The archaeologist.
Jeff Berry grew up in Los Angeles in the 1960s and ’70s, a kid in a city where Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic’s were still operating and tropical-cocktail culture was already past its peak. He worked as a screenwriter through the 1980s and ’90s and developed, alongside that career, an obsession with the disappearing world of mid-century American tiki bars. He began traveling to surviving tiki rooms, interviewing aging bartenders, and collecting fragments of recipe books from estate sales and retiring staff. By the late 1990s he had enough material to publish a book.
Beachbum Berry’s Grog Log came out in 1998. It was the first serious attempt to reconstruct the lost mid-century exotic-cocktail catalog from primary sources. Five more books followed: Intoxica! (2002), Sippin’ Safari (2007), Beachbum Berry Remixed (2009), Beachbum Berry’s Potions of the Caribbean (2013), and Beachbum Berry’s Sippin’ Safari: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (2017). Together they constitute the canonical reference shelf for the genre. Nearly every modern bartender working in exotic cocktails has at least three of these books on their shelf. Most have all of them.
The method
Berry’s approach was forensic. He treated lost cocktails the way an archaeologist treats lost cities: cross-reference everything, distrust late accounts, prefer primary sources, document the chain of evidence. For the Donn Beach catalog specifically, this meant:
- Tracking down former Don the Beachcomber bartenders and interviewing them, often more than once. Memories diverge; corroboration matters.
- Recovering fragments of recipe books from estate sales and from descendants of former staff. Don’s bartenders weren’t supposed to keep written recipes, but some did.
- Cross-referencing post-war menus from different Don the Beachcomber locations to triangulate ingredient changes.
- Decoding the numbered mixes (Mix 1, Mix 4, Don’s Mix) by inference from menu language, surviving staff memory, and reverse-engineering from finished cocktails.
- Resisting the temptation to fill in gaps with plausible guesses. When the evidence was incomplete, he said so.
The result is a body of reconstructions that the cocktail community has, by and large, accepted as authoritative. There’s always room for argument at the margins—was it six drops of Pernod or eight?—but the overall framework Berry recovered is what serious bars now serve.
Latitude 29
In 2014, Berry and his wife Annene Kaye opened Latitude 29 in New Orleans’s French Quarter. It is, to a degree few of his contemporaries’ bars are, an extension of his research: the menu is built directly out of his reconstructions, the ingredient sourcing is fanatical, the bartenders are trained on the historical context as much as the technique. It’s also a working New Orleans bar, not a museum, and the modern originals on the menu—drinks Berry has created in the 2010s rather than recovered from the 1940s—are part of the offering.
Latitude 29 sits in the same lineage as Smuggler’s Cove, Hale Pele, and Three Dots and a Dash Chicago: bars that treat the genre as a continuous tradition worth advancing, not a kitsch to revive.
What he changed
Jeff Berry didn’t invent the tiki revival on his own. Sven Kirsten’s The Book of Tiki (2000) reframed the aesthetic as a serious subject of study. Martin and Rebecca Cate’s Smuggler’s Cove (opened 2009) demonstrated the modern bar version. Brother Cleve and a handful of Boston-area bartenders kept the cocktails alive through the lean years. But Berry’s books are the proximate cause of the revival’s recipes existing in a recoverable form. Without him, the Donn Beach catalog would be lost the way Duncan Nicol’s Pisco Punch is mostly lost—pieced together from memory and speculation, never authoritative.
He’s also the rare cocktail historian who is also a working bartender. The Latitude 29 menu is the proof that the reconstructions taste right—not just plausible on paper but actually serveable, actually good. Every modern menu that sources from his books is, in some sense, eating off his plate.
To go deeper
- Books (in chronological order, all worth owning) Beachbum Berry’s Grog Log (1998), Intoxica! (2002), Sippin’ Safari (2007), Beachbum Berry Remixed (2009), Potions of the Caribbean (2013).
- Bar Latitude 29 at 321 N. Peters St. in New Orleans’s French Quarter. Open daily; reservations recommended for groups. Mai Tai is exemplary; the menu rotates seasonally.
- App Beachbum Berry’s Total Tiki is a paid iOS app with several hundred reconstructed recipes—a useful pocket reference even if you own the books.