Spirit of Aloha | Features | September/October 2006

The The Sweet and Sour Saga of the Mai Tai
By Tom Chapman

Tales of the cocktail that launched a thousand bars

It was at the original Don the Beachcomber restaurant in Waik¯ık¯ı … that a very special “Original Beachcomber Rum Concoction,” first served in his bar in Hollywood in 1954, was reintroduced to the public … The Beachcomber’s pupil, Vic Bergeron, a.k.a. Trader Vic, for years claimed to be the originator of the mixture, but Trader Vic eventually admitted that the Beachcomber had invented it.
—Hawai‘i Tropical Rum Drinks & Cuisine
By Arnold Bitner and Phoebe Bea

Anybody who says I didn’t create the Mai Tai is a dirty rotten stinker.
—Victor Jules “Trader Vic” Bergeron


OUTSIDE IS the abstract beach landscape of blistering sun and sand, the steady raw rhythms of the surf. Nearby, the day is vivid with the sound of light laughter, a steady hum and buzz of good cheer, clink of ice cubes, swaying palms, sweet, sensuous fragrance of blossoms, a lilt of canned Hawaiian music. Late afternoon at the Mai Tai Bar at the fabled Royal Hawaiian Hotel, Waikīkī, Honolulu—close your eyes and imagine Dorothy Lamour in a grass skirt. Sitting at a table with Scott Botelho, the bar’s manager, veteran of the cocktail wars, I am staring at a tiny green paper parasol, obviously handmade and painted, festooned with red flowers, which has been carefully positioned on the edge of my Mai Tai, this tropical rum drink the reason of our meeting. Something bothers me. Who can imagine a Mai Tai without a paper parasol? And so I pose a troubling question to Scott: “What are you going to do when the Chinese stop making these little umbrellas?”

He pauses and gives the feeling that he is formulating a purposeful response. “Amazing, aren’t they?” he says. “I think ours come from Taiwan. They’re quite intricate, you can make them go up and down. We buy them by the hundreds of thousands. On any given day I wouldn’t be surprised if 25,000 Mai Tais are made in Waikīkī alone. Bar after bar after bar. In the evenings, if you wander around, you can see hundreds of these little parasols in the streets. One by one they’re caught in the wind and blown every which way. I know how much the Japanese treasure them. The girls put them in their hair as decorations.

LATE IN 2003, a professional mixologist named Jamin Margeretich, then working at a place in Kona on the Big Island called Korner Pocket, got me involved in the saga of the Mai Tai when he won The Search for Hawai‘i’s Greatest Bacardi Mai Tai. His concoction, called an Easter Island Mai Tai, outlasted some 50 other entries and was judged superior based on points awarded for taste, appearance and presentation. Margeretich’s winning cocktail was served in the face of a Pacific chief carved from a pineapple. His advice for making a great Mai Tai was “to drink a lot of them first.”

In my account of this event, I wrote in what I considered to be an innocuous aside that “nobody knows for sure who created the first Mai Tai.” I should have added that, regarding its provenance, there is much mystery and almost no agreement. Two weeks later, an e-mail arrived from a public relations operative representing Trader Vic’s, the legendary purveyor of Polynesian-themed food, drinks and faux fantasy. “We were very surprised,” said the message, more or less, “that you are misinformed about the origins of the Mai Tai, since it is well known, and has been well documented for many years, that this classic drink was invented by Vic Bergeron, the founder of Trader Vic’s.” And so forth. On the whole, it was a very friendly, but forthright message, and it concluded by inviting me, the next time I was in the Bay Area, which is where Trader Vic’s is headquartered, to drop by for an authentic and, thus, by virtue of its authenticity, a historic Mai Tai, made the way it ought to be, had been for many years and still was, thank you, at Trader Vic’s.

