The Revival
The era of cocktail history from roughly 1995 to the present, during which a small number of bartenders, historians, and bar operators rebuilt the exotic-cocktail tradition from a near-extinction point in the 1980s. The era that produced this site.
The Revival is the modern era of the cocktail world generally, and of the exotic-cocktail tradition specifically. Exact start date is debated—1987 (when Dale DeGroff took over the Rainbow Room program), 1995 (when Sven Kirsten started documenting the surviving tiki bars), 1998 (when Jeff Berry published Beachbum Berry’s Grog Log), or 2000 (when Kirsten published The Book of Tiki) are all reasonable benchmarks—but the broad consensus is that the Revival period runs from roughly 1995 to the present.
What had to be revived: by 1990, most of the original tiki bars had closed, most of the canonical recipes had been lost or degraded, and the broader exotic-cocktail vocabulary had been reduced to the resort-bar Daiquiri-and-Piña-Colada level of seriousness. The cocktail revival as a whole was reviving classic cocktails (Manhattan, Old Fashioned, Sidecar), and the exotic-cocktail wing of that revival had to do additional work: track down former Don the Beachcomber bartenders, recover lost recipe books, decode the numbered mixes, and rebuild the technique vocabulary from scratch.
The Revival’s key figures
- Dale DeGroff—Rainbow Room program, training program for the next generation, The Craft of the Cocktail (2002).
- Jeff Berry—Donn Beach catalog reconstruction; six foundational books including Sippin’ Safari (2007); Latitude 29 in New Orleans.
- Sven Kirsten—cultural-history framework via The Book of Tiki (2000) and subsequent books; the Polynesian Pop terminology.
- Martin and Rebecca Cate—Smuggler’s Cove in San Francisco (2009); Smuggler’s Cove: Exotic Cocktails, Rum, and the Cult of Tiki (2016) which codified the modern rum classification and proportions.
- Audrey Saunders—Pegu Club (2005–2020); training program; argument for serious rum in elegant cocktails.
- Robert Hess—DrinkBoy.com; Museum of the American Cocktail co-founder; digital and institutional infrastructure.
And dozens of others: Brother Cleve, Brian Miller, Paul McGee, Joaquín Simó, Phil Ward, Giuseppe Gonzalez, each contributing specific pieces of the larger project.
The Revival is still in progress. New bars open, new books appear, new generations of bartenders pass through the training programs the early revivalists built. Forbidden Altar is a Revival-era project, working from Revival-era sources and trying to add a small amount of additional documentation to the record.