Why hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophe, where I took the reference I knew I wanted to make the most, and put it in the title in the hopes of stopping myself from indulging, like some kind of Victorian addict placing my craving in a cupboard and strapping myself to a chair to ride out the crashing pain of my need. I’m your Laudanum-Less Leader, Jon O’Guin, and today we’re talking “tiki culture”, and how it gave us Mai Tais, Crab Rangoon, and, weirdly, Chicken Livers. Well, no, it didn’t give us chicken livers. Chickens did that. And we more “took” them. Look, it’ll make sense in a bit.

A Man, A Plan, A National Coup

So, to understand Tiki culture, you gotta understand early 1900’s America. The nation is finally healing from the Civil War, now that Reconstruction is turning into Jim Crow and segregation is allowing us to wallpaper the vast rifts in our national and racial unity, and, totally unrelated, we just recently stolen a country.

That’s right baybeee, we’re starting a discussion of an outdated restaurant trend with our historical misdeeds! America: everything we used to love was rooted in injustice and tragedy!

If you didn’t know this chapter of the history, then let me break it down very simply: in the 1870’s and 1880’s, Hawaii was its own Kingdom, that traded with America, but was only more connected with us than other countries because other than other Polynesian or Oceanic islands, we were the physically closest nation. During this time, there was also a lot of political turmoil: the founding house of the Kingdom of Hawaii, Kamehameha (yes, like Dragonball, they got the name from this) ended without an heir in the 1870’s, and the elections for a new King or Queen of the country got a little heated. (Yes, they held elections for King. It was a relatively new idea: if the royal family died out, the island’s version of Congress would just elect a new one.)  Specifically, what happened was the popular and expected candidate, a cousin of the previous king, won the election to become the next king, and then 8 months later, caught tuberculosis and died, meaning they had to have ANOTHER election. During this election, the dude he had just beaten ran against one of the late king’s personal friends, who was also the wife of one of the last Kamehamehas, and who said she was personally ASKED to run by the late king, which several people directly verified…but the former king’s advisors came out and said “We have no proof he said that, so she might be lying.” So it was “last of the Kamehamehas, chosen by the late king” versus “Guy we already didn’t elect.” The people had a definite favorite in that race…and the Congress had a definite different favorite. So when Congress voted, and picked “the other guy”, there were some…what do we call them now? “Tourists” breached the Congress and assaulted several legislators.

Is there just a look for people who try to overthrow governments? Like, those are Jan 6 eyes and hair.

Man, I am NOT simplifying this enough. Okay, sketches now: due to Hawaii not having any army at the time, they had to ask the US to help stop the riots. The new king had plans to maybe make like, “the United Islands of the Pacific”, where Samoa, the Marianas, all of the Polynesian islands would treat Hawaii as their Washington DC. America and the European powers who were colonizing those areas for financial gain said “what a sweet idea, and if you bring it up again, I’ll fucking shoot you.” A bunch of white businessmen start messing with the politics of the island, the king is spending a FUCKTON, and not particularly wisely. Like, he gets convinced to make ONE license for someone to sell opium in Hawaii, because a wealthy Asian businessman wants to, and directly bribes him. The king doesn’t agree with selling opium, but he likes getting money to pay off that fuckton of spending, so he makes the license…and a different Asian businessman goes “oh, cool, if that’s on the table, I have a much better offer to Congress than the other dude.” Second guy wins the license, first guy sues the king, and this causes a crisis of legitimacy, debt, scandal, and oh hey, look at all these white guys with guns!

Hawaii gets a mini-coup (sorry, “surge of tourists”) the new guys make the king write a new constitution that makes the king a figurehead, and makes it much harder for native HAWAIIANS to vote in HAWAIIAN elections, and suddenly a relatively small group of white businessmen are basically in charge. That king dies, new queen shows up, and after a couple years in charge, goes “Hey, I’m going to re-rewrite the Constitution so I’m not a figurehead anymore”, and the white dudes who now control the country call America, so that a unit of US marines shows up to help them overthrow the Queen and create a “republic”, that 5 years later becomes a territory of the US, because of course we didn’t send a unit of fucking marines 2,500 miles just to be nice.

"Yeah, I sent all those soldiers across an ocean because I really care about the Constitution of a different country.”

A Coup Dropped in the Ocean produces Ripples Across the Sea

All of that meant that, for much of the late 1880’s and 90’s, Hawaii was constantly in American’s newspapers. Never, like, a BIG story, as we had “far more important things” happening, but people were hearing about these Polynesian islands, and growing interested in them. The classic depictions of them were of idyllic places where the sun always shone, the people were friendly, beautiful, and supposedly didn’t understand the concept of shirts or bras, and the food was fresh and vivid. Then suddenly we OWNED them, and within about 10 years, there was a surge in media about the islands: people are writing plays, and books, and 10 years after that, they’re making movies about beautiful island girls and strong white adventurers. One of them, 1932’s Birds of Paradise, has an extended sequence where the lead actress playfully swims with the male lead while nude, which caused quite the acclaim: Orson Wellles proclaimed the lead actress the “highest erotic ideal” with her performance. (Which may have been a little biased, as Welles was 17 when the film came out.) Technically, the original King Kong kind of falls into this category as well.  

Only for like, 5 minutes, between the ship arriving at Skull Island, and before all the monkey business begins. Oh, sorry, “Ape action.”

