Jeff “Beachbum” Berry is the man who trailed lost recipes from the most important tiki restaurants and bars as Trader Vic’s and Don the Beachcomber and decoded them. His signature cocktail recipes have been printed in publications around the world and can be tasted at his restaurant in New Orleans, Beachbum Berry’s Latitude 29, which is a must to everybody who loves tiki cocktails and all kind of drinks as well.
By LORENA MARAZZI
Drinks by Marazzi
Charismatic bartender, cocktail expert, “Beachbum” Berry has always been fascinated by tiki culture. His passion made him find most secret and lost recipes, so he became a tiki master. He released six books (from 1998 to 2014) sharing his discoveries and he is working on the last one. His restaurant Latitude 29 is not only a model tiki bar, it is also a great craft cocktail place to visit and enjoy it.
When did you open Latitude 29?
In November 2014, and in no time at all, we got in a lot of newspapers and magazines because there hadn’t been a proper tiki bar in New Orleans since the 1970s.
When did you become a passionate about tiki cocktails?
Although I’ve been working with tiki drinks for twenty-five years, mostly writing books, this is my first bar. I’ve always loved it, since I was a little boy. My parents would take me to places like this and although I was too young to drink, I just loved the decor. When I got old enough to drink and I started going to those places and found out that were all disappeared because the trend was finally over. So I realized if I wanted to keep drinking this drinks, which were very good because they were really the only ones that we now called “craft cocktails”, I had to make them myself. That’s when I discovered that there were no written recipes.
Tell me more about it.
The tiki trails started in 1934 with the first tiki bar Don the Beachcomber in Hollywood and it was so successful that there were copycats immediately, like a hundred and fifty across the country. This trend lasted from Prohibition all the way to the 70s. Forty years, it’s the longest drink trend in US history. The drinks were enormously popular, they looked very theatrical and they were also very good that’s what drove them over the years.
Then, when the trend finally collapsed in the 70s, all the places that were doing drinks properly couldn’t stay in business because it was too expensive. The only places which stayed in business were those which offered cheap drinks, and tiki got then its bad reputation.
In addition, good recipes have never been written down. Bartenders who knew how to make this complicated drinks had valuable trade information. They used to work for restaurants but never leave their recipe books. That was the only time in industry that I know that bartenders did have this kind of power.
Restaurant owners did the same. Don the Beachcomber never published any of his recipes to avoid being copied. He put them in code, so he had bottles known as “Don Mixes” and his bartenders didn’t know what the bottles contained. That worked so well that nobody knew that his drinks were good because he never published them.
How did you find the recipes?
I tried to find anything by going to libraries, to used bookstores and so on. But I was lucky enough to be living in Los Angeles in the 1990s when all these guys with their little secret books were still alive. I gradually got some recipes out of them. Later on, some bartenders past away and theirs wives and sons contacted me. When finally I’ve got the recipes, they were in code so I had to find people who knew what the code meant, which took me years.
I wrote my first book in 1998 and the recipes got circulated. But during the time I was writing the books tiki was becoming to be cool again. The books, I’ve been told, played some part of that because craft cocktail bars, which served the recipes, became gradually tiki bars. Then, my wife Annene told me: “Everybody else uses quite well your recipes, why don’t you open a place?” So here we are.
Beachbum Berry’s Latitude 29 in New Orleans, LA.
In Latitude 29, besides classic tiki cocktails, do you have your signature drinks?
Yes, because by the time we got this place opened, there were already great world-class tiki bars serving those drinks, out of my books, so I really should try to do something different. And you have to move forward, you can’t just live in the past. Almost every really good tiki bar -like Lost lake in Chicago and others- has original recipes as well, and they keep coming up with new ones, as we also do, just keep people interested in.
Are people more into the new cocktails or are they still asking for the classic ones?
Most of them don’t know what the classics are. People come in and always ask “What should I drink?” and I say, “What do you usually drink?” There are some people who love tiki so we have about a hundred classic tiki drinks out of the menu for them. But if somebody prefers gin or tequila, we have something for them too.
You are open to any kind of drinks…
Yes. For a cocktail bar you can’t serve only your own because a lot of people may don’t like rum and prefer white spirits or whiskey. We are in a hotel so it’s a hotel bar, we are in the French Quarter so we are a tourist bar, but we are also a tiki bar, so we have three different kinds of people coming in. Some people come here for Margaritas or Dirty Martinis and I happily make them ones.
