Thunderbird

Treasure Island's Thunderbird Resort was really something back in the glorious days of Exotica, and we should all be damn glad it still carries that tattered flag of 1957 into the 21st century.

Of course, once you get back behind the immense monolithic slab of its facade, you realize the place is really just another motel. But that's okay.

Then again, they do have a top-notch restaurant, called Feola's. I had a Philly Cheesesteak that was so big, they had to cut it in half to fit it on the plate. And dee-lish. The two cocktails I imbibed - a Blue Hawaiian and a Rum Punch - were worth coming out here again for. Especially at times when my regular Blue Hawaiian pit stop, O'Maddy's in Gulfport, is lined out the door with inebriants who had the foresight to get to Happy Hour early.

When I was passing through the courtyard, a fun lady named Fiona was playing electric ukelele (accompanied by a drum machine and effects) and singing Edie Brickell's "What I Am". There's a second bar out on this courtyard, a little tiki shack called Ikky Woowoo's, which is probably where I really shoulda gotten the drinks. Next time.

Aku Tiki / Traders

In a world where most of the glorious Tiki-themed businesses of yesteryear are gone, it's refreshing to see that the Aku Tiki Inn still survives in Daytona Beach. Somewhere along the way it was conglomerated by Best Western, but kudos to them for retaining much of the place's original character. A giant Moai with red glowing eyes greets you at the entrance, and it's a replica of the original which was destroyed by Hurricane Charley in 2004. Other Tiki decorations, many by the great Witco, still remain on the premises.

The hotel's restaurant, Traders, doesn't quite recreate the splendor of old. There are no waitresses in coconut bras and grass skirts bringing you wooden platters of Ono and Dr. Sam Tee cocktails.

More photos of Aku Tiki here.

Sniki Tiki

Siesta Key's Sniki Tiki is another good example of my Anomalous Enthusiasm Axiom regarding Tiki Bars. Despite being Tiki-named on a freakin' island in the freakin' gulf, the decor is not really retro and the waitresses seem hurried and disinterested even when you're the only customer in the joint. Nine tenths of the Tiki Bar experience is about the mood, the setting, and the demeanor of the staff. But if pressed on the matter, all these managers of these sorta-but-not-really-Tiki-bars would probably just shrug and say, "Look, man, this isn't 1957. I just gave the place that name 'cuz, you know, it's all tropical-sounding and stuff."

Having said that - ah, the inevitable "having said that" - I nevertheless visited the place three times and still have fond memories of it. Because the food is excellent. And that's really what it's all about, isn't it?

First time I went, I had the clam chowder, second and third time the Philly Cheesesteak. All superb, and it must be said I am an authority on Philly Cheesesteaks, you ask anyone. The drinks are top-notch, even if they are served in dinky little boring clear plastic cups and not in a proper Tiki Mug or a ceramic tumbler that looks like Fu Manchu's less successful brother.

You'll find Sniki Tiki at the world famous Captain Curt's Village on Stickney Point, Siesta Key.

Tiki Joe's

In a perfect world, every place using that overused term "Tiki Bar" would have beautiful women in sarongs bringing you exotic food and bizarre umbrella drinks, with an enormous stone Tiki head overseeing it all. And of course, a healthy mix of exotica, lounge, space-age-pop and uncategorizable retro ephemera on the sound system. But I'm not a Tiki Bar snob, dear reader, I'm really not.

To me, a Tiki Bar must, at the very least, though, offer some classic Tiki Culture beverages, even if they didn't go all-out on the trappings and the decor. There's a point I've often belabored in print, and bear with me now because I'm going to belabor it again:

This may seem overly harsh, but here's my position: any upscale bar that claims to be a true "full bar" and doesn't have a specialty cocktail list is immediately suspect, and to be avoided.

I've never met a bartender yet who says "we can make you anything" who really could. And that's where the specialty-cocktail drink list comes in - even if I don't order anything off it, I want to see it be there. Because it proves to me that these people are really bartenders and not just randomly-assigned pourers of liquid. Having house-specialty mixed drinks shows me that, at least, someone was enough of an artisan to come up with these ideas. It also shows me that there are drinks that even a novice bartender there might have fixed often enough to be familiar with. Feel me? If you don't make Mojitos very often, I don't want you fixing my Mojito, capish?

And so my face fell just a little when my entourage and I stumbled into Tiki Joe's in Sarasota recently and it not only didn't really look very much like a Tiki Bar, they were playing modern rap music in the restaurant. Then I asked the million-dollar question, "can I see the specialty drink list?" and received the million-dollar wrongest of all wrong answers: "we don't have one, but I can make you anything."

