isn’t clear of controversy, and the scene has long faced the accusation that it’s just a bunch of mainland Americans appropriating multiple Pacific cultures and turning them into a mishmash stripped of cultural significance. The very name Tiki comes from the name of the first man in Māori mythology, and the reduction of its symbols and rich history to bar decorations still causes anger in some quarters to this day. Tiki has even faced accusations that it was a way to sell American expansion into the Pacific, that it was basically one huge psy-op.
It’s a conundrum that many in the scene take into account: that a rich subculture that they are helping preserve is built on borrowed lands. Perkins noted that modern Tiki is undeniably most heavily influenced by “when the soldiers came back from World War II. They had been stationed on these islands, and they remembered what it was like and wanted to bring a bit of that back over here.”
Yet contemporary Tiki has evolved beyond those roots to become its own pop art movement. Equally, since its early days the Austin scene only expanded, evolved, and become more interconnected, especially since she founded the Texas Tikiphiles Facebook group, and many members have taken the same next step as Perkins: building their own home Tiki bar.
It’s rum o’clock at Humphrey’s Hideout. Through bamboo slats you can watch waves break on the palm-lined beach. John Humphrey stands behind his bar, surrounded by artifacts that speak to lost nights on far horizons, and offers a glass of relaxation. Meanwhile, the bird calls and smooth piano jazz of Martin Denny’s Exotica, the acknowledged soundtrack album of Tiki, drift from the turntable. “A crazy work day, pop that on, and I’m instantly transported,” he said.
This is his little island paradise, but it’s also just his living room in Hutto. Turn off the mood lighting and the waterfall in the corner, pull up the removable shutter over the TV, and it’s back to being where his teenage kids play video games.
When he was younger, in Charleston, South Carolina, Humphrey used to hang out at Voodoo Tiki Bar & Lounge, “but I just wanted the two-dollar beers,” he said. When it came to Tiki, “I just thought of Jimmy Buffett and Party City.” Then one night at Tiki Tatsu-ya changed everything. “The music, the cocktails, and after that experience my view of what a Tiki bar was like was flipped on its head.”
Humphrey’s Hideaway started as just the liquor cabinet and some decorations, but slowly grew like kudzu to blossom over the whole space, shaped by that beachcomber mindset that epitomizes Tiki. Alongside original pieces by his wife (“my art director”) are recovered and repurposed items. The light shades are often handmade, thrift store finds like wicker baskets decorated with seashells or cloth from Hawaiian shirts. Humphrey holds out the perpetual dream of finding genuine Polynesian carvings or a vintage piece from Witco, aka Western International Trading Co., the furniture firm whose warm, heavy wood designs became the defining look of home Tiki. After all, thrifting is a big part of the hobby, “and if I find something, all of a sudden everything on the wall has to shift.”
The Tiki home bar can often be a rough-hewn affair, deeply individual with a no-such-thing-as-wrong mindset. Yet that doesn’t mean there aren’t practical problems to be solved, and that’s where historian and author Jayme Lynn Blaschke comes in. When he built his backyard poolside oasis in New Braunfels, dubbed the Lagoon of Mystery, he didn’t have any resources to go on, and his only real background was watching Gilligan’s Island and that one episode of The Brady Bunch. Then he started looking at tikicentral.com, “where it showed the home Tiki bars of Pixar Animation directors and Lucasfilm special effects guys, this incredible stuff, and so I stepped back, my eyes as big as saucers, and said, ‘I need to up my game.’”
He turned his own learning experiences as “the blind man feeling around” into an ongoing YouTube series, A Moment of Tiki, where viewers can learn about everything from making your own seashell lampshades to repairing a rattan swivel chair, all while following his adventures at antique stores and estate sales. “You can’t run down to Lowe’s or Home Depot and grab some Lauhala matting,” he said. “When I started building my home bar, I didn’t know where to start. … With A Moment of Tiki, I set out to document my experiences and how I progressed in building my home Tiki bar. As I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen, I made the mistake so you don’t have to.”
