Writing Sample

Self-Made Man of Mystery

Would it be a stretch to say that one man invented what we now think of as tiki culture? Maybe. But undeniably, Trader Vic did more than anyone else to define its look, feel, and flavor. If he didn’t invent it, he wrapped it all up in a brightly colored package. He defined and refined it, set its standards, gave it style, and made it fun. No one person invented “tiki,” but the Trader made it an institution.

He was, by all accounts, a force of nature, as variable as a tropical storm—charming and gruff by turns, generous, brutally opinionated, riotously funny, notoriously profane, and wildly imaginative. He was a tough guy who also had a capacity for unabashed sentimentality. He was fiercely independent—by his own definition an antisocial loner—yet he was a spellbinding raconteur and a charismatic showman, the instant center of attention in any crowd, with a thousand friends all over the world.

He was an adventurer and a hunter of big game, who found time to sculpt, paint, write, and work tirelessly as an advocate of the disabled. He was a dirt-poor, sickly young man who turned a borrowed $500 into an international restaurant empire that became the world’s first major themed restaurant chain.

And when it came to empire building, he was, and remains, one of America’s great marketing geniuses—the P.T. Barnum of the restaurant world. Everything about him, from his adopted moniker to his wooden leg, was cloaked in legend, and the Trader knew exactly how and when to keep it that way. Was he French? French-Canadian? Or a native of a tiny island in the South Pacific? What exactly did he trade in? Fur? Rum? And what about that wooden leg? Did he lose the limb in a shark attack? Or in a near-fatal encounter with a runaway San Francisco cable car? Who was this guy?

A Shaky Start

In fact, Victor Jules Bergeron was a quintessential self-made man of the American twentieth century, a man who fashioned his fortune from nothing and who made himself up as he went along. He was born nowhere more exotic than San Francisco’s working-class Mission District, just two years into that century, to immigrant parents. His mother, Marie Camount, came from the French Pyrenees, and his father, the original Victor Jules Bergeron, was a big, barrel-chested French-Canadian who worked as a waiter at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel.

“Little Vicky” had a rough start in life. Disease was rampant in the city’s poorer neighborhoods, and by the time he was four years old he’d contracted scarlet fever, typhoid fever, and tuberculosis. In 1906 things got even shakier. During the great San Francisco earthquake and fire, four-year-old Vic found himself trapped in a room in the French Hospital as chunks of plaster rained down on his bed. His father made the trek across town on foot to rescue him and wheeled him home through the smoldering ruins of the city in a baby buggy. For months afterward the family got by on rationed food, cooked over an open fire in the backyard.

Two years later, Vic’s tuberculosis had gotten worse, and his leg had to be amputated to keep the disease from spreading through his body. This time he returned from the hospital on crutches to a new home in rural Marin County, just north of San Francisco, where the weather was better. It was a one-room shack with a stove, a washbasin, a table, and four beds.

But for all that, he would later remember his childhood as a happy one, filled with hunting, fishing, foraging, and Huck Finn–style adventures with his brother and sister in the wilds of Marin.

His mother refused to coddle him, and she encouraged him never to let his disability get in his way. “I guess she could have made me a cripple instead of a successful man,” he would later reflect. “Suppose she had pampered and petted me. I wouldn’t be worth a damn.”

Victor Senior, meanwhile, passed on to his sons his big-hearted love of food and cooking. One of his favorite meals, an improbable concoction of ham and eggs fried in butter with bananas and pineapple, would one day reappear as “Ham and Eggs Hawaiian,” a mainstay of the early Trader Vic’s menu. 

Birth of a Mai Tai

One day, in 1944, Vic was hanging around at the service bar with one of the bartenders and they got talking about creating a new cocktail. With his typical mix of cheerful confidence and boundless ambition, Vic declared it would be the finest rum drink in the world.

He grabbed a bottle of seventeen-year-old J. Wray & Nephew Jamaican rum. He squeezed a lime. To balance its tartness he added some sugar syrup, and for a hint of tropical flavor and aroma he used a splash of orange curaçao and a little French orgeat, a sweet almond syrup. He poured the ingredients over crushed ice in an old-fashioned glass and shook it well.

Now, these may all have been top-shelf ingredients, but none of them was particularly exotic. They were all sitting right there behind the bar. But Vic’s instinct for mixology gave him the ability to taste a drink with his “mind’s tongue” before he ever mixed a drop of it. The secret, he knew, was all in the proportions. And that afternoon he would blend five ingredients in perfect proportion and make cocktail history.

Vic was just about to taste his concoction when his friends from Tahiti, Ham and Carrie Guild, showed up. He invited them to be the first to try the new drink. Everyone took a sip. Vic said nothing. Carrie said, “It’s mai tai! It’s mai tai roa áe.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Vic replied.

Carrie said, “It’s Tahitian for ‘out of this world—the best.’”

“That’s the name of the drink,” Vic declared. “It’s a Mai Tai.”

He wasted no time putting it on the menu, and it was an instant hit. How big a hit? Within a year, Trader Vic’s had exhausted all the seventeen-year-old J. Wray in the world. No problem. Vic, by then a seasoned rum connoisseur, used one of his last bottles of J. Wray as a gold standard and blended West Indies, Jamaica, and Martinique rums to create his own Trader Vic’s Mai Tai Rum.

The mystique of the Mai Tai spread quickly. When the Matson Steamship Line invited Vic to Oahu to put together a list of tropical drinks for its bars in Hawaii, he threw the Mai Tai into the mix and it became the best-seller at the famed Royal Hawaiian bar. Within three months it was all over Hawaii. In short order, it became—and remains to this day—the most popular drink of the islands.

Tiki Party!

Maybe you live in a big house with a pool flanked by palm trees and jungle flora. Or maybe your “backyard” is a fire escape. No matter. Take a page from the Trader. Short on cash and long on confidence, he turned a little shack on the wrong side of the tracks into an exotic tropical playground of the rich and famous. And his kind of thinking will work just as well at your place.

Here’s what the Trader knew: The fun of tiki has less to do with extravagance and expense, and more to do with romance and imagination. If you’re throwing a party, going island-style is pretty much a no-fail proposition. Whether it’s a sunny summer afternoon or a frosty winter night, whether you go ultra-casual or elegantly hip, it’s bound to turn out relaxed and unpretentious. Hey, how seriously can anyone really take themselves in a Hawaiian shirt and lei?

It all comes down to three basic elements: the mood, the drinks, and the food. A little advance thinking about each will go a long way. You’ll soon discover that a tiki party is that rare and perfect combination: foolproof, universally likeable, and surprisingly cheap. That’s the weird and wonderful thing about tiki. It instantly makes everyone happy. Even the host.