Mai Kai, at last

An assignment brought me to Fort Lauderdale yesterday, and so last night after checking in I did the only reasonable thing: I made a beeline for the Mai Kai, generally considered to be the greatest of the extant tiki bars. And it's one I've never visited.

Built in 1956, this cluster of Polynesian buildings probably stood out impressively along Route 1 north of Fort Lauderdale at one point, but large modern buildings have cropped up all around and it's now actually sort of hidden away. But the place was mobbed – the bar was packed, and a line of cars backed on to the highway waiting for valet service.

I didn't have reservations for the floor show, and didn't really want to sit alone at a table anyway – fire eaters just aren't the same without someone to marvel with – so I made for the sunken galleon bar just to the left of the main entrance. It's a superb interior, dim, close, and intimate, with a faux rainstorm (or is that ocean water?) running down most windows, faux nautical detailing everywhere and a great waterfall to watch through the windows at the end. The servers behind the bar were all women and all were wearing tiny two-piece floral outfits (think: Hooters goes Hawaiian). These showed off their tattoos to good effect – a nice tribal touch of authenticity.

The folks on my side of the bar were mostly local business types who I'd guess were very active in their fraternities and sororities in college. This included a woman in a sober pin-striped suit to my left, from whom I didn't not expect to hear the phrase "projective vomiting" when she described a previous Mai Kai visit, yet there you have it.

The drink menu is as lavish and colorful as it is uninformative. I guess the secrecy thing is still alive when it comes to recipes. They do allow that there's mint in the julep, and pineapple in the pina passion, but the other descriptions don't give one much to go on (e.g.: planter's punch is "the traditional favorite of the East India traders when calling at Jamaican ports.") On the plus side, I was there during happy hour (5 to 7 p.m.) when it's two for one drinks.

I asked the server about the Maru-Amu, which she admitted had light and dark rums, grapefruit and lime juices, and was tart. That sounded good, so I went with that.

And it was good. I was also pleased that my second one didn't taste exactly like the first, suggesting that they may not have great vats of premade mixes in the back, where the drinks are concocted out of view of tiki spies. It cost $12.50 (inlcuding the happy hour bonus drink) and included one tiki mug to bring home.

Also, the guy next to me ordered a vodka and tonic (not a wholly adventurous choice for a tiki bar), but I was pleased to see that they brought out a large shot of vodka, a little carafe of bubbly tonic, and a glass of ice, allowing the customer to decide how much he wanted to cut his spirit. Too many bars don't get it, and still approach drinks as if the mixer were the main ingredient, which is then slightly spiked with the spirit. Stop that. Now.

As for the food, I ordered the pu-pu platter from the bar menu. It consisted of interestingly shaped McNuggets that tasted pretty much identical, but this could be slightly altered by dipping them into one of three sauces. Or more than one sauce, if you were trying to get some flavor into each bite.

Someday I'll come back for the full floor show and dinner, and will perhaps have better things to report on the food. But until then, I can say this: go for the drinks, and go for the aloha.

Mai Kai drink menu

Debunking the Bodeguita myth?

One of the more common exchanges I had when writing "And a Bottle of Rum" was with folks who told me they'd been to Havana and drank at Hemingway's favorite bar. "Oh, El Floridita," I'd say. "Um, no," they'd reply. "Bodeguita del Medio, where he drank his mojitos."

When I started researching the book, I thought I'd find all sorts of stuff on Hemingway's time at Bodeguita, since his affection for the place is commonly cited in travel guides and articles in the popular press. But it didn't happen. I found lots of anecdotes on Papa's time at El Floridita, but the only real evidence of his time at Bodeguita was the famous scrawl above the bar: "My mojitos at La Bodeguita. My daiquiris at El Floridita." Signed: Ernest Hemingway.

As much as I wanted to play up Bodeguita's Hemingway connection, I ended up only mentioning it in passing because it just didn't seem wholly true. (I probably did give the inscription more credence than I should have in an article I wrote for The Atlantic in October 2005, but still didn't buy into the whole thing.) For starters, Bodeguita opened in 1942; Hemingway had set up shop in the city a decade earlier, and his hangouts seemed pretty well established early on. And he moved outside of the city in 1939, three years before the Bodeguita even opened. But proving a negative is tricky – what's the evidence that he didn't drink here? – and so I ended up skirting the issue in the book.

Now comes some evidence of a negative.

Today's Wall Street Journal has a fine article by Joel Millman about the Hemingway connection with the bar – or lack of it. Among other intriguing details, he cites Delio Valdés, an 85-year-old Miami exile and former Havana nightclub promoter who says that Hemingway was never there.

The most intriguing part of the article (available online only to subscribers) is this:

Adding another dig, Mr. Valdés says it wasn't even Hemingway who wrote the mojito-daiquiri line. The author, he says, was a noted Havana bon vivant, Fernando Campoamor, who, according to Mr. Valdés, wrote the line while visiting Mr. Hemingway's home, where he persuaded the author, who was drunk, to sign it.

Not exactly the debate over Shakespeare's authorship, but intriguing in that it discredits the sole evidence of Hemingway's patronage.

At least I believe it's the sole evidence. So to reopen things: I'd be curious if anyone else has come up with references, passing or otherwise, to Hemingway's having even been inside Bodeguita del Medio.