All eyes at the table looked at me, and one friend, well aware of my Walkout King ways, hadn't even let go of her purse. But this time, I stuck it out - mainly because it was a Groupon deal, heh.

And I'm glad I did.

As I turned out, the meal was among the best I've had in Florida, no lie. The angus burger was 100 percent real, homestyle, patted out. The cheese fries were hand-cut from actual potatoes - you know, like they used to do in prehistoric times? I haven't had fries so friendly since the late lamented Taylor's Billiards in Richmond, Kentucky, what seems like another life now. The guy who waited on us turned out to be Tiki Joe himself, a real nice guy and he did indeed fix a heck of a frozen pina colada.

Tiki Joe's is hidden way, way out in the suburbs of northeast Sarasota - 5802 Longwood Run Blvd, to be precise - but I tell you what and I kid you not, it's worth the drive.

The Walkout King

One from the Victorian Squares blog:

You don't have be a new-ager or a transdimensional seer to grasp the basic idea that life's too short to surround yourself with junk that's bringing you down. This of course applies to people, but it also applies to products and businesses. Too many people out there are eating food they don't like and buying stuff they don't need, out of some sort of I-don't-even-know-WTF-to-call-it that makes them allow the will of others to supersede their own.

I gained something of a reputation back in Louisville as being "that guy" who gets up in the middle of a play and walks out. I don't mean to cause a scene about it, and I try to find a dimly-lit moment to make my exit as inobtrusive as possible, but I've been dragged to too many horrible plays that I politely sat through and then went home in a bad mood and grumbled about how that's two hours of my life I'll never get back. So I don't do that anymore.

Dr. Bill: I never did understand why you walked away.
Nick Nightingale: It's a nice feeling. I do it a lot.

One of Florida's biggest problems is customer service, and I find myself once more becoming "The Walkout King" as I find myself sitting at tables in restaurants that I'm just not feeling. (Much to the weary irritation of my dinner companions.) But you know, why settle for anything less than greatness? If a restaurant can't be bothered to give me their A-game, I can't be bothered to whip out the American Express card.

Today in Jacksonville Beach, we stopped into a place I won't name; one that presents itself as a Tiki Bar (and I suppose it is, in a sort of lowest-common-denominator frat-boy way.) It got bad reviews on the Internet, said one of my dining companions. I don't put stock in Internet reviews, but it must be said the place was completely empty when we walked in. Not a soul except a bored-looking waitress who, 20 seconds into taking our order, started arguing with us about the coupon we tried to use from their website. "Oh, that one doesn't apply to this location," she said, despite having it pointed out to her that the coupon made no such distinction. Then she said there were no frozen drinks. She didn't say why, but I have a suspicion it's because business was so non-existent, they didn't bother firing up the machine today.

All eyes at the table looked over to me, watching my enthusiasm for this place plummet, waiting for the inevitable words.

"We're leaving."

We went across the street to a fantastic place called The Pier Cantina. As it turned out, they had no frozen drinks either this day - their machine was down (protip: always keep a spare, boys.) But the server apologized profusely and did a kick-ass job at his post. The food was delicious. The ambience, overlooking the ocean, was superb. The drinks were excellent. But most importantly, customer service was top-notch. As my pal Grant Cardone has noted, and you better listen good to him:

I once told a salesperson that I wanted to pay cash for the product, at which time he said, “You don’t want to pay cash for it; you should finance it.” His response created a block to my power of decision and lessened my enthusiasm for continuing to do business with him. By disagreeing with me, the salesperson created a barrier to what should have been an easy sale. He could have simply said, “Cash would be great, sir.” Then as he was taking my cash, he could have shown me both the cash price and the alternative if I financed, at which point I would have at least considered the alternative as a choice, not a “make wrong.”

A business that has zero customers had damn well better cheerfully honor all coupons if they want to stay in business, instead of giving a convoluted explanation to the customer why he's wrong and why this coupon "doesn't count for this location." The Pier gets ALL my business now when in this part of Jax Beach, baby.

The Space Coast

One of Florida's greatest claims to fame, the Space Coast is the area around Merritt Island (where NASA launched Space Shuttles from Kennedy Space Center until the last voyage on July 8, 2011) and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, the site of various space launches both civilian and military. Cities in the area include Titusville, Rockledge, Cape Canaveral, Cocoa, Cocoa Beach, Melbourne and Palm Bay. One of the Space Coast's area codes is "321", which was chosen as a deliberate nod to the "3-2-1, liftoff" countdown of space launches.

