parasol drinks

[7/4]

November 28, 2007

Cracking the Code of the Zombie

By STEVEN KURUTZ, NYTimes

THE culinary world seems to inspire a certain kind of dedicated, if slightly obsessive, connoisseurship. Think of Elizabeth Tashjian, who for 30 years ran the Nut Museum out of her house in Old Lyme, Conn., and spent her off hours painting portraits of walnuts. Or, more recently, Steven Kaplan, an American academic whose scholarly energies are principally focused on French bread.

Add to this list Jeff Berry, an easygoing California native who has spent more than a decade tracking down original recipes of drinks with names like the Cannibal Grog and the Nui Nui. A self-described “tropical drink evangelist,” Mr. Berry, who goes by the name Beachbum Berry, has written four slim books that serve as remarkably detailed bar guides to the tiki culture that began in the 1930s, sputtered out in the ’70s, and was revived a decade ago. He sees his mission as elevating the lowly reputation of umbrella drinks to their rightful standing.

“When people see that parasol hanging out of the glass they usually laugh,” said Robert Hess, a cocktail historian and host of “The Cocktail Spirit,” a show on smallscreennetwork.com. “It’s kind of sad, because when done properly a tiki drink can exemplify the culinary side of the cocktail."

Mr. Berry believes in doing them properly. His latest book, “Beachbum Berry’s Sippin’ Safari” (Club Tiki Press), published this summer, represents a culmination of his research. In it, he reveals what he believes to be the original recipe for the Zombie, a famed rum drink that has been made often but rarely well. “The Zombie was the Cosmopolitan or Margarita of its day,” Mr. Berry said recently. “There are hundreds of recipes for it — and they all stink.”

Many of the cocktails that Mr. Berry has studied, the Zombie included, owe their creation to a raconteur named Ernest Raymond Beaumont-Gantt who remade himself as Donn Beach and started the tiki craze in 1934 by opening Don the Beachcomber’s in Hollywood. In their interior design, the tiki joints inspired by Mr. Beach tended to thoroughly fake pastiches of tropical themes — swaying hula girls, angry savages — that can offend some modern eyes.

But Mr. Beach was a gifted mixologist, and his drinks were the real thing. His “Rum Rhapsodies” were elaborate concoctions that called for multiple brands of rum, fresh fruit juice, crushed ice, obscure syrups and esoteric ingredients like honey-butter mix.

Unlike Trader Vic, who was born Victor Bergeron and who wrote several books and printed his recipes, Donn Beach kept his formulas a closely guarded secret.

“His recipes were all in code,” Mr. Berry said, “so a recipe might say one half-ounce of number two, a dash of number four.”

To recreate the Beachcomber drinks, Mr. Berry became a kind of cocktail shamus. He visited libraries and thumbed through old issues of Gourmet on the chance any recipes had been printed (they hadn’t). Eventually, he learned that some of the Beachcomber’s bar staff had kept the secret recipes in little black books. Mr. Berry got his hands on one of the recipe books — but found that it too was coded.

Undeterred, he began frequenting the Tiki-Ti, a bar on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles run by a son and grandson of a Beachcomber bartender. Armed with the coded recipe book, he would order, say, a Montego Bay, and attempt to reverse-engineer the ingredients. Through this slow but sybaritic method he figured out that an ingredient obscurely identified as “Golden Stack” was a brand of Jamaican rum, or that “Markeza” meant passion fruit syrup. After tracking down a few more black books, he said, “it all came together.”

Mr. Berry’s single-minded scholarship has gained him respect in the cocktail world. Wayne Curtis, author of “And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails,” (Crown, 2006) called Mr. Berry “the Indiana Jones of tiki drinks” for his trailblazing work in uncovering recipes and marveled at his commitment to craft. “I’ve seen Jeff at cocktail events where he’s serving drinks to 300 people,” Mr. Curtis said, “and if it doesn’t taste just right he gets very upset and wants to throw the whole thing out and start over.”

A few weeks ago, Mr. Berry was in New York City from Asheville, N.C., where he lives. At Otto’s Shrunken Head, a neo-tiki bar in the East Village, he further demystified the subject of tropical cocktails by drinking a few.

Mr. Berry is 49, with a slim build and a bushy white goatee that lends him the appearance of an aging beatnik. He said his fascination with tiki culture began as a kid when his parents took him to a Polynesian restaurant in the San Fernando Valley that had jungle-pattern carpeting and an indoor waterfall. “If you walked in there as a grown man, you might think it was tacky,” Mr. Berry said. “But for me it was like walking onto a Hollywood movie set. It was this cocoon of tropical fantasia.”

After graduating from U.C.L.A. film school, Mr. Berry spent several years as a screenwriter and director, achieving some success as a rewrite man on movies like “Inspector Gadget.” During that time he fell in with a crowd of tiki aficionados who threw backyard luaus. Mr. Berry became the resident bartender and soon after published his first book, “Beachbum Berry’s Grog Log.” When his film career stalled, he dedicated himself full-time to tikiana. “I really am a bum,” he said.

Mr. Berry turned his attention to the Zombie at Otto’s. In a clever bit of reverse marketing, Donn Beach once claimed the drink was so strong that he would serve no more than two to a customer. “I’m getting some dark rum taste, which is good,” Mr. Berry said, trying Otto’s version, “but it also tastes like a Jolly Rancher. Of course, to be fair, nobody really knows what goes into a proper Zombie anyway.”

(Mr. Berry later said that a second visit to Otto’s yielded much better drinks.)

Mr. Berry’s own arrival at the Zombie recipe is convoluted. In 2002, he stumbled upon an old copy of “Barbecue Chef,” a cookbook self-published in 1950 by one Louis A. Spievak that contained a Zombie recipe supposedly given to Mr. Spievak by Donn Beach himself. Following the formula, which called for three kinds of rum, three kinds of juice and passion fruit syrup, Mr. Berry was pleased to discover a superb drink.

A few years later, he found another Donn Beach-sanctioned Zombie recipe — this one in a 1956 issue of the men’s magazine Cabaret. That recipe called for 11 ingredients, only five of them matching the Spievak formula. The drink was equally good but darker in color and heavier in body.

Then the story took one more twist. In 2005, Mr. Berry was given a little black book belonging to a Beachcomber waiter named Dick Santiago that dated to around 1937. The notebook contained a recipe for “Zombie Punch,” which was the drink’s original name. Mr. Berry concluded that the recipe was truly the original Zombie formula, and set about decoding an ingredient listed cagily as “Don’s Mix” (two parts grapefruit juice to one part cinnamon-infused sugar syrup, it turns out).

“It took a year to crack it,” he said. Mr. Berry’s lasting contribution may be in salvaging tropical drinks from decades of bad bartending. Because drinks like the Zombie and the Mai Tai were so popular, bars felt compelled to offer them, whether their employees knew how to make them or not. The results were one-dimensional drinks that substitute high proofs and sugary sweetness for balance.

“When people think of tropical drinks, they think of the syrupy slush that gets served on a cruise,” Mr. Berry said, his voice rising in pitch. “But when you get a properly structured tropical drink, it’s unbelievable.”

[DukeCity]

This story reminds me of

from the show Kids In The Hall. "Girl Drink Drunk" is a parody of those film noir stories of "one man's descent into the depths of alcoholism" but he only drinks "Girl Drinks", lots of fruit and parasols and big straws.