A FEW WEEKS LATER, a book was delivered to my desk that added twizzle and swizzle to the fire. It was a collection of history, recipes and photographs compiled by a gentleman named Arnold Bitner and his wife, Phoebe Beach. Beach happened to be the third wife of Don the Beachcomber, a former bootlegger, who was born Ernest Raymond Beaumont-Gant in the little Texas town of Mexia. He had changed his name to Donn Beach, lived a peripatetic, robust, glamorous life around the world, and, after years of selling copious quantities of rum, died in Honolulu in 1989. Friends and insiders have long claimed that he invented hundreds of different—and often successful—rum-based drinks. His classic restaurant in Waikīkī, Don the Beachcomber’s, was arguably the last great tiki hangout in the world—with an emphasis on the word great. Inside the book were directions for making colorful drinks like a Mystery Gardenia, Cobra’s Fang and Marama Rum Punch, but what was particularly fascinating to me were the four pages devoted to what was labeled “the original Mai Tai.” From reading this section, it was easy to conclude that, as far as Arnold Bitner and Phoebe Beach were concerned, everything Trader Vic knew about the Mai Tai when he invented it, he had once learned at the bare feet of his arch-competitor and sometimes friend, Don the Beachcomber.

LET US note at the outset that I am an amateur of rum. My first and only real encounter with a killer rum drink was in the late 1980s in the rugged northern Queensland town of Cairns, Australia, at a place called the Jabiru Cabaret Restaurant. This sprawling, gaudy joint had become a tourist sensation by offering nightly a unique format of traditional and contemporary singing, dancing and didgeridoo playing, mixed with Aboriginal song and dance, the wailing of crocodile mating sounds and indescribably garish mixed drinks with names like Didgeridoo Blues, Killer Koala and the one I was offered, a Ngoomugarra Nightmare. When it arrived at my table, adorned with a pineapple chunk and a tiny flag of an unknown country, the Ngoomugarra Nightmare turned out to be an almost blinding mixture of mango liqueur, two kinds of Bacardi rum, banana liqueur, peach schnapps, pineapple juice and milk. My host, a transplanted Englishman, placed this cream-colored liquid in front of me and said, “It’s guaranteed to make your boat wobble.” Hoisting his drink to toast me—I recall his being a Fruit Bat Fizz—he said, “As we say in Australia, mate, up yours.”

IT IS AN ODDITY of modern mixology—or perhaps geography—that, although the Mai Tai has long historic associations with Hawai‘i, the drink has little to do with Hawai‘i. Almost certainly, the first Mai Tai was created and named in California, from rums made in Jamaica, and garnished with syrup made in France and Curaçao liqueur made in Holland, and then brought to the Islands, sometime in the early 1950s, by Trader Vic or Don the Beachcomber, or, probably, both. (Or else it was invented by a bandleader at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel named Harry Owens, but that, as they say, is another story.)

I would not dispute anything that’s been said about the Mai Tai,” says Scott Botelho, a mixology diplomat.

While the numbers of Mai Tais made and drunk each year are on an epic scale in Hawai‘i alone, nobody can quite seem to pinpoint the vague association of the drink with tropical living, tiny umbrellas made in China, sunshine, a Bali Hai existence and pineapple chunks. Writing in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in 2001, reporter Scott Vogel noted that “everyone, it seems, wants to take credit for the Mai Tai, especially Mainlanders, who frequently describe it in terms usually reserved for a religious experience.”

Sadly, not everyone thinks of the Mai Tai in religious terms. The cocktail raises hackles wherever it goes. James Waller, writing in Drinkology: The Art and Science of the Cocktail, says the Mai Tai “is about as Polynesian as a plastic lei, inflatable palm trees or Hawaiian Punch (whose taste it inadvertently mimics). It’s the kind of drink—decorated with paper parasols and other kitschy paraphernalia—that loud, loudly dressed, tourist-types used to guzzle too many of. The Mai Tai is, in a word, awful.”