You can watch rocket launches from a number of handy points on the island, as delineated in the graphic below, swiped from spacecoastlaunches.com.

The place is a veritable space-geek's wet dream, but even without all the rocketry going on, there's plenty of good old fun and sun going on. Me, I like to hang out on Cocoa Beach and slug 'em back at the Mai Tiki Bar on the pier, 800 feet out over the Atlantic.

Dr. Sam Tee

Back when I first got on the Internet, circa 1995, I tried to do some research online about my Tiki mug collection, but there wasn't much to be found. Nowadays, of course, the online hive-mind has sprawled out to cover everything imaginable, and now I can find out more about my Tiki mug pictured below (which isn't even a Tiki, actually, but appears to be a Fu Manchu-type character) than I ever wanted to know.

It's an "Orchids of Hawaii" R-82, circa 1960s.

According to a website of Tiki-obsessives called Ooga Mooga:

"Orchids of Hawaii was a restaurant supply company, based out of the Bronx, with most items being manufactured in Japan, and later Taiwan. Orchids of Hawaii made a wide assortment of mostly non-exclusive mugs, many fairly similar in overall (if not quality) look to their competitor Otagiri Manufacturing Company. Also produced a number of other items for Polynesian restaurants that were used throughout the eastern seaboard, many items being of a cheap quality, but the lamps being rather nice. Orchids of Hawaii had a showroom in New York as recently as the 1990s."

But if one consults Sven Kirsten's great book Tiki Modern on Taschen, there's a scan of a 1960s cocktail menu from Hawaiian Village, Tampa, Florida. On it we clearly see a clumsily rendered graphic of what seems to be our man. He's called "Dr. Sam Tee" and the drink is described thusly:

"Those oriental doctors know something. This drink is prescribed for the timid, the daring, the young in heart. A tropical adventure with delectable rums."

(Should I bother mentioning that Rum has absolutely nothing to do with Chinese medicine? Nah. Oops, I just did.)

I'd be interested in finding out whether the R-82 was made expressly for Tampa's Hawaiian Village, or if they picked it out of the catalog and said "let's use this for our Sam Tee drink." According to Beachbum Berry, the Dr. Sam Tee cocktail was but one of a succession of similar drinks all owing their lineage back to something called a "Doctor Funk" created by Don the Beachcomber but inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson's friend Bernhard Funk:

All these drinks came from one man, the most influential bartender of the 20th century, Don the Beachcomber. He came up with 70 original cocktails in the 1930s. These drinks were stolen by thousands of other bars and were the template for this entire trend. The Doctor Funk cocktail, for example, traveled from Don the Beachcomber to Beverly Hills where it was called the Dr. Fong. Then in San Diego it became with Dr. Won. Then in Florida it became the Dr. Sam Tee.

Back in the day, Tampa's Hawaiian Village was a huge Polynesian themed complex with a motel, restaurant, nightclub, coffee shop, etc. It was located at 2522 N. Dale Mabry, then went out of business and became a Days Inn, and then came back for a while in the 2000s, then went bye-bye again when it was sold out from under them and subsequently bulldozed to make room for a car dealership. Things just don't stand still in Interzone.

Polynesian Putter

Someday when the giant radioactive cockroaches that inherit the Earth look back on what the mammals achieved, I'd like to think that they'll smile (or whatever it is they do with their insectoid faces to express pleasure) at the idea that mankind, at the pinnacle of its culture, merged Tiki culture with miniature golf.

Polynesian Putter is located at 4999 Gulf Boulevard, St. Pete Beach, FL. When I took these photos last Spring it still defied the odds by surviving into the age where its own half-century-past zeitgeist is now seen on Mad Men by a generation who never knew - and still don't - what it was all about. But hurry if you wanna get puttery wit' it, because everything awesome from the past eventually gets torn down to build a bank or a gas station sooner or later.

The Polynesian Putter is actually part of the Sea Palms Motel complex, but you need not be a resident to play the putt-putt. My favorite aspect of the whole course is, of course (heh), the 30-foot large Moai statue which can be putted through. It also has a staircase inside it which allows courageous seekers to climb to the top and get a nice view surveying the entire course.

The Moai were carved by the Rapa Nui people on Easter Island between the years 1250 and 1500 and were reportedly intended to symbolize their deified ancestors. I wonder what the specific ancestor they modeled their copy after thinks about being celebrated centuries later on a roadside tourist attraction?

The place is densely wooded, but you can just barely make it out through the foliage on Google Maps here.