Slowing down at the Tiki Ti

I’m only now recovering from the Tales of the Cocktail five-day boozefest. The world around me is slowly coming back into focus, and I’m realizing that there are actually not two of everything. (For a brief account that deftly captures the event's flavor, see Jason Wilson's story in the Washington Post.)

Sadly, Tales of the Cocktail is not the sort of event that allows long periods of quiet reflection between seminars and sessions. Nor does it allow time to update blogs, at least not after the first toast, which occurs in the middle of the first day and signals that this annual semi-scholarly debauch has begun.

Tales is more like a vortex you get sucked into than an event you witness. When Stephen Remsberg, the noted rum collector, suggests in passing that he might have an interesting 1917 rum that would bear sampling, you don’t say, no, um, I’ve got to write up an upaid blog entry. When you walk into the Carousel Bar at the Monteleone and a rum producer who has samples of a product not yet launched invites you to sample, you don't say no. When the opportunity arises to have cocktails with Dave Wondrich and Ted Haigh and Dale Degroff, you don’t come up with feeble excuses and slip off to do what needs to be done.

Because of further catastrophic scheduling failures on my part, I had to fly out of New Orleans Sunday morning to give a talk on rum history in Pemaquid, Maine. I didn’t even get to hear Chris Macmillan on mint juleps or Ted Breaux on absinthe. And right after that talk I had to hop on a jet to Los Angeles and to research a story due soon.

But after a couple days here in California, life has finally started to resume a more normal pace. Actually, that happened at a precise moment at a precise place: at the Tiki Ti, one of the last of the great tiki drink bars.

Many of us had been talking about the Tiki Ti during Tales. As the estimable tiki researcher Jeff “Beachbum” Berry noted at one of our two panels, the Tiki Ti is just one of three tiki bars nationwide where you can get an authentic Don the Beachcomber-style exotic drink. The owner, Mike Buhen, is the son of the late Ray Buhen, who trained with the original Don the Beachcomber staff back in the day. Mike and his wife and sons now run this tiny bar (capacity of less than 50, with seats for about half) in a part of L.A. where Paris Hilton does not hang out. (Although Drew Barrymore was here a couple of weeks ago — she had to wait in line like everyone else.)

I wandered in yesterday right after it opened at 6 p.m. — once capacity is reached you might have to wait for an hour to get in. I found an immensely agreeable seat at the bar, and ordered up a Ray’s Mistake, one of the bar’s most popular drinks. (It’s unclear what’s in it — even Jeff Berry hasn’t figured it out.) It’s tart and tasty, and slices through the dry California heat with amazing swiftness. And it served as an anchor thrown abruptly overboard. Life started to slow.

Then it took on an even more relaxed tempo with a Space Pilot — a drink not unlike the Zombie, with passion-fruit and several rums, including 151. I fell into talking with the guy next to me, a man named Bill from Chino with a handlebar mustache and a Hawaiian shirt.

This was his first time here. (It was my second.) Bill was a wine drinker and brand new to rum drinks, but making up for lost time. He’d been given a copy of Jeff’s new book, Sippin’ Safari, and had seen the light. He bought Jeff’s three earlier books, then set off on a daylong Beachbum Berry pilgrimage. He drove around L.A. and bought $102 worth of Berry-prescribed rums for his own exotics, then cooled his heels until the Tiki Ti opened. He began his Ti quest with a Mai Tai and a Zombie. We compared notes.

Drinking and chatting about drinking and drinking some more. It was like Tales of the Cocktail all over again, but in extremely slow motion.

Which is just how it should be.