Author and food critic Jay Jacobs once called the Mai Tai “a tarted-up cocktail served to egregious rubes in Sino-Polynesian restaurants.” But the dagger in the Mai Tai’s heart may have been struck by the Wild America iconoclast Joe Bob Briggs, who described the one served to him at the ill-fated Windows of the World bar in New York City as “a combination of cough syrup, pancake batter and the automatic transmission fluid from a 1973 Oldsmobile Tornado.” Of course, only egregious rubes go to New York City to drink Mai Tais.

IN DECEMBER 1933, as the first story is told, Don the Beachcomber, whose rule No. 1 was “enjoy life and spend every penny I make,” rented a 13-by-30-foot space in a tailor shop that had gone broke, just off Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, and here set up a bar with stools and five small tables that accommodated 30 people. He decorated the place with South Pacific paraphernalia—old fishing nets, parts of ships, seafaring bric-a-brac—and hung out a handmade driftwood sign that said DON BEACHCOMBER. Studio heads hung out there with their girlfriends. Every major star showed up. It was the place to go, and its reputation spread far and wide, all the way up to Northern California, where Vic Bergeron had a bar called Hinky Dinks. Hinky Dinks had Eskimo artifacts on the walls, snowshoes and skins and things like that. In one version, Bergeron travels down to Los Angeles, has a look at Don the Beachcomber’s place, returns and tears all the snowshoes out of his bar, puts up all this tropical stuff and opens his first Trader Vic’s.

Naturally, this story is disputed by Bergeron’s grandson, Peter Seely, who, in an interview in 1998, claimed that Vic’s grandmother gave him money “somewhere around 1934 or 1936” to travel to Florida and Cuba, from where he returned with fish nets and blowfish to display in his restaurant. Arnold Bitner, in his unpublished memoir of Don the Beachcomber, writes that Bergeron “purchased over $8,000 worth of authentic Polynesian items of décor from the Beachcomber to start up his operation. The Beachcomber, who also loaned out several of his employees in order for the first Trader Vic Restaurant to be opened on time, always complimented Vic Bergeron as his greatest imitator.” Trader Vic, in his biography, wrote about his visit to Los Angeles, “We went to a place called South Seas ... and even visited Don the Beachcomber in Hollywood. In fact, I even bought some stuff from Don the Beachcomber.”

“Donn and Vic were neither good friends nor casual friends,” Phoebe Beach told me in 2005. “They were business competitors. One would imitate the other, but there was always mutual respect. Donn was very much a gentleman and he was very comfortable in his own shoes—he knew exactly who he was. They would have been friendly rivals. But not necessarily close friends. That probably sums it up.”

Whatever the true story, nobody seems to doubt that Vic Bergeron was inspired by Beach. And nobody questions that Bergeron turned the inspiration into a worldwide empire.

ACCORDING to menus that still exist, Don the Beachcomber started to create rum drinks as early as 1934, with the Depression raging and prohibition officially repealed. Mostly made with 30-year-old rum, these drinks included the Sumatra Kula, the 14-ounce Zombie, the Beachcomber’s Gold, Missionary’s Downfall, Cuban Daiquiri and Don’s Pearl. According to Arnold Bitner, who is in possession of Don the Beachcomber’s huge collection of journals and memorabilia, the “first” Mai Tai was called the Original Beachcomber Rum Concoction. It was reputedly first made in 1933 in Hollywood, then reintroduced to the public in Waikīkī after Donn returned to Honolulu in 1946 (his first visit to Hawai‘i was, according to his journals, in 1925, and he returned in 1927). The original Don the Beachcomber restaurant in Waikīkī opened in 1947. His first Mai Tai here was not called a “Mai Tai,” but it was certainly a rum-based drink.

Trader Vic arrived in Hawai‘i in 1953, courtesy of the Matson Steamship Lines, which owned, at the time, the Royal Hawaiian, Moana and Surfrider hotels, and at whose bars Victor Bergeron was contracted to “formalize” drinks for the customers. Later, in 1954, the Mai Tai was introduced by Trader Vic to bar service on American President Lines vessels sailing to Hawai‘i.

