Jeanie and Tom and have been into Tiki a long time …
They were collecting tiki mugs and making tiki drinks back in the mid-90’s. If there were other people into tiki in Seattle, they wouldn’t have known. Jeanie and Tom were part of the second wave of tiki and didn’t even know it! The Bamboozled Bungalow is where Tom makes his drinks and Jeanie displays her mugs. Here’s a peak inside their piece of paradise, hidden in their basement …
What’s the Tiki scene like where you live?
Tom- Seattle doesn’t seem to us like it has much of a Tiki scene. There are or have been Tiki bars and restaurants; some haven’t lasted long enough to establish a real presence – Bellevue Trader Vics and The Islander, for instance – and others, while they have ‘Tiki Days’ (Rumba), or once-annual ‘Tiki Weeks’ (Burgundian) at which they serve great drinks, aren’t full-time Tiki bars. The Lava Lounge has a promising name, but isn’t a Tiki bar at all … Hula Hula – to us at least – is more of a tropical-themed karaoke bar than a Tiki bar; the Tacky Tiki Bar in Edmonds is more Margaritaville than Tiki, the No Bones in Ballard we were totally unimpressed with, and Navy Strength – while the drinks were innovative and interesting – is very sleek, with no great depth to its décor, and doesn’t have a convincing Tiki feel to it.
The Hotel Albatross is a near miss – we enjoy their food and drinks and the early, 1920’s-ish tropical décor there; unfortunately, they go on to blow their potential exotic ambiance with a throbbing industrial soundtrack. We’ve nothing against industrial music, but this is definitely not the setting for it.
To our thinking, the Bothell McMenamin’s North Shore Lagoon is the best Tiki-themed place nearby – all of the elements there are about right – and the fact they have their Tiki bar parked overlooking a tropical-themed swimming pool area is fun.
One of our favorite breakfast joints, the Kona Kitchen, is a great neighborhood Hawaiian restaurant – but it’s real Hawaiian, not Tiki. The Hawaii General Store, near us on 45th street, has both authentic Hawaiian and Tiki stuff, as well as fresh flower leis, so it’s a help for when we host at home. Seattle has no real Tiki events or conventions to our knowledge, and we are only now becoming aware that there may be a few other home Tiki bars in town – so our Tiki development has occurred in something of a bubble.
That said, this has not always been the case. As a young boy, I vividly remember a couple of fancy, celebratory dinners out at Trader Vic’s (long gone, alas) that really made an impression … and for many years, we had a neighborhood Tiki restaurant called The Luau a mere two blocks from our home – dangerously convenient! It was run by three friends; the front man/head bartender was Tony Boitano. The place had good drinks, great food*, and had a casual, fun vibe. Because it also had a family seating section, it was a place our young son Richard soon came to love as well – particularly the table next to the aquarium of Hawaiian fish in the room with the zebra-patterned carpet. I think it really instilled his interest in things Tiki at an early age; now at age 14 he has his own mug collection mixed in with ours.
Unfortunately, the market crash in 2008 closed the doors of The Luau, and we still miss it. About the time it folded, though, and Richard was about five years old, we got to go to Hawaii for a friend’s wedding, so all of us got to see the Big Island for the very first time! Otherwise – we have enjoyed the various tropical bars and restaurants as they’ve come and gone in the Seattle area, but none have become the mainstay for us that The Luau was.
As an aside, it is worth noting that Seattle does have some fine Caribbean restaurant and bar choices – La Isla in Ballard is a favorite, as is Bongos near Green Lake (gotta love the sandy seating area, and their food rivals my Caribbean home-cooking) … and of course the afore-mentioned Rumba.
* Their flaming mini-hibachi pupu platter changed constantly, and was awesome; the entrée I remember most vividly, though, was a short-term special: The plate arrived at my place, and looked exactly like a solid, middle-American meal of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and coleslaw – not Tiki at all. And then, as I began working on it, the chef’s sense of humor became evident … the batter on the fried chicken was laced with warm, tropical spices, the coleslaw had tiny bits of pineapple and other tropical fruit mixed in, and a dressing flavored to match, and the mashed potatoes – well, there were potatoes in there, but I would also guess something like yucca or taro root as well. You couldn’t tell any of this just looking at the meal, it was just a lot of fun to discover how they had subtly tweaked each item in an unexpected direction.
What brought you into the ‘Tiki lifestyle’ and how long has it been part of your life?
Tom- It was a gradual thing; we dabbled a long while, but can safely say that it’s been an important part of our lifestyle for at least 18 years.
Jeanie says that she has always had an attraction to things tropical – the idea of visiting the South Pacific (which finally happened, as noted above) as well as tropical flavors in food. Also, as a conservatory opera and stage direction major, she has always been very attuned to music, so for her, bands like the Blue Hawaiians were very inspirational in moving her towards things Tiki – and her stage direction background gave her a real edge when we started planning parties and fundraising events with Tiki themes. In addition, she is very skilled in many Pacific Rim cuisines, and can turn out fantastic Asian-style meals – another real asset when it comes to hosting a Tiki party!
One of her defining experiences as a child was going to the Enchanted Tiki Room in Disneyland – she loved it, and even after a single experience had the song indelibly instilled in her memory. This is why we have a dedicated Tiki Disney shelf in our bar, as well as Enchanted Tiki Room inspired art mixed in with the masks and other images on our walls.
For me, of course, there were the old Trader Vic’s memories – and somewhat unusually, I had a remarkable amount of Caribbean cooking in my background for a native Seattlelite.
My mom was a great cook in her own right, but at some point during my childhood, my parents befriended a Cuban refugee turned CIA agent, and he loved to cook as well. He never measured anything, and the food he made was always delicious and exotic-seeming, so I spent long hours in the kitchen watching what he did and taking notes. Rabo Encendido (“Tail on Fire”) – oxtail stewed with wine, tomatoes, green olives, and copious quantities of black pepper – was a favorite.
When he was not on assignment he was around quite a bit – sometimes convalescing from an injury received in the field – so in the end I was able to record dozens of recipes and develop some real skill in executing them. For one of my sisters’ 16th birthdays, the family threw a big party and he had a custom pig grill made, and we roasted a whole pig in my parents’ back yard. I still have and use the grill for our parties to this day … our Cuban friend has been gone for many years now, but we know he would have approved.
As Jeanie says, “Caribbean food and drink is like a gateway drug to Tiki”, so our shared enthusiasm for things Caribbean was a contributing factor. Also, as a family, the shared experience of having a Tiki bar/restaurant (The Luau) two blocks away is probably what really cemented the shift.
Further facilitating this was that when Jeanie started collecting Tiki mugs, Tiki wasn’t really a thing yet, so it was still possible to find really great mugs for very little money in thrift, junk, and antique stores.
At some point I came into the possession of the Trader Vic’s Food and Drink book from 1946. Jeanie, who was encouraging her introvert husband to socialize more by gently nudging me into hobby bartending, was able to get my first set of bar tools at the now-defunct Clevenger’s secondhand store in Aberdeen, WA. The recipes in the book were fun to try, and I was soon turning out drinks for visiting guests in our kitchen – it would be several years before we had a proper bar.
Our big turning point ended up being us hosting my other little sister’s 16th birthday party. We decided to do it as a luau, it turned out well enough – and afterwards, we asked ourselves, “Wow, wouldn’t this make a great adult party with real drinks?” And so the following year we had a big summer Tiki party in our home for a couple dozen friends … and have been hosting them ever since. At this point we have an extensive collection of tropical cookbooks (actually, an extensive collection of cookbooks, period) – so that has helped us generate the multiple themes we have used at our subsequent parties.
Can you give a little history of how it all came together?
