![]() (Beach’s measurements were so intricate that he’d custom-solder the spouts of glass cruets to regulate the flow of bitters, and saw down standard 2- and 1-ounce jiggers into quarter-, half-, and three-quarter-ounce sizes.) And all of that was before executing the Beachcomber’s notoriously complex formulations, which regularly called for 10 or more ingredients topped with elaborate garnishes. While the celebrity-heavy crowd hobnobbed out front, the Filipino barstaff toiled in a secluded back room, hollowing out pineapples and coconuts, juicing crates of citrus and shaving down enormous blocks of ice. The Filipino forebearers to bartenders like Licudine, Esmino and Aranas were the so-called “Four Boys,” a quartet of lightning-fast mixologists responsible for crafting each and every one of Beach’s “Rhum Rhapsodies” in the Beachcomber’s nascent years. ![]() ![]() "The Filipinos made the place popular because of their service-they were good at it,” says Steve Aranas, a longtime Beachcomber manager whose father, Nash, was among the first group of Filipino immigrants to find their footing in Beach’s employ. But while looking the part aided Filipinos in landing gigs, talent is how they kept and cultivated work. The racist conflation of cultures to fit a Westerner’s notion of Oceania led to the promotion of several prominent Filipino bartenders, like Manila-born Mariano Licudine, who became the face of the Mai-Kai, Fort Lauderdale’s Polynesian landmark or Filipino Americans Bob Esmino and Ray Barrientos, who wound up opening outposts of the Kon-Tiki chain across North America. Though Filipinos had no direct ethnic or geographic connection to Beach’s subequatorial pastiche, their dark complexions and Southeast Asian features were a seamless fit for tiki’s “exotic” aesthetic. Their labor was hidden by design-Beach was at once guarding his recipes against theft from competitors and crafting a magical environment in which his seductive creations seemed to materialize from thin air.īut it’d be simplistic to breeze past these hiring practices as purely altruistic. “It was not an easy road to hoe back then-racism was very pervasive, and white guys would always get jobs first, whether they had the chops or not,” says Berry. When the original Don’s Beachcomber Café opened in 1934 on North McCadden Place in Hollywood, the bar and service staff were overwhelmingly Filipino, an anomaly at the time. Over the next decade, Southern California would develop the highest concentration of Filipinos in America by 1933, Los Angeles County alone was home to nearly 20 percent of the 65,000 Filipinos new to the States, according to historian Linda España-Maram.īeach made good on this promise. While those who disembarked in cities like Seattle and San Francisco found employment in seafood plants and farm fields, respectively, Filipinos who landed in Los Angeles gravitated toward domestic and service work. Thousands of Filipinos, almost all single men under the age of 30, crossed the Pacific Ocean by freighter from the port of Manila to the West Coast. The first large-scale Filipino migration to the United States took place in the early 1920s. The relationship between Filipinos and tiki was, in part, a result of timing. Of all the people shortchanged by this fast-and-loose dedication to fantasy, however, no group has been as overlooked as Filipinos, whose contributions to the birth, growth and survival of tropical drinks cannot be overstated. The sleight of hand inherent to the genre’s allure can range from the benign-encrypted recipes, hushed techniques-to the elaborate: the culturally obtuse cultivation of Asian, Caribbean, Hawaiian and Oceanian customs, all in the name of a faux-tropical experience. Mystery has always been central to tiki’s appeal.
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