His tutorials may be lighthearted, but they’re also rooted in an appreciation of Tiki’s indigenous roots. Blaschke praises and promotes the artistry of the Pacific nations that influence his work, from the Maori whakairo carvers to the tapa cloth weavers of Hawaii. “You go up through the Cook Islands, the Marquesas, each one has their own distinctive traditions that never cease to blow me away.”
He’s also solved some specifically Texan problems. In the Midwest, many home Tiki bars are built in the basement, which are in short supply in Texas. On the plus side, the hotter weather means more outdoor Tiki bars, but also fireproofing all those natural fibers like palm frond thatching. And while a basement bar comes with a lot of pluses for running power, lighting, and even sound, there’s something special about an outdoor bar. Blaschke said, “Once the sun goes down and I turn the lights on with the different colors, and I light the torches among the banana plants, and there’s backlight coming from behind the palm trees, it takes on an otherworldly appearance. I’ve had people say, ‘We’re not in Texas anymore.’”
While he’s providing advice, Blaschke’s not laying down holy Tiki law. While his own tastes turn toward the classic midcentury look, “I’m not a purist,” he said. “I’m not angered by people bringing new perspectives to it and adding new things, and introducing new elements.”
Creating home Tiki bars can open up new mediums to established artists. Monica Holbert, known on the scene as MakikoMoe, was already an illustrator and artist, and getting into Tiki meant learning new skills like how to patch Lauhala matting, woven from the dried leaves of the Pandanus tree, and freehand wood carving and routing. “I could make sawdust all day,” she laughed. Not only has she sold her work online in every medium from woodwork to insulated mugs but, like Laschke, she’s also posted online tutorials. “I got into a lot of it because I wanted it but couldn’t find it. So, I would make it, and thought, well, maybe other people want this.”
In her own home, the application of those skills can be seen in one of the most unique home Tiki bars in Texas. For there lies Vulcania, a collaborative project between Monica and her husband, Karl, and a tribute to the 1954 aquatic action classic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Amid the classic Tiki decorations of bamboo and puffer fish, there are nods like a full-size model of Nemo’s speargun and photos signed by the cast: The theming is so complete that they’ve even added original cocktails like the Fog of War and 3° Down to their home-printed menu. Karl explained, “When I first got into the games industry, I was an environment artist, so I was like, ‘I make rooms. I’m literally a digital designer/architect. We can do this, and it will be awesome.’”
“The scary part,” Monica added, “is that he builds it digitally and then I have to make it.”
Part of the joy for Monica is that every home Tiki bar blows away expectations of Party City decorations and teeth-melting concoctions made of Bacardi and fruit punch. “Everybody builds their own sanctuary. Seeing someone’s home bar is like seeing their personality on display.”
A Tiki bar can also be a refuge for historical artifacts. For example, the doors to Vulcania were recovered from the Trader Vic’s in Dallas. And in Caroline Roe’s tiki bar, dubbed the Moai Ice House, there are lights and tables from the now-defunct Kahiki Supper Club in Columbus, Ohio, and the former Trader Vic’s in Chicago, while the one window is a real porthole in a door reclaimed from a ship. Every inch under the purpose-built A-frame roof is covered with knickknacks and paraphernalia, from a carved replica of a drummer from the Enchanted Tiki Room to bamboo-framed dioramas commissioned from local artists and even an Ikea stuffed cuddly octopus. As for the bathroom, it is lined with black velvet portraits of Elvis, including a Holbert original of the King as a goat.
This is actually Roe’s second home Tiki bar; the first was her old dining room back in Wisconsin. But when she moved to Austin she created the Moai Ice House, a refuge for a portion of her collection. The rest is on loan or passed on to other home bars around the city, “sold to friends, given to friends,” Roe said.
Roe’s interest in Polynesian culture goes far beyond Polynesian Pop, as she sits on the board of the Easter Island Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to the preservation of Rapa Nui as a living language and culture. An ocean away from the Polynesian islands she adores, on a rainlashed Austin night she stands behind her home bar, its shelves stocked with a liquor and mixer selection that would be the envy of most professional mixologists. She rattles a shaker of Zombies in each hand, while her boyfriend, David Hill, helps prep the glasses. It’s never just the drink: It’s the right kind of ice, the right straw, the right garnishes and fruit. And of course, the mug.
