Between the months of May and September, Mr. Baseball and I are going to Vegas, San Diego, Chicago and San Francisco. Most of those vacations were, surprise, baseball-inspired—we’re going to see the Cubs lose! I mean win. Sorry, honey 🙂 —but since I picked up Tiki Road Trip: A Guide to Tiki Culture in North America
So I was excited when I came across the baseball equivalent at work—Roadside Baseball: The Locations of America’s Baseball Landmarks
Maybe Mr. Baseball will start a blog, too!
With all the dirty, sorta scary dive bars in LA to choose from, what is the Tiki-Ti doing on a list of The Best Dive Bars in America?
Rob Willey in Details magazine describes the venerable tiki bar thusly:
“Forget Trader Vic’s: A rum-soaked night at this violin shop turned tiki lounge is as close as you’ll get to the tropical-drinks craze that swept Hollywood from the thirties through the seventies. Marlon Brando drank here; Burt Reynolds too; but when the Polynesian fad went bust, founder Ray Buhen managed to keep rolling. Today the menu includes something like 90 concoctions—including Ray’s Mistake, a mixture of rum, passion fruit, and ‘super-secret flavor.'”
However, Willey seems to disqualify the Tiki-Ti from the dubious honor of being named a “best dive bar” in the very first line of his introduction: “Fancy, handcrafted cocktails have their place—and it sure as hell isn’t any of these watering holes.” Sure, I guess they’re not “fancy,” but there’s no doubt that they’re handcrafted!
Of course, half the fun of reading any kind of “best” list is in disagreeing with it.
The other day, Mr. Baseball asked me why I liked tiki so much all of a sudden, and I didn’t really have an answer for him. Because it feels like I’ve always had a passion for this kind of kitschy stuff, but it had nowhere to manifest itself. I think James A. Teitelbaum captured this feeling in his introduction to Tiki Road Trip: A Guide to Tiki Culture in North America:
“For children growing up in California, Tiki style has always been a part of everyday life. Even with the amount of Tiki we have lost in the past 30 years, Tiki still permeates California.”
So, you might say it’s in my So-Cal soul. Add to that a penchant for retro style, a slightly obsessive personality and my fairly recent discovery of Tiki Central and Tiki Farm, and my affinity has taken root and grown like a palm tree on steroids. I’m very much a noob, but I think that just makes discovering all things tiki that much more new and exciting.
The Tiki Chick 