“We’re more than Mai Tais.”
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recent tweet asks: “Sipping a Mai Tai at sunset. Does it get any more Hawaiian than this?”
According to Ku’uipo Kumukahi, the Director of Hawaiian Culture & Community Relations at Hyatt Regency Waikiki Beach Resort & Spa, it does—a lot.
“We’re more than Mai Tais,” she told Fodor’s. “That’s not who we are. Those people exist only in stories made for tourists.”
That raises an interesting question. Why did the Mai Tai—a cocktail that wasn’t invented in Hawai’i, whose name isn’t in the Hawaiian language, become so emblematic of Hawai’i? And moreover, how fair is that?
Alcohol certainly has a fraught history with exchanges between Native Hawaiians and the outside world. Isolated until a visit from English explorer James Cook in the 18th century, the Hawaiian Islands were quickly exploited by Westerners for their own gain.
The islands became a popular waypoint for transpacific shipping in the early 19th century, and scores of Native Hawaiian men would be plied with liquor to pass out and find themselves blinking awake on the deck of a ship the next morning—pressed into maritime service likely to never return to Hawai’i.
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The Mai Tai itself is reported to have been invented in 1944 by Victor Bergeron at his tiki-themed restaurant Trader Vic’s in Oakland, California. Legend has it that when Bergeron gave the drink to a Tahitian acquaintance, the exclamation “Mai Tai!”—a Tahitian expression of delight—became eponymous for the cocktail.
In the 1950s, Bergeron was contracted by the Matson Shipping company to create cocktail menus for their hotels, the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and Moana Hotel in Waikiki. The drink was an instant hit and was frequently requested by tourists during the subsequent tourism boom after Hawai’i became a state in 1959.
There’s been suggestion that tiki culture is exploitative of Pacific cultures or reductive when it conflates Polynesian cultural elements as synonymous with American escapism. But while tiki culture is thoroughly American, that amalgamation isn’t wholly alien to Hawai’i, where the local culture is an amalgamation of Pacific cultures—Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and Portuguese, and other parts of Polynesia among them. Hospitality—making visitors feel welcome—is also a common thread in each of those cultures, and that’s certainly a trait that Hawai’i’s visitor industry has spent decades refining.
The Royal Hawaiian and Moana are still in operation today, managed by Marriott Bonvoy Hawaii. The Mai Tai Bar at the Royal Hawaiian first opened in 1953 and is still a beachfront favorite. The Royal Hawaiian Mai Tai remains by far the most popular drink sold in the bar—over 100,000 sold in 2023. In second place is the “Vic’s 44” Mai Tai, which is closer to the original, fruit-juice-free recipe, coming in at just over 20,000.
It’s not difficult to see why tourists flock to the bar, which is located directly on Waikiki Beach, sandwiched between the famous pink Royal Hawaiian (immortalized as the “pink hotel” in Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”) and commanding views of Lē’ahi (commonly known as Diamond Head).
In the 1950s, the drink evolved with the addition of juice from a fruit also not native to Hawai’i, but similarly considered emblematic of it today—the pineapple. Kui Wright, the head bartender at the Mai Tai Bar, explains in a video for a locals-oriented YouTube channel that “The Mai Tai wasn’t invented in Hawai’i but we like to say that