The 1 Hotel Hanalei Bay, situated at the foot of the Napali coastline, can lay claim to one of the most stunning views on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, or perhaps anywhere in Hawaii, or perhaps even the world.
But the dozen or so guests in the resort’s open-air
1 Kitchen restaurant in August had their backs to the view, more intent on the bottles of rum, curacao, orgeat, juices — and was that a bottle of Pernod? — being unpacked by a very energetic, tall surfer dude with a backward ball cap.
The dude, Johnny Quinn, is a bartender at the 1 Hotel’s Kai Maika’i bar, and each Monday he teaches a cocktail-building class called The Perfect Mai Tai to curious vacationers.
“The most celebrated tiki cocktail in the world, and for good reason,” is how the 1 Hotel Hanalei Bay’s website explained the class.
I hadn’t come to Hawaii with the sole intent of seeking the perfect mai tai — I was here for a long-delayed vacation and to see the 1 Hotel Hanalei Bay, which opened in March (its previous incarnation was a St. Regis) and resort updates on Oahu.
But the 1 Hotel Hanalei Bay wasn’t wrong about the celebration. Like a painkiller in the British Virgin Islands, a dark ’n’ stormy in Bermuda, a Negroni in Italy or a Guinness in Ireland, the mai tai leads nearly every Hawaiian resort’s bar menu and is a necessary part of luaus, sunset cruises and any place where a hammock joins a palm tree.
I myself had been on Kauai for less than 24 hours before coming into contact with my first mai tais at the open bar at the Smith Family Garden Luau in Kapaa. After that, I became fascinated by the way the drink was woven into the environment of different Hawaiian resorts and a part of today’s Hawaiian tourism.
Like many of Hawaii’s modern traditions, the mai tai is not native to the state. It originated in California, then migrated to the Islands via a steamship company, where it cemented its position as the ali’i, the chief, of the tiki world.
A crash course in mai tais
The Perfect Mai Tai class at the 1 Hotel Hanalei Bay is listed on the resort’s giant chalkboard of daily events, and reservations are required. Quinn has been leading the class since the 1 opened. Alexis Eaton, the director of marketing, public relations and programming for the resort, said all of its mixology classes are “so popular.”
“We’re trying to figure out how to manage it because we have so much demand from our guests wanting to participate and loving it,” she said.
As Quinn bopped around, searching for ingredients and mixing, shaking and straining with gusto, he took us back to midcentury tiki culture, the birth of the drink and the feud between two famous cocktailers, “Trader Vic” Bergeron and Donn Beach, the proprietor of Don the Beachcomber, over who invented the mai tai.
According to legend, the first mai tai was mixed by Bergeron at his famous Trader Vic’s restaurant in Oakland, Calif., in 1944, and it included J. Wray Nephew rum, lime, orange curacao, rock candy syrup and orgeat, with a mint garnish. A story that I heard on the Islands, reproduced on the Trader Vic’s website and the cocktail menu at the Halekulani in Waikiki, says that Bergeron gave the drink to friends of his visiting from Tahiti, who tasted the drink and pronounced it “mai tai roa ae,” meaning, “the best” or “out of this world.” Needless to say, the name stuck.
Beach, who also laid claim to being the mai tai’s originator, used grapefruit, falernum and Pernod in his version, according to online recipes. Neither is anything like the pineapple-with-a-cherry-on-top and rum-float version that most people associate with mai tais.
In all, Quinn mixed four mai tai recipes: A reproduction of the original Trader Vic drink; one of Don the Beachcomber’s; one inspired by the later, fruitier Royal Hawaiian mai tai; and a “modern” version of his own. He poured a shot glass-size taste for each of us on each round and shook up four full-size versions with the proper presentation and garnish, which he urged guests to take.
Now, I’m generally an imbiber who doesn’t like sweet drinks, so I haven’t counted the mai tai as a favorite. But the class perfectly changed my perspective on what a mai tai is — and what it can be.
“The Trader Vic mai tai is a lime punch with rum,” Quinn told me later. “It’s lime and citrus forward, it’s got a few different rums, and that lime-citrus balance along with the orgeat brings out some of the caramel and darker flavors in the rums.
“The second drink is almost like a cool, mixology drink, kind of like the last word cocktail … where you put in ingredients that make no sense and they come out as something that’s completely different. That one’s really, really cool,” he continued.
The third one, “the Royal Hawaiian, that’s the tropical one. That’s where that whole lineage comes from.”
Last but not least was Quinn’s own interpretation of the cocktail, which uses KoHana agricole rum from Oahu and macadamia-nut orgeat to give it “100% Hawaii-born ingredients.” He called it “modern” and an “homage” to the Trader Vic version.
The mai tai is so malleable, the class is even a learning experience for the teacher. Execs from wine companies and Ko Hana Distillers have dropped in to audit the class or provide feedback; other experts, he said, will just “chime in.” A guest even mailed Quinn a hardcover book on mai tais after recommending it during class. “It’s on my coffee table at home,” he said.
Quinn modestly did not call his concoction the “perfect” mai tai. As I wandered away from the 1 Kitchen with a pineapple-shaped glass of mai tai in my hand, and into the adults-only pool, I wondered: Is there such a thing?
Just in this resort alone, there are different mai tais on at least three different restaurant menus, which speaks to the sheer ubiquity of the drink and multiple ways to tweak and present it.
At the Kai Maika’i bar, according to the 1’s website, there’s the Mai Tai-Roa Ae, made with Kuleana Nanea rum, sweet vermouth, passion fruit, pineapple, citrus, orgeat and a KoHana Kokoleka rum float. At the flagship restaurant, Welina Terrace, it’s the Kauai’i-tai. At the Sandbox restaurant adjacent to the main pools, it’s simply called a mai tai.
