http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/24/dining/smugglers-cove-tiki-cocktails-book-martin-cate.html 2016-09-05 09:34:17 A Book Adds Rigor to the Laid-Back World of Tiki Cocktails The owners of the San Francisco tiki bar Smuggler’s Cove set out to define an aesthetic built on leis and umbrellas. === One of the richer paradoxes of the cocktail world is that, for all their Hawaiian shirts and beach-bum bonhomie, tiki aficionados are among the most doctrinaire pedants you’ll find in any bar. Just ask Martin Cate, the owner of the beloved “It is quantifiable,” Mr. Cate said. “When I hear people say: ‘Oh, tiki is whatever. It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s just a good time,’ now, no. That’s not true. To me, that’s as crazy as walking into the Guggenheim and declaring it to be Art Nouveau. There are definitions in this world.” Mr. Cate and his wife, Rebecca Cate, recently set out to record those definitions in At 352 pages, it contains not only recipes for dozens of cocktails — some historic, some original — but also a history of the tiki movement in America; an accounting of its revival and quirky major players; a dissection of the décor of Smuggler’s Cove and the people who created it; a novel categorization of rum types (based on production method, not color or country of origin), and an exacting definition of what the term “exotic cocktail” means. In the Cates’ opinion, the term has to do with the way drinks were created in the 1930s by Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt, a.k.a. “We wanted to say, these drinks don’t exist in a vacuum,” Mr. Cate said. “Tiki cocktails are part of a larger story of ‘Polynesian Pop.’ It’s part of this four-decade fantasia, this obsession with Polynesian arts and culture, which included music and painting and art and architecture.” The volume has proved a quick success. The lei-wearing demographic has predictably picked up the book, but so have some unexpected parties, including people who have been led to the bar by the book, rather than the other way around. “I didn’t expect that,” Mr. Cate said. “I thought people would already know the bar.” Recipe: