Martin & Rebecca Cate

The bar that made the revival serious.

Martin Cate grew up in Virginia obsessed with rum. He spent his twenties in the spirits industry, eventually building a reputation as one of the country’s foremost rum educators—he’d traveled the Caribbean repeatedly, knew the distilleries, knew the production methods, and could tell a continuous Coffey-still rhum from a pot-still Jamaican by smell. Rebecca Cate, his wife and business partner, had a background in operations and design. In 2009 they opened Smuggler’s Cove in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley—a three-level bar with a pirate-ship aesthetic, a 400-bottle rum collection organized by region and style, and a menu that treated the exotic-cocktail canon with the same rigor a serious whiskey bar treated its bourbon.

Smuggler’s Cove was not the first revival-era tiki bar. Trader Sam’s at the Disneyland Hotel, Forbidden Island in Alameda, and a handful of others predated it. But it was the bar that made the revival reputationally serious—the place that proved exotic cocktails could be approached with the same intellectual seriousness as classic cocktails or single-malt whisky. Within a few years it had won Tales of the Cocktail’s Best American Cocktail Bar award and put the city of San Francisco back on the global cocktail map.

The book

Smuggler’s Cove: Exotic Cocktails, Rum, and the Cult of Tiki (Ten Speed Press, 2016) is the most influential cocktail book of the modern era for this category. It does several things at once:

• Documents the Smuggler’s Cove menu and house recipes, many of which are now broadly served.
• Proposes a new rum classification system—based on production method (column-still vs. pot-still), region (Spanish vs. English vs. French Caribbean), and aging—that the industry has substantially adopted.
• Provides the most thorough modern guide to building a home rum bar, with specific bottle recommendations across price tiers.
• Codifies recipes for canonical cocktails (the Hotel Nacional Special, the Three Dots and a Dash, the Jet Pilot) in proportions that have become the modern standard.
• Argues a quietly insistent thesis: that tiki is the wrong name for the category, and exotic cocktails is more accurate and more respectful.

The terminology argument is the part most likely to be missed by casual readers. Martin Cate’s preferred word for the category is exotic cocktails. He uses tiki sparingly, mostly when referring to specific historical figures or to the aesthetic movement Sven Kirsten calls Polynesian Pop. The book’s subtitle includes the word tiki—the publisher insisted, for market reasons—but the body text argues against using it as a generic label. Forbidden Altar follows that lead.

The rum classification

Before Martin Cate, most American bars classified rum the way the Bacardi marketing department wanted them to: light, gold, dark, spiced. That system is useless. A Cuban-style aged column-still rum and a Jamaican pot-still rum are both technically dark, and they have nothing in common except that they’re both brown.

Cate’s classification, now widely adopted, organizes rum by:

• Production method Column-still (lighter, cleaner) vs. pot-still (heavier, ester-rich) vs. blended.
• Origin tradition Spanish (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Venezuela—light, sippable, often aged), English (Jamaica, Demerara, Barbados—heavier, more characterful), and French (Martinique, Guadeloupe—rhum agricole from fresh cane juice rather than molasses).
• Age Unaged, aged 1–3 years, aged 4–6 years, aged 7+ years.

This framework makes the recipe instructions in canonical exotic cocktails legible for the first time. When Donn Beach specifies “Jamaican rum and Puerto Rican rum” in the Zombie, the modern bartender knows what those words mean: an English-tradition pot-still rum (Smith & Cross) and a Spanish-tradition column-still rum (a Banks or Probitas), respectively. Before Cate’s framework, that knowledge was hard-won and uneven. After it, it’s the floor.

The wider work

Beyond Smuggler’s Cove, Martin is co-owner of Hale Pele in Portland (where he bought into Blair Reynolds’s bar in 2016), False Idol in San Diego (in partnership with the Consortium Holdings group), California Gold in San Rafael, and Max’s South Seas Hideaway in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Martin teaches the Rum University at Tales of the Cocktail and is a regular industry educator. Rebecca handles the design and operations across the family of bars.

What they made is bigger than any one bar: they made the modern category. Most exotic-cocktail bars opening in 2015 or later are downstream of Smuggler’s Cove, both aesthetically and intellectually. The book is in nearly every working bartender’s library.

To go deeper

• Book Smuggler’s Cove: Exotic Cocktails, Rum, and the Cult of Tiki by Martin and Rebecca Cate (2016). Essential.
• Bars Smuggler’s Cove at 650 Gough St., San Francisco. Hale Pele in Portland, OR. False Idol in San Diego. California Gold in San Rafael. Max’s South Seas Hideaway in Grand Rapids, MI.
• Society Smuggler’s Cove runs the Rumbustion Society, a long-form rum education program. Members work through a curated tasting list and earn rum-rated rank titles. It’s exactly as nerdy as it sounds, in the best way.