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Totally Tiki

NYC nutty over kitsch cocktail culture

By STEFANIE COHEN

Last Updated: 11:33 AM, June 21, 2010

Posted: 5:16 PM, June 19, 2010

 
The new Lower East Side Tiki bar Painkiller serves sublime Zombies, custard-like piña coladas, and mai tais that transport you to a Tahitian beach. Like any good tropical cocktail, they go down smooth — perhaps too smooth.

Painkiller co-owners Giuseppe Gonzalez and Richard Boccato conducted fastidious research into all things Tiki before opening their own rum room, striving to bring the authentic Tiki cocktail experience to thirsty New Yorkers.

Lots of New Yorkers are freaky for Tiki. Another Tiki-themed spot, The Hurricane Club, is slated to open at 26th Street and Park Avenue soon.

At Tiki bar Painkiller on the Lower East Side, Yael Vengroff presents a Cradle of Life cocktail, which combines ice, flame and a sweet confluence of liquor and syrup.
On a recent night at Painkiller, local Tikiphiles gathered in their finest vintage luau dresses and Hawaiian shirts. They sipped on rum swizzles, Cradles of Life and Jet Pilots as they discussed their obsession with the kitschy trend that’s making a comeback.

Nell Mellon, owner of Otto’s Shrunken Head in the East Village, was there, along with Joe and Nicole Desmond, who have stocked the home Tiki bar in their Greenwich Village apartment with more than 130 different rums. “Our place is littered with booze,” says Nicole.

David Lenoue, who also tends a Tiki bar in his Jersey City apartment, explains his interest: “I just love the architecture and the art and the music. It includes the car culture and the surfing culture and mid-century modern all in one.”

Architect and Tiki lover Jack Fetterman listed his favorite Tiki music, new and old, including Martin Denny and the Waitiki 7.

“It’s a re-creation of a tropical dream and an easier life,” said filmmaker Duda Leite. “It’s escapism.”

Plus, there are the drinks, says Gonzalez. “The beautiful thing about Tiki drinks is that you put so many elements together and think, ‘There’s no way this will work,’ and then you taste it and it’s like heaven.”

The Painkiller mixologists broke with Tiki tradition by sharing on the bar’s Web site the intricate recipes for their drinks, down to the proper stemware and garnishes.

Tiki drink recipes are traditionally guarded more closely than the Shroud of Turin. “The cocktail recipes used to be top-secret because they were worth so much money to the people who made them,” says Jeff Berry, Tiki expert and author of the book “Beachbum Berry Remixed.”

“They were coded with numbers and letters because rival bar owners would poach the bartenders so they could cash in on the Tiki craze,” he says.

Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt, the inventor of the Tiki bar, opened Hollywood watering hole Don the Beachcomber in 1934, offering rum drinks reminiscent of those he’d sipped on his travels through the tropics. The bar was a huge hit, bringing in the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Howard Hughes, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

But other club owners wanted a piece of the coconut. They offered Gantt’s bartenders money to stir up a Sumatra Kula or a Cobra’s Fang across town, Berry says. Gantt smartened up, peeling the labels off his liquor bottles and coding them and his various spiced syrups with numbers. The bartenders themselves didn’t even know what they were mixing. They kept the recipes in little black books undecipherable to all.

It took Berry, a former reporter, almost three years to divine the secret recipe for the Zombie cocktail — a mix of three different rums, Angostura bitters, lime, grapefruit juice and about six other ingredients.

But it was worth it. His first sip was transcendent.

“Tasting it was like riding the rapids. It took me on a journey through eight or nine different flavors,” he says happily. “That’s the mark of a truly great tropical drink. As it melts, the drink changes in character from beginning to end.”

Gonzalez says he and Boccato, both pioneers of the modern couture cocktail movement, agonized over their ingredients. They make their own curaçao, for instance, plus their own orgeat (an almond syrup) and crème of coconut.

“It takes a day and a half to make it, putting whole coconuts through the blender and cutting the mixture with sugar — but it’s a labor of love,” Gonzalez says.

He added that their decision to publicize all their recipes was a conscious one.

“We think it’s a genre that people will be reapproaching, and the only way it will be great is if people share their information,” he said.

stefanie.cohen@nypost.com


Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/lifestyle/food/totally_tiki_mFZh2MOrfEQ6s7jLn5fGsO#ixzz0rW2z8ZC6
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