Scott Botelho says, “All of the literature of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel is very careful not to say that the Mai Tai was invented here. However, the Mai Tai was redefined here.”


Why does Trader Vic go to such great lengths to keep the Mai Tai legend alive? In my opinion, it’s because it’s the most famous drink ever made. There are ships, nightclubs, everything named after the Mai Tai. That’s the only reason to keep it alive.

Arnold Bitner

We talked about creating a drink that would be the finest drink we could make, using the finest ingredients we could find. —Victor Bergeron Frankly Speaking, Trader Vic’s Own Story (Doubleday, 1973)

Arnold Bitne ng, Trader Vic’s Own Story
(Doubleday, 1973)



— THE OFT-TOLD STORY of how Trader Vic invented the Mai Tai goes like this: He was at the service bar in his Oakland restaurant in 1944. He took down a bottle of 17-year-old rum. It was J. Wray Nephew from Jamaica, “surprisingly golden in color, medium bodied, but with the rich pungent flavor particular to the Jamaican blends.” He took a fresh lime, added some orange Curaçao from Holland, a dash of rock candy syrup and a dollop of French orgeat, for its subtle almond flavor. A generous amount of shaved ice and vigorous shaking by hand produced the marriage he was after. He stuck in a branch of fresh mint and gave two of them to Ham and Carrie Child, friends from Tahiti, who happened to be with him that night. Carrie took one sip and said, “Mai tai—roa ae.” In Tahitian these words mean, “out of this world, the best.” He named the drink “Mai Tai.”

One perplexing thing about this story—and one senses a feverishly powerful public relations hand in it all—is that, if Bergeron invented the Mai Tai in 1944 in Oakland, he was so modest about it that he failed to include this distinctive drink in his 1946 book Trader Vic’s Book of Food & Drink (his first book, published by Doubleday and long out of print, but still around if you know the right people). Many rum recipes, including the fabled Zombie, are included here, as are many stories about rums and where they are made. But not a single recipe comes close to describing a Mai Tai, so maybe Trader Vic didn’t invent the Mai Tai in 1944, although perhaps—let’s be generous here—he was working on it. (A theory advanced by the mixology scholar Robert Hess is that “to enshroud these drinks in mystery, their recipes were closely guarded secrets. In many cases even the bartenders didn’t know the recipes for them. This is why Trader Vic himself does not reveal the recipe for his most famous drink in any of his books.”)

What also raises skepticism and some eyebrows about ancient Mai Tai lore are the old menus from the original restaurants. The hospitable Trader Vic’s people in San Francisco, when I visited their restaurant in 2005, gave me handsome facsimiles of two of these menus. One is from Hinky Dinks in Oakland, the “original” Trader Vic’s, and the other is from the first Trader Vic’s restaurant in Honolulu, which opened in the early 1950s, but later passed into the hands of persons not affiliated with the original Trader Vic’s group (Trader Vic’s, the corporation, sold the name for $9,000), and subsequently was disowned by Trader Vic himself. The Hinky Dinks menu lists 35 rums and 37 rum-based drinks, but the Mai Tai isn’t one of them. The Honolulu restaurant menu lists more than 100 different rums and rum-based drinks, but no Mai Tai. What should the curious onlooker make of all this?

The Trader Vic’s menu from the Honolulu restaurant does include a love song of praise to “rum, the spirit of the ages,” and a tribute of sorts to Don the Beachcomber that salutes “Don the Beachcomber as the outstanding rum connoisseur of our country.”

That said, there is also an old drinks menu from Don the Beachcomber’s Honolulu restaurant reproduced in the book by Bitner and Beach, which, among 30 delectable drinks, many of them rum-based, also does not include the Mai Tai. A 1941 menu from Don the Beachcomber’s Hollywood restaurant does list the Mai Tai, available for $1.75. According to Bitner in his memoir, Donn Beach “became the serious inventor of 71 exotic tropical rum concoctions, including the Mai Tai, originally called the Mai Tai Swizzle.” And so the question is begged: Not just who created the Mai Tai, but who, finally, named it, and when was it named?

ABOUT THE NAMING QUESTION, Scott Botelho of the Mai Tai Bar has a new twist on the old theory. He told me, “You think of the word Mai Tai and the fact that in Tahitian it does translate into ‘out of this world, the best.’ But in the Hawaiian language, the word maika‘i also translates into ‘the finest.’ The words sound so alike that I’m sure that the Hawaiian bartenders, especially at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, would probably have associated Mai Tai with maika‘i. Is there a chance the Mai Tai was named in Hawai‘i? No, it was almost certainly named somewhere in California. But, as we know, the Hawaiians often adapted many names and gave them a Hawaiian twist, a little local flavor and color, and whether or not the bar crowds erupted in cheers of ‘Mai Tai’ or ‘maika‘i’ when the drink was served we may never know.”

TRUE TO HIS WORD, when I showed up in San Francisco, Hans Richter, president and chief executive officer of Trader Vic’s Inc., bought me a Mai Tai. In fact, he bought me two Mai Tais: one made from the Second Adjusted Mai Tai Formula, the other made from the popular Trader Vic’s Mai Tai Mix. He even watched closely while his bartender, Jim Shoemake, carefully followed the recipes. After that, we sat down to lunch: Bongo Bongo soup, kung pao chicken with bamboo shoots, steamed Chilean sea bass with ginger and soy, duck breast with Malagasy green peppercorn sauce, crab Rangoon—all great Polynesian/Asian/Eurasian dishes, impeccably prepared, presented and served, and all, as even Trader Vic’s, the corporation, admits, created in the United States.

I asked Richter, an unassuming, affable gentleman, who was hired by Vic Bergeron in 1969, why he works so hard to keep the legend of the Mai Tai alive. He said it was very important, because the Mai Tai is still the most popular drink at Trader Vic’s, and, for that matter, throughout the tropics. “It is not a matter of whether Vic created the story afterwards or out of nowhere. It is important to know that we’re still probably the only bar in the world where everything is fresh, natural and measured. Trader Vic’s bartenders still get up to six months’ training, so they know what they’re doing. With all the different flavors and ingredients of a good Mai Tai, it’s a tough assignment to keep up with the legend. And, by the way, please make a note that we never put paper umbrellas in our drinks, although everybody always claimed we did.

What kind of a man was Vic Bergeron? I asked. “He was rough,” said Richter, “but he had a genuine interest in many things, to the end of his life. He knew how to live in the world. He had a great interest in food, and he liked to take other people’s food and reinvent it. To tell the truth, Trader Vic was a man who could take other people’s ideas, and make them better.”

Then our lunch ended and a plate of fortune cookies arrived. My fortune said, “You think that it is a secret, but it never has been one.

A great Mai Tai starts with a good frame of mind. Here at the Mai Tai Bar we have a good old Hawaiian-style atmosphere, which is part of a good frame of mind.
—Scott Botelho,
Mai Tai Bar

The Mai Tai is a classic cocktail whose original recipe has unfortunately been randomized through a clumsy hand-me-down process, until such a point that many bartenders don’t know (or often don’t even care) as to how it is properly made.

—Robert Hess,
mixology historian

IT IS SAFE TO SAY that more is known about how to make a good Mai Tai than about who actually created and named it. Serious mixologists would also rather talk about making a Mai Tai than about the controversy of its origins.

Dale DeGroff, America’s foremost mixologist, widely known as the King of Cocktails, told me that he doesn’t have a big issue with who did or did not invent the Mai Tai. When he’s in Honolulu on his regular tours of duty at the Lewers Lounge at the Halekūlani Hotel, he gives rum seminars and teaches locals and guests how to make a perfect Mai Tai.