Overall, there’s a growing appetite for information about, and ways to connect with, the Islands of the Pacific. So when Prohibition ends, a gentleman named Ernest Raymond Beaumont-Ganti opens a restaurant in Hollywood. Ernest claims to have been a rum-runner during Prohibition, and to have visited many of these islands, on which he is basing his restaurant, Don’s Beachcomber, made to look like how Hollywood movies showed off the Polynesian islands. To keep with his Rum-runner backstory, the menu includes a variety of rum-based drinks, exotic food, and generally sought to give people what they THOUGHT it would be like to go to Hawaii or Fiji, without the long travel times and cost. Within a few years, the restaurant changed names to “Don the Beachcomber”, and Ernest Raymond Beaumont-Ganti became “Donn Beach”. This was the beginning of “tiki culture”. Kind of. “Tiki culture” was a name given to the phenomenon later, as a way to summarize the surge of restaurants, movies, and other components that first gained steam in the thirties.

The name itself is…messy. “Tiki” is, in Polynesian myth, the first man, equivalent to Adam in Christianity. And Polynesian culture used to refer to ancient stone or wood carvings of men as “tiki”, either to relate them to their makers (“products of the first man”) or to suggest what they depicted. Like how when talking about things in a museum, you might shorten the name of a piece to just what it depicts: “Past the David, take a right.”

They’re not as classically handsome, but at least their dicks aren’t hanging out.

So replica tiki were a common component of decorations for these locations, hence the name “tiki culture”…but also because “tiki” is just an obviously foreign word, it was used a lot in these early bars to handwave away why things they made look different. The bamboo torches they used to decorate? Those are “tiki torches”. The drinks were “tiki punches”.

And that kind of epitomized the early tiki culture: it was White Americans kind of hand-waving and making shit up about what the Polynesian islands were like. Both Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic’s claim to have invented the Mai Tai, the drink being named for the Tahitian word for “good/excellent”, maita’i. The drink has no real basis in Tahitian culture, but it’s a good drink, so let’s find a word that means “good” in one of the islands, and slap it on there. In a similar but less clear arc, a dish called ‘rumaki’ appeared at Don the Beachcomber in the early 40s, and became a mainstay of Hawaiian/Polynesian themed menus or dinner parties, made of water chestnuts and chicken livers wrapped in bacon, marinated in sweetened soy sauce, and then baked or fried. The thing about that is: “rumaki” is a made-up word. The closest anyone can guess is that it’s based off of harumaki, which is Japanese for “Spring Roll”.

Yes, I definitely see the resemblance.

Now, as we mentioned Monday, this wasn’t entirely malicious: without the Internet, it’s very easy for early attempts at informal research to run into problems. Like, maybe they learned the dish from some Hawaiian chef, who only himself partially understood Japanese, and thought “rumaki” was Japanese for “roll”, rather than just “maki”. Or maybe it was a joke: what if he made it with rooster livers, and called it “Roo-maki”, and he just didn’t explain the bit, or the guy forgot. Or, water chestnuts are mikuri in Japanese. “Mikuri Maki” (Water-chestnut roll) could easily get misheard/misremembered as “kurimaki/rumaki”.  One or two people lying, or too tired/irritated/bored to clarify a comment, or even just a mistake or failed translation, and one guy walks away thinking he knows what he’s doing, when he’s very wrong.

Been There, Ate That

So all of this is happening in the 30’s and 40’s, and then explodes in the 50’s and 60’s. Because a LOT of American soldiers just ended up serving in the Pacific Theatre, getting to see the beauty of Hawaii and pacific islands, trying weird new foods, etc, and end up thinking  “man, I think I’d like that a lot more if I wasn’t afraid of being shot/bombed”. Further, in 1959, Hawaii is formally admitted as a state, meaning now it’s even MORE American to go there, especially since it’s the NEWEST state! (Suck it, Alaska! You had 8 months of being the baby, and no one wanted to go because you’re too cold.)

This is where Elvis stars in 3 Hawaiian movies, Disneyland opens the “Tiki Room”, and it becomes trendy and cool to vacation in Hawaii. Plane tickets are a mere $100, after all. ($922 in today’s money), so if you’re a middle class white guy, you might be making $8,000 a year. Wife and two kids, that’s $4k just to get there. So Hawaii is a BIG splash of cash, the kind of thing you save for a couple YEARS to swing. Meanwhile, Hawaii moves from the big screen to the small: In the 60’s, we see shows like Hawaiian Eye, McHale’s Navy, Gilligan’s Island, and many sitcoms of the 70’s through the 90’s era sprang to have their casts have at least one “Hawaiian episode”.

Even Full House went! Which means, technically, for a while, it was just “Dog House”.

Eventually, the kids of the 70’s and 80’s thought of it as something uncool their parents cared about, and it putters out, though it’s had a couple revivals now and again. But this is the bed from which Crab Rangoon sprang, as did the Mai Tai, the Zombie, the Dole Whip of Disney, and probably a lot of acceptance for various southeast Asian dishes and ingredients from the 70’s and 80’s was rooted in people hearing of similar things at fancy tiki clubs or Hawaiian barbecues.  It’s a mess, sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a great place for good things to grow.

MONDAY: WE’RE VISITED BY OUR BARON OF BREAKFAST, WHO MAKES DINNER FOR A CHANGE.

THURSDAY: DUNNO. LET ME FINISH THIS PINA COLADA, AND I’LL SEE IF I CAN BRING MYSELF TO CARE.