For many people, the defining aspect of Tiki is the Tiki mug. Or rather, Tiki mugs, plural. Mermaids, monsters, maoi, Tiki gods, pirates, explorers, hula dancers, and more, often designed for one specific drink but also meant to be displayed.
Like so much about Tiki culture, the origins of the Tiki mug are shrouded in mystery, legend, and tall tales. The earliest bars served drinks in regular glasses, or sometimes in carved bamboo mugs or hollowed-out pineapples. There are those that say that the first purpose-crafted mug was 1949’s Ruru & Weku, a literal mug with a handle, Tiki gods cast on both sides, part of Crown Lynn’s New Zealand Wharetana souvenir range. Some will argue that doesn’t count, that the first purpose-made ceramic barware was Trader Vic’s shareable Scorpion Bowl. Others still will say that there’s not really one original Tiki mug, but instead it was an idea everyone had at the same time.
These days, there are thousands of mug designs, some produced by big firms and many handcrafted by artists, several of whom have set anchor in Austin. Some are modern twists on classic designs like the Suffering Bastard, with a slumped figure holding his head, or incorporate the unofficial mascot of the scene, smiling Tiki Bob. Others truly innovate, or incorporate non-Tiki elements into their design.
Take the first mug ever designed by Grant Irvin, a professional chef and now the artist behind Freaky Deaky Tiki, a take on Pan from Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. “Not a traditional Tiki mug in any way,” he said, “but I don’t collect super-traditional mugs anyway.” It was an experiment, the result of having too much time on his hands during COVID. He said, “The kids had some air-dry clay in the garage, and I went, ‘You know what? I’m bored, I wonder what it would be like to sculpt a Tiki mug?’”
After positive responses to his first few designs, Irvin has turned Tiki mugs into a second career, with a full pottery studio and kiln installed in his garage. While his more recent work has leaned toward themes of jungle adventure, he’s made several mugs paying homage to his love of classic monsters like King Kong and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and he sees that as fitting in with one aspect of Tiki, “that uneasy, jungle-y mystery, I have always enjoyed that aspect of it.”
That’s something he shares with his friend and fellow local Tiki artist Steven Lewis of Slewis Curious, whose latest mug design is the Corpse Flower. Modeled on the infamous gigantic stinking titan arum, it comes with a removable central component: a semi-decayed pilot, legs sticking upward, who met his foolish fate in the jungle. It’s the latest component of a whole narrative that he’s been setting out since his first mug, dubbed Drake’s Jungle Jam. This introduced his cast of characters on the search for treasure and finding more than they bargained for. The success of the mugs has also been more than Lewis expected, earning enough of a reputation to receive commissions, including from Galveston’s Pineapple Parlor Tiki speakeasy. With the Corpse Flower, word spread fast among collectors, leading to his fastest presale ever. “It’s been a little overwhelming,” he said. “I made it, I posted it, and then I immediately got a thousand likes.”
The elaborate design of the Corpse Flower speaks to an important aspect of Tiki mugs: Gorgeous as one may be, you’re gonna drink out of it. Irvin called it “usable art” but noted that there’s always “a balancing act” in any design. “If there are features that you want to put into it that reduce the usability, then you just have to find the sweet spot.”
The removable pilot is an extreme case study. When Lewis explained his idea to friends, “Everyone said, ‘You’re going to make that ceramic and not resin?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah,’ ‘You know that’s gonna break, right?’ ‘No, I’m going to make it thick enough, and I’m going to round the edges.’ So there was a lot of research and development.”
“I won’t make something just to make it,” Lewis added. “It’s got to have something to it.” He puts that down to his previous career as an animator, leading him to develop a story that’s summed up in a piece on non-ceramic art he’s created: a map of his fictional character Sir William Drake’s misadventures with his doomed band of explorers that sets out all their ports of call and final destinations, each to be given their own mug. Tying back to his storytelling roots, Lewis is now working on a Patreon that will give subscribers access to exclusive items as well as the story of the expedition in its members’ own words, “so you’ll get notes and postcards, and later on it will become lost journals.”