Tom- This really picks up with the note at the end of the last answer:
“The big turning point ended up being us hosting my other little sister’s 16th birthday party. We decided to do it as a luau, it turned out well enough – and afterwards, we asked ourselves, “Wow, wouldn’t this make a great adult party with real drinks?” And so the following year we had a big summer Tiki party in our home for a couple dozen friends …”
We decided early on that we would be repeating the party, and to keep it fresh would add a twist or variation to the theme each time. So, every year we changed our décor (lacking both a lot of real Tiki stuff at this point and an unlimited budget, I made a lot of our décor out of cardboard figures painted to look like idols and masks) and the menu to match a particular theme – early party themes, after our first straight tropical paradise party, included titles like “Trouble in Paradise” and “Motog Goes to Hell” (Motog was/is the name we’ve dubbed to our standard Tiki idol party rental). After several parties, we noticed that the ones with darker, “danger” themes seemed to play out better in terms of party vibe and social dynamics, so while we do mix things up and execute light themes too, we still tend towards the dark side … Vader would no doubt approve.
The next big milestone came when the party became large enough that we decided to take it into our basement and backyard. This helped limit the mess in our main living areas, allowed us to expand the guest list to include more people, and gave us a freer hand with decorating, as the half-finished basement was a blank slate that we could completely remake to match the sub-theme of any given Tiki party. (Yes, this sounds like a lot of work, and it is.) That first basement-yard year we did a sort of Astro-Sputniki sort of theme, with black light shop tubes and spacey, glowing Easter Island heads hanging about the walls … and since it went well, we concluded that this new basement party idea was a repeater.
A few years went by until the next milestone in bringing it all together – a friend found someone in Gig Harbor, WA, in the classifieds, looking for someone to take a teak and rattan bar off their hands for free – or they were going to take it to the dump. He rescued it with help from family and friends, and it appeared shortly afterwards at our house. The bar had to be brought into our basement in pieces, and was in pretty poor shape, with two corners of the teak counter-top snapped off, and water damage – the first foot-and-a-half of the bent rattan facing was almost black. After six months of restoration, however, the old ‘30’s antique was beautiful, and the corner of the basement where it landed (near the utility sink for the washer-dryer area, which we dropped a screen over during parties) became permanently Tikified.
A few more years passed, with some great parties, including a Volcano Lair/International Spies and Villains theme, a kitschy 50’s Oriental Exotica theme, and a Voodoo theme where we hung all of the empty bottles from the previous year’s party in the Hawthorn tree hanging over our backyard – and then came the winter of 2015.
In 2015 during a roofing project, the temporary seal leaked during a storm, damaging multiple rooms in the house. The basement wasn’t damaged directly, but it was discovered during all the other work that the knob and tube down there was not relic wire as the contractor who had repaired the house before we moved in had assured everyone, but was indeed hot, and unsafe. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the plumbing stack over the bar area failed during the rewiring, so six weeks before our 2016 Tiki party – which, perversely, was particularly ambitious, and being done as a fundraiser for the USO Northwest Mobile unit, with the local electro-swing band Good Company performing – the whole basement had to be gutted, and we about freaked out.
As long as the basement was gutted, however, Jeanie decided to have the entire room rebuilt as a permanent, fully tricked-out Tiki bar – woven wall matting, a marble bar counter and sink to turn it into a proper wet bar, and more bamboo and display shelving than we might have previously believed possible. Our Midgard Construction contractors were good friends and party guests … and it all somehow was miraculously done in time. Tiki art and mugs that had been in our storage for years flooded out on to the new shelves … and it was awesome.
Since that party in 2016, the displays, storage, and bar area have continued to evolve, as well as the backyard in which so much of the party happens … the yard now has a raised functional stage as one of the levels of our deck, and is wired so we can plug in novelty lighting, fog machines, or other party props in just about anywhere back there. As with any home Tiki bar, it remains a work in progress.
What made you decide to build your own Tiki bar? Any story behind the name?
Tom- Build? – There were less conscious decisions involved than there were a series of lucky (and one big not-so-lucky) events, as detailed above, that led to our bar coming together.
