At Honolulu’s Top Cocktail Bars, Many Mai Tais and not a Pineapple in Sight

"Trader Vic's Mai Tai" by Andrea_Nguyen is licensed under CC BY 2.0

The Mai Tai was created by Trader Vic in 1944 and it became one of the most famous tropical drinks of all time. It was also one of the worst-executed cocktails in history until recent decades, served with any number of fruit juices (or other questionable fruit-flavored liquids) and any sort of rum, and it might have come in colors from orange to blue. The flavor was anyone’s guess.

Part of the reason for the Mai Tai’s many terrible interpretations is that Trader Vic kept the recipe a secret until 1972. By then, bartenders at other bars had just made guesses as to what the drink might contain, and every bar and restaurant would put forth its own interpretation.

The original recipe called for aged rum, orange curacao liqueur, orgeat (almond) syrup, rock candy syrup, and lime juice, and was garnished with mint. But the most common misinterpretations of the drink often included pineapple juice and grenadine, often made with mass-market white rum with a float of dark rum on top, and they were garnished with bright red maraschino cherries and/or a pineapple wedge.

You’ll still find this “style” of Mai Tai in many if not most tropical vacation destinations, while craft cocktail bars have long since stayed true to the original recipe. On many bar menus, to distinguish the original recipe (or something close to it) Mai Tai from the pineapple version, the drink is listed as a 1944 Mai Tai.

In Honolulu, you can probably find plenty of bad versions of the drink (as you can anywhere), but the city is also host to a solid selection of urban craft cocktail bars serving locals and traveling cocktail geeks (ahem) who seek them out. Not all the top bars list a Mai Tai on their menu, but like an Old Fashioned, you can expect to get one- and the original version- at all of them.

Beyond the classic version, several of these same top bars have also opted to put their own interpretation of the drink on their menus – minus all the mystery juice.

Below we list a few you can find on your next visit to the Isle of Aloha:

Heyday is a poolside bar in the central courtyard of what looks to be a 1960s-era motorlodge, at which some of the barstools are actually swings that hang from the roof of the bamboo bar cabana. Chef Maii, also of restaurant Fête, lends her name to the Mai’i Tai on the menu at both venues. The drink’s signature ingredient is rum infused with mamaki, a native Hawaiian plant supposedly found nowhere else on earth that has been long used for medicinal and ceremonial purposes on the island in teas.

At Bevy an artsy bar with nighttime DJs located between Waikiki and Honolulu’s Downtown district, owner Christian Self serves the Mai Thai. The drink drops the orgeat in the classic recipe and replaces it with house-made lemongrass syrup and falernum, the latter a clove-almond-ginger syrup from Barbados. The drink is topped with “candied ginger foam” made from ginger liqueur and grapefruit. Self says, “The cocktail was created for, and won, the Don the Beachcomber’s Mai Tai competition 2010, as an homage to the 1944 Trader Vic Mai Tai with a Southeast Asian twist. The foam was added as an alternative to the traditional ‘Hawaiian Mai Tai’ dark rum float, and to open people to the molecular side of cocktail making.”  

Bar Leather Apron photo credit John Hook

Bar Leather Apron also features an award-winning Mai Tai, co-owner Justin Park’s E Ho'o Pau Mai Tai that won the 2015 World's Best Mai Tai competition. The cocktail contains aged rum, orgeat, and lime, but one of the rums is infused with raisins and the drink includes coconut water syrup, vanilla, local honey, absinthe, and smoke from Hawaiian mesquite wood. It’s a Mai Tai turned up to 12. The bar in which it is served is located on the mezzanine level of a financial center in Honolulu’s Downtown district and is a more stoic, elegant Japanese-style whiskey-focused cocktail bar.

Also in the Downtown part of Honolulu, specifically in its Chinatown, Skull & Crown Trading Company is more of a creepy-tiki bar than the standard version, with lots of skulls and heads in jars that make ordering a Zombie a natural choice. But for the Mai Tai-inclined, the recent menu offers three from which to choose. The Maunakea Mai Tai is the classic 1944 style with a splash of funky Smith & Cross rum added to give it an extra kick. The ‘Awa ‘Awa Mai Tai uses local Ko Hana Agricole-style rum (distilled from Hawaiian sugar cane juice rather than from molasses), which is also a rum used in Heyday’s Mai Tai. But here at Skull & Crown they also add Campari and passionfruit (lilikoi) to the mix. A third variation, developed in partnership with San Francisco’s Smuggler’s Cove, is named the Dagger Mai Tai and all of its ingredients have been blacked out on the menu, a nod to secret tiki recipes like that of the Trader Vic original.

Another San Francisco connection is found at Hau Tree, a beachside restaurant helmed by Beverage Director Jen Ackrill, formerly of San Francisco bars including Rye. Akrill offers two Mai Tai variations on the menu, one more tourist-friendly called the Waikiki Mai Tai that uses a blend of fruit juices including guava, lilikoi, and yes, even pineapple. The other, the 1944 Mai Tai, is made with a mix of rums from Hawaii and Jamaica, plus a few dashes of Angostura bitters to keep the drink robustly flavored to the last sip, even though it’s served over pebble ice.  The pro move for visiting this bar is to make a reservation for dinner so you can enjoy your cocktails with a fabulous sunset view.