For Aloha Julie, that storytelling aspect goes right back to Donn Beach, an unreliable narrator who let his mutable biography spill into the story of his bar. “He really liked to make up things and create some entertainment and drama for everyone.”
Emphasizing the storytelling elements has allowed each artist to chart their own route through the stormy waters between appreciation and appropriation. Irvin noted that he deliberately avoids anything too clearly influenced by Polynesian culture. “It’s not the style of art I do anyway,” he said. Instead, he creates something “more about fun, escapism, and sometimes that blended horror piece too.” Similarly, Lewis’ story of foolhardy explorers and their misadventures may be rooted in the now-dated pulp fiction and movie serials of pith-helmeted explorers, but any ill that befalls them is clearly of their own doing.
Immersive visual storytelling is truly Tony Canepa’s trademark: not just his own tales to tell, but creating complete narratives for Tiki bars and restaurants across the country, from mugs to bar mats, painted Mai Tai glasses, swizzle sticks, posters, and even printed matchbooks that tie in to the story they want to tell. If the experience of a bar is truly immersive, he said, “you want to visit 20 times and every single time you’re soaking it all in.” His work has appeared as far afield as the Inside Passage Seattle and, of course, at Tiki Tatsu-ya. Every time you sip on a Port Light, with its signature mug of an octopus crawling over a barrel, or pick up their distinctive foldout menu, with its drinks laid out as a journey from daytime light flavors to nighttime spiciness, you’re touching Canepa’s creations. He picked up a copy of one of his latest works, a menu for Hidden Harbor in Pittsburgh. “This is my magnum opus as far as menus go,” he laughed. “At least until the next one.”
An award-winning advertising designer with clients including multiple AA and AAA baseball teams and several major breweries, Canepa’s obsession with Tiki began in childhood, when his button-down, suit-wearing father returned from a business trip to Hawaii with a colorful Aloha shirt. “Immediately on him coming home, I went, ‘That’s mine,’ and I started wearing it. I would wear it to school and I wore it under my cap and gown for graduation.” He had an equally life-changing experience when he moved to Las Vegas for college, just in time for the opening of Sin City’s first Tiki bar in decades, Taboo Cove at the Venetian. “That was where I was like, ‘Oh, I get all of this,’ and then I was all-in.”
Over the years, he’s seen the growth in both Tiki audiences and Tiki creatives, to the point now that there are “master artists creating these drinkable art vessels.” Canepa’s style is unabashedly retro with a bright, aquatic and pastel color palette, so each mug and menu “looks like a vintage piece, but when you look at it again it’s brand-new.”
Every artist has their own twist, with designs at every price point. Mass-produced mugs start at a few bucks, but the bigger, more ornate, limited-run pieces can run into the hundreds of dollars. Canepa said, “Anytime someone says, ‘Oh, I got one of your mugs or glasses,’ that’s the biggest compliment, because someone picked one up and said, ‘I’ve got to have that.’”
But what’s a Tiki mug if it’s empty? Still gorgeous, but it’s not fulfilling its true purpose. So while Tiki is filled with Pacific dreams, there’s one core element that hails from a completely different ocean.
The backbone of Tiki drinks is almost always Caribbean rum. Behind the bar at Tiki Tatsu-ya, Williams estimates that there are over 190 rums, some of them the only bottle of that particular expression in Texas, and each with its own subtly different flavor profile. And, as Donn Beach is purported to have said, whatever one rum can do, three rums can do better. Unlike most spirits, blending rums can layer the flavors, or meld to create new flavor combinations. “Rum is the most diverse spirit,” Blaschke said. “Neither one of these rums taste of strawberry on their own, but put them together and there’s notes of strawberry.”
But there’s more to a Tiki drink than just a jigger of rum and some fruit juice. As Hill noted from the comfort of the Moai Ice House, if someone doesn’t really know what they’re mixing, “it’s going to be overly sugary, you’re going to get a hangover. If they do it right, it’s a work of art.”
