Our approach to tiki

The bar and cocktail style commonly called tiki developed in the United States beginning in the 1930s and became especially popular during the mid-20th century. It created an imaginary tropical escape by mixing influences from Polynesia, the Caribbean, Asia, and elsewhere into something distinctly American.

Some extraordinary cocktails came out of that movement.

So did imagery and entertainment that reduced real people and cultures to stereotypes. Polynesian religious figures, carvings, clothing, language, and traditions were frequently removed from their original contexts and turned into decoration. Depictions of Pacific Islander and Asian people could be caricatured, sexualized, or openly racist.

We don't think appreciating the drinks requires pretending that history didn't happen.

On this site, we use tiki primarily as the commonly recognized name for a style and era of cocktails.

It does not mean that the drinks, artwork, or aesthetic presented here represent Polynesian culture.

In fact, many ingredients and techniques associated with tiki cocktails come from somewhere else entirely. Rum traditions are deeply connected to the Caribbean, and individual drinks have histories in places including Jamaica, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the United States.

Whenever we can, we try to tell those stories accurately instead of putting everything vaguely tropical into the same bucket.

Our visual inspiration comes primarily from mid-century modern design and vintage tropical travel and cocktail graphics rather than representations of Indigenous Pacific cultures.

That distinction matters to us.

We intentionally avoid using sacred or culturally significant Polynesian imagery as decoration, including representations of deities, ceremonial objects, culturally significant carvings, or similar imagery simply because it looks “tiki.”

We also avoid caricatures of Polynesian, Pacific Islander, Asian, Caribbean, or other people historically used to create an idea of the “exotic.”

Palm leaves? Absolutely.

A ridiculous amount of orange? Probably.

A sacred figure turned into a decorative mascot? No.

This database exists to make recipes easier to find and use, but documenting where they came from is part of that work.

Whenever possible, recipes include their source and attribution. We try to distinguish between documented historical recipes, modern interpretations, adaptations, and recipes whose origins are uncertain.

That doesn't make the history perfectly tidy. Cocktail history almost never is.

It does mean we would rather say “we don't know” than quietly turn a story repeated often enough on the internet into fact.

Language changes. Scholarship improves. People point out things we missed.

We're okay with that.

Our goal isn't to create the definitive interpretation of tiki culture. It's much narrower: to build a useful database of this particular family of cocktails while treating their history—and the cultures that were borrowed from in creating the genre—with respect.

We can enjoy the escapism, craftsmanship, strange ingredients, beautiful glassware, and mid-century absurdity without needing to reproduce everything that came with the original fantasy.

That's the kind of tiki we're interested in preserving.