The annual gatherings worth planning around—Tiki Oasis (San Diego), the Hukilau (Fort Lauderdale), Tiki Caliente (Palm Springs), TikiCon and the rest of the calendar of conventions, festivals, and educational events where the community shows up in person.
Sacred Grounds Experiences Worth
Experiences Worth
The Pilgrimage
Bars where the craft is taken seriously. Conventions where the people who care show up. Destinations where the tradition is woven into the place itself. The full pilgrimage list, sorted.
Golden Age Survivors
Tonga Room & Hurricane Bar
San Francisco, California
The 1945 grand dame of American tiki bars. The Fairmont Hotel basement was a swimming pool until Mel Melvin redesigned it as a Polynesian fantasy with thatched roofs, a real lagoon, and indoor rain showers timed to the band’s breaks. Eight decades later, it still does what it set out to do.
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Mai-Kai Restaurant
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Bob and Jack Thornton opened Mai-Kai in Fort Lauderdale in 1956 as an East Coast answer to Don the Beachcomber. Mariano Licudine, who had worked for Donn Beach, brought the recipe book and the technique. Six decades later it is still here—through hurricanes, ownership changes, and a 2020 roof collapse that took four years to repair. The most theatrical surviving tiki bar in the country.
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Tiki-Ti
Los Angeles, California
Ray Buhen worked for Donn Beach for twenty-some years, learned every recipe in the book, and opened his own tiny twelve-seat bar in 1961 in a Sunset Boulevard storefront. Three generations of the Buhen family later, it’s still operating, still pouring 90+ recipes (most of them original or recovered), and still drawing both old regulars and pilgrims who flew in to see it. The Bukowski-favorite of tiki bars.
Read →Revival-Era Flagships
Smuggler’s Cove
San Francisco, California
Opened by Martin and Rebecca Cate in 2009, Smuggler’s Cove is the bar that taught the modern craft-cocktail world that exotic cocktails could be both serious and fun. Three floors of pirate-shipwreck-meets-Polynesian-Pop interior, the deepest rum selection in any American bar, a 500-drink-deep passport program, and the cocktail-program-as-pedagogy approach that has trained dozens of the genre’s most important contemporary bartenders.
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Latitude 29
New Orleans, Louisiana
Jeff Berry’s New Orleans bar, opened 2014. The only working tiki bar owned by the genre’s most important contemporary historian. The drinks are documented to a level no other bar can match—Berry’s books, his recipe research, and his decades of interviews with surviving mid-century bartenders all feed directly into the cocktail program. The proof-of-concept bar for everything in Sippin’ Safari.
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Three Dots and a Dash
Chicago, Illinois
Paul McGee opened Three Dots and a Dash in 2013 in a Chicago alleyway basement, taking the unmarked-entrance secret-bar pattern and applying it to tiki for the first time. A decade later it’s still the Midwest’s most important exotic-cocktail destination—and McGee himself is one of the modern revival’s most accomplished menu builders, with Lost Lake and other concepts to his credit.
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Hale Pele
Chris’ Pick Portland, Oregon
Blair Reynolds’ Portland, Oregon bar—the Pacific Northwest’s anchor for the modern exotic-cocktail revival. The integrated counterpart to his BG Reynolds Syrups operation: he built the ingredients, then built the bar that pours them properly. Volcano erupts hourly; mugs are museum-quality; the Jet Pilot is the recommended first order.
Read →Modern
Historic
Events
Destinations
Places where the tiki tradition is woven into the location itself, not just a single bar—Palm Springs, Disney’s Polynesian Resort, immersive hotels, and tropical districts worth a dedicated trip.