“It’s real juice, it’s decent rum,” said Roe. “That’s what it’s all about.”
For Williams at Tiki Tatsu-ya, a great Tiki drink is “escapism in a cup. It has got to be strong, and exotic in its own way. It can be exotic with just lemon and lime.”
This is where Irvin’s mugmaking background takes a back seat to his culinary training, and his experience running cocktail programs kicks in. What defines a Tiki cocktail “is a balance between acidity and spice that a traditional resort tropical drink will never even approach.” And, as the teetotaler Canepa noted, that flavor profile means Tiki mocktails that are a lot more than just a few fruit juices sloshed over some ice.
So where should the new traveler on the shores of Tiki start? For Irvin and his fellow mug artist, Lewis, the answer is simple: the classic Mai Tai, a mix of dark rum and light rum, orange curaçao, orgeat and simple syrups, and fresh lime, as first crafted by Trader Vic in 1944. Irvin called it a barometer beverage, while Lewis compared it to trying the chips and salsa at a new Tex-Mex restaurant. “If the chips and salsa are good, then usually the food’s going to be good.”
While Williams is a big fan of a Mai Tai, getting over those first-drink jitters is where having seasoned and passionate bar staff at Tiki Tatsu-ya matters. Because they can ask newcomers a simple question: What would you order if you weren’t here? “It’s going to look great, it’s going to taste great, but let’s get you something you’re going to be excited about drinking. Oh, OK, you like whiskey sours. You might like a daiquiri with a smoky rum in it. You don’t like Tiki drinks, you only like beer. OK, we’ve got you.”
From there, the world is your giant clam. Post-Mai Tai, Lewis leans toward either a Zombie, with its Pernod tinge, or the grapefruit kick of a Navy Grog, both classics dating back decades. Blaschke’s suggestion is that, anytime he visits a new bar, he’ll go for the house’s unique specialties. “I want to know what their signature is.”
If that’s still a little overwhelming, Lewis has crafted a novel solution, as suggested to him by Rich Furnari, co-owner of UnderTow in Phoenix, Arizona. The Chimp of Chance is a mug styled to look like an engraved ape skull, the eyes holding specially designed dice: roll ’em, and let the gods of good fortune pick your next drink for you. In a busy, stressful world, it’s one less decision to make.
While its roots may be American, Tiki has become truly global. There are Trader Vic’s on four continents and a thriving Tiki scene in Australia, while the Misfit Tiki Bar in the Norwegian city of Tromsø, 200 miles within the Arctic Circle, proudly proclaims itself as the world’s most northerly Tiki bar. At the Moai Ice House, Hill recounted a recent trip to Florianópolis, Brazil, where he found a Tiki bar. “They had surfboards with stuff written all over [them], they had some tikis, and the family was there, just playing music together. I walked in with my friends and said, ‘We’re hanging here with this family tonight.’”
As for why there’s such a resurgence right now, Lewis pointed to the double attractions of community and escapism as a major part of why Tiki is undergoing a resurgence right now. “It’s the people, and the excitement that everybody has. It keeps everybody young.”
For Karl Holbert, that escapism is the spirit of Tiki he saw as a younger man, drinking out of a coconut at Bali Hai in Lynnfield, Massachusetts. “It was all about the stuck-up Don Drapers of the 1950s who wore a suit every day to the office, coming home and every weekend they could put on a fun shirt and have people over for a barbecue with some umbrellas in a drink, and it was a luau. It felt exotic and it felt relaxed, and everything that work wasn’t.”
“Tiki’s great for forgetting the outside world,” Roe added. “Especially where I’m from, where there can be three feet of snow outside and you’d never know, sitting in a nice, warm Tiki bar, drinking the drinks.”
It’s also a scene with multiple points of entry and no gatekeepers. “If you have a classic lei and a Hawaiian shirt, you can join the party,” Canepa said. “Some people enter through the cocktail door, some people enter through the music door. Some people, it’s the clothing. Some people, it’s the home bar.”
As Aloha Julie concluded, “It’s not just the drinks. It’s not just the art. It’s everything, and everybody fits in.”
This article appears in July 24 • 2026.