The name: The friends who rebuilt our basement prompted us directly for a name as they were finishing up the remodel – given that the house is a Craftsman bungalow (yes, we foolishly have parties for 50-60+ plus guests in a modestly-sized home with a single bathroom), that for months after the remodel, the entire place smelled like bamboo, and that (go figure) our Tiki bar has served a lot of booze, we came up with The Bamboozled Bungalow … which also shares a double-entendre with the Don Tiki song Bamboozled. This has allowed our friends to add more personal touches – like carving the name of the bar on the edge of hanging mug shelf, and so on.
What is your favorite Tiki drink? Why?
Tom- I’m a big fan of the Three-Dots-and-a-Dash – I like the complex spiciness and great rum blend in that drink. I also like Manhattans, so the Rumscullion from the Thatch Tiki bar in Portland (before it became the Hale Pele) is also a favorite.
Jeanie- Scorpions and Painkillers!
What is your favorite Tiki bar? Not including your own!
By region and/or city:
Whole East Coast, probably entire U.S.A. – the Mai Kai
Los Angeles: Trader Sam’s in Disneyland
Big Island, Hawaii – the Canoe House Restaurant. OK, so this isn’t really a Tiki bar, but their tropical drinks were fantastic! For those who wonder why I’d choose a non-Tiki bar over the obvious, thoroughly Tikified choice of Don the Beachcomber’s Mai Tai Bar in Kona, suffice it to say that when we were there it was very nearly impossible to get any actual Don the Beachcomber drinks at this bar – they simply did not know how to make them, which pretty much boggled my mind. Missionary’s Downfall? Zombie? … Bueller?
San Francisco: Pagan Idol (Can say this easily because Forbidden Island is technically in Alameda and Trader Vic’s is in Oakland – which, on the infrequent occasions they serve Sunday brunch, is pretty much a must-do experience). The Tonga Room is also a must-see for its history and décor … and it’s also not a bad idea to hit the Tonga Room dinner happy hour buffet and stoke up there before heading to Pagan Idol, since the Idol doesn’t serve food!
Portland: Hale Pele … though we’ve been going to the Alibi practically forever, and it holds a special place in our Tiki hearts.
Seattle: As noted, there are very few real contenders in this field currently … McMenamins North Shore Lagoon Tiki bar is good though, and we’ve enjoyed multiple visits there. Really though, our favorite “local” tiki bar is in Tacoma – the Tacoma Cabana, and now Devil’s Reef, which we have high hopes for, since its run by the same couple – Jason and Robyn – who’ve done such a great job at the Cabana.
Vancouver BC: The Shameful Tiki Room – though the vintage Tiki bar at the Waldorf, complete with its amazing collection of Leetegs and its mural in the closed-off basement section, is really a must-see as well. Visit the Waldorf for the history, then set up camp at the Shameful Tiki Room for awesome drinks.
Outside of great drinks, what do you think are essential elements in creating the perfect Tiki environment?
Tom- Tiki environments are all about natural textures – raffia, woven matting, bamboo, rattan – warm and primitive. They are also about creating an illusion, so almost equally important is lighting – keeping natural light out, and illuminating with carefully chosen lights that accent the theme and contribute to an air of mystery – flame bulbs, pink, orange, or red lights that add a warm glow to the area and flatter your guests, black lights that pick up the details in your Tiki pinstripe art – the choices should match the other décor and thematic elements, and there are almost innumerable options.
Music is also essential, and as with lighting, there are so many great possible choices to personalize the sound to your bar or party theme. There’s old school and new school Exotica, Hulabilly (a bit of Elvis’ Blue Hawaii, in our opinion, falls solidly in this category), Surf music in about as many flavors as your local Baskin & Robins, mainland America “Luau” music, tropical-rhythm swing dance music (like Mambo Swing by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, or I’ve Got a Feeling by Lavay Smith & Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers) – even authentic Polynesian music!
