Jeff Berry is a man with a mission. His self-imposed quest: to recreate many of the lost drink recipes from the heyday of the Tiki-themed bars. He thinks he has found the Holy Grail of Tikidom, the original recipe for the Zombie.
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.
Berry actually had to decode the original recipes – which were a closely guarded secret. This could be a book and a movie: The Beachcomber Code.