“To me,” says DeGroff, “it’s the simplicity of the Mai Tai that makes it great. It’s a pretty simple, straightforward drink, but it’s a difficult drink for a bartender to make well. I like them because they’re not too sweet, and they’re strong. And, with that vanda orchid fitting over the glass, they’re beautiful. Donn Beach’s Mai Tai was a complicated drink. Vic’s Mai Tai is simple and elegant, and it highlights the rum in a very nice way. It’s a little bit of Curaçao and a lot of very old rum, and I like that idea. In my observation, there were a lot of drinks that Donn did better than his Mai Tai. The Zombie, for instance, is a brilliant drink, absolutely brilliant. I think it far surpasses his Mai Tai.”

“A good Mai Tai has to be icy and cold,” says Scott Botelho, as he sips one at the Mai Tai Bar, where they make about 400 Mai Tais a day. “It has to be refreshing, it has to be a little bit sweet and a little bit sour, and it has to have enough rum so that your toes start to tingle, but not enough so that you can only have one.”

Hans Richter of Trader Vic’s believes, like all serious mixologists, that a good Mai Tai starts with a good rum. Rum for Mai Tais has drastically changed over the years. “The original recipe called for a rum so rare we’d have to charge an arm and a leg today—if we could even find it,” he says. “Our own rum today is a blend, called Trader Vic’s Royal Amber Rum, that comes very close to the original, and still makes the ultimate Mai Tai. “ He reminds me that the quality of the ice is also important. “If you took the ice out, you’d think you were drinking medicine.

ONE LOVELY SATURDAY MORNING I coaxed Dale DeGroff to join Arnold Bitner and Phoebe Beach for breakfast at the Halekūlani to talk about Mai Tai history. I was not foolish enough to believe we would settle the mystery of the Mai Tai over omelettes. “Donn Beach created the Mai Tai to be an after-dinner drink,” said Phoebe. “It was to be sipped slowly. It was not to be chug-a-lugged, like you see so often today, those awful buck-fifty drinks you get everywhere.” “Donn really did start the whole tiki thing, there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind about that,” said Dale. “But with all respect to Donn, I do like Trader Vic’s Mai Tai recipe better. And that’s the one we use at the Halekūlani."

The Mai Tai wasn’t Donn’s favorite drink,” said Arnold. “And I would imagine that it was Trader Vic who made it famous. They did advertise that it was the first Mai Tai made in Hawai‘i, and that’s probably true.”

“Trader Vic was much more interested in expanding his chain of restaurants,” said Dale. “Donn Beach was more interested in the creative process, in other things. And that’s the way they were.”

Then Phoebe said, “It’s impossible to truly go back to the original tiki times. It’s impossible to do another Don the Beachcomber, you couldn’t duplicate the place or the character. The spirit is gone, the soul is gone. Donn and Vic were pioneers. They exposed the masses to an experience of the South Seas, it was faraway, it was exotic. Now they have to go to the Polynesian Cultural Center, where there is no alcohol.”

I said, “Then it emerges that Donn invented something like the Mai Tai and Trader Vic improved it and made it famous?

Dale said, “I think that’s very clear and true.”

And Phoebe added, “So they both need credit over the one drink.”

IN THE LONG RUN, the Mai Tai is like the history of the world, the way people take things and improve them, or change them, or adapt them, says Scott Botelho. “The thing about the people in the bar business is that we all borrow from everybody else. It’s not to say that this is a Mai Tai, and that isn’t a Mai Tai, but if you want to dig down into the genealogy of it, who invented it and all, I think it was a collaboration. Donn Beach first had that idea of the rum concoction, sort of an after-dinner drink, a little on the sweet side, and then Vic Bergeron took it and made it into a real shaking cocktail. Then the plot thickens, and we’ll never know the rest.

“But here’s what I believe: The Mai Tai is a joint venture, isn’t it? The drink is a little bit of 17-year-old rum, a dash of history, some culture thrown in for good measure. Then we add that gorgeous little umbrella, a little bit of hyperbole, a taste of Maui pineapple and an orchid from the Big Island. There you have it. Mai Tai. Maika‘i. Cheers.”

TOM CHAPMAN is the editor of SPIRIT OF ALOHA.

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