While not a musical professional like Jeanie, I do have an extensive musical background playing the cello in small groups or symphonies, and will cheerfully listen to music in a wide selection of genres – so I’m the one who creates Tiki party playlists on my MP3 device, so we can just plug it in and not worry about the tunes. For this, I try to mix many different musical genres together, so the music keeps changing and evolving through a bar visit or party event, linking up songs based on similar keys and/or musical styles, so they flow more or less seamlessly together. Since a lot of Exotica and some Surf music is not especially danceable, I will usually also weave in danceable elements that play well with more traditional Tiki sounds – for instance, experimentation with Caribbean rhythms was big in the 1980’s, so bands like the Police and UB40 are usually easy to incorporate in such a playlist, as are singles like Blondie’s Island of Lost Soul, or the Eurythmics’ Right By Your Side. I’m also not above dropping a song like Godsmack’s Voodoo or the Atomic Fireball’s Man with the Hex into the playlist of a Voodoo-themed party, or The Presidents of the United States of America’s Tiki God into about any Tiki party soundtrack, just for the fun of it.
What does the future hold for you and your home Tiki bar?
Tom- We will continue to have parties, and enjoy hosting similarly-minded friends, old and new, in our bar! It’s a great way to meet new people. And, the mug and Tiki art collection will probably continue to inevitably grow, so we’ll need to find more shelving space … somewhere.
Anything else you would like to add?
Tom- When we were new to this and wanted to decorate on a budget, big pieces of cardboard, such as you’d get from appliance boxes, were really our friend. Drawing Tiki masks, standing idols, and surfboards on cardboard and painting them (with fluorescent kiddie paints if using black light) was time-consuming, but has allowed us to tackle big decorations projects (like decorating multiple hallways and the gym of a school for a ‘Ohana-themed fundraiser auction) with very little monetary outlay.
After my initial Trader Vic’s books (my collection grew), Beachbum Berry’s books (of course) became absolutely key to keeping my basement bar with a lineup of great drinks. My next big step forward was learning to take the time to make many of my own mixers like grenadine, sour mix, hibiscus simple syrup, and coconut crème, to name a few … if you haven’t tried making your own mixers yet, it is totally worth it! The last couple years I’ve added homemade cocktail bitters to the mix – and while they are usually more useful in non-Tiki drinks (the Tiki classics rely heavily on Angostura) or in original concoctions, it is still interesting and a lot of fun.
Instrumental in giving us decorating ideas for our bar, and providing information on what to collect to fill it out, have been the various great resources on historical Tiki bars – The Big Book of Tiki, Tiki Quest,Tiki Modern, what have you. A big Mahalo to Sven Kirsten is due here for sure.
Finally, an anecdote: It was one of our early Tiki parties. I woke up next morning, and came downstairs in a bathrobe. A scattering of guests were sleeping in various nooks around the main floor, but something was moving. I walked into the living room, and there was our dachshund Oscar, staggering around the place with a coconut on his head. No joke – I had made up a number of fresh coconut cups for the punchbowl, and they had been used all night and apparently left around. The dog was gripping one side of the rim in his lower jaw – and since he had a shorter nose than is typical for the breed, the cup curved around to completely cover his face past the eyebrows.
Bemusedly watching this spectacle, as the dog bumped his way towards his bed (pesky furniture!), I slowly followed him to see what he would do. When he felt his bed in front of him, he pitched the coconut shell down in it – right next to another, previous shell! The coconut cup already in his bed had about a two-inch ring of booze-soaked coconut meat grawed from around the inside of the rim; he couldn’t reach any further in, apparently, and had so gone and found another. Oscar flopped on his side in bed, grappled the new coconut with his forepaws, and got to work … after all of his effort, I didn’t have the heart to take it from him, so I started cleaning up the catastrophe of dirty dishes and glassware in our kitchen instead, and working on making breakfast and a big batch of Trader Vic Banana Cows (banana-rum milkshakes; one of the few hair-of-the-dog concoctions I know of that actually makes you feel better). Oscar was up and around again sometime in the mid-afternoon after a peaceful, drunken snooze, none the worse for wear … unlike a number of his human counterparts. Party on!
I’d like to thank Travis Bay for his awesome photos used for this post.
Check out The Bamboozled Bungalow page on Critiki