That’s great because some bars are very closed to their kind of mixology.
I don’t believe in that. This is supposed to be a place for people to have fun not to feel like you are in church. A lot of craft cocktail bars are very academic and they tell all about the drinks. We don’t tell any about the drinks unless you want to know. If you want, we’ll tell you all about Navy Grog. If you want to be alone, it’s okay. And if you want a Cosmopolitan, we’ll make you one!
Some people think that there is a couple of drinks like Cosmopolitan that are not cool enough.
There is no such thing. The Cosmopolitan it’s a very sophisticated drink. It was invented in the 90’s and it is a very good balanced drink. Cocktails don’t get popular because they are terrible; they get popular because they are good.
Coming back to tiki drinks. Is it difficult to get all the ingredients?
Fortunately, since New Orleans is a port city, we don’t have much trouble. We use a lot of fruit purees like passion fruit and guava and we make our own syrups. In tiki bars, you have to do everything as a craft cocktail bar plus other stuff. There are so many things involved. A lot of people wanted to work for us, but when they found it how much work was, they changed their minds.
“Don the Beachcomber was the first person who blended more than one rum to make a base spirit more complex and interesting.”
As every recipe has a lot of ingredients, it might be difficult to get the balance, right?
Yes. A normal craft cocktail has three or five ingredients. Tiki drinks have eight to twelve, so having these things in balance in the mouth is not easy.
And you have a lot of rums…
One thing that made Don the Beachcomber kind of a genius is that he was the first person who blended more than one rum in the same drink to make a base spirit more complex and interesting that any bottle could have. For example, the Navy Grog has three rums: a dark Jamaican, which is heavy and sweet, a light Cuban or Puerto Rico rum and the Demarara, which is really smoky. So, the combination makes something better.
In Argentina, it is very difficult to have all these variety of bottles.
I know that. I travel around a lot and I’ve been talking to people from Buenos Aires, among other cities, and it is very hard for them because they can’t get the ingredients they need. I was in Argentina three years ago and there were two tiki bars. One in Buenos Aires and the other in Mar del Plata.
I’ve been in Mar del Plata Tiki Bar, they managed doing things properly.
Yes, I meet the people who run it.
“People now talk about cocktails the way we used to talk about films, theater, art or music.”
Have you been to Hawaii?
Yes. It is funny that there were no tiki bars in Hawaii until the trend went so big on the mainland that they had to start building them for the tourists who expected them.
I know a guy from California who went to Hawaii to make the tiki decor, an irony, and he said it was the easiest thing in the world because the place is so beautiful that all you have to do is to put windows. On the opposite, most famous tiki bars of the 40’s or 50’s in the United States had no windows at all because the whole idea was living the fantasy of being on the beach.
I think this kind of environment takes you to the beach.
My friend Robert Hess, who is a cocktail historian, says “you try to create a mini vacation”. So that is the idea.
What is your opinion about this worldwide cocktail trend nowadays?
It is a really interesting time. I never thought this would happen. People now talk about cocktails the way we used to talk about films, theater, art or music. It is amazing how passionate people are about this. I don’t see that passion in any of the arts now. And this is a craft not an art but still there is something people are getting excited about. We see a lot of young people today who are getting into bartending who probably would have tried to be filmmakers, musicians or painters twenty years ago.
Well, I used to write about cinema ten years ago and now I am very fond of this too…
That is funny because I used to be a film critic and I was in the movie business for many years. I studied film in the 70’s in college. At that time it was a revolutionary new art form. It was really fascinating but now is all corporate, terrible stuff. So now we are doing this… (Laughter).
Navy Grog, Latitude 29 and Espresso Bongo.
Drinks we have tasted:
• Latitude 29, signature cocktail. Eight-year Demerara rum, passion fruit purée, own Madagascar vanilla syrup, orange, pineapple and lemon.
• Navy Grog, a Beachcomber classic from the 1940’s and Frank Sinatra’s favorite tiki drink. A bracing blend of Jamaican and Demerara rums, perfumed with allspice and laced with lime and grapefruit.
• Espresso Bongo. Gold Jamaican rum bestirred by coffee syrup, pineapple, passion fruit, orange and lime.
Beachbum Berry’s Latitude 29
321 N. Peters Street
New Orleans, Louisiana, EEUU.
Phone: +1 (504) 609-3811
latitude29nola.com
facebook.com/beachbumberryslatitude29
twitter.com/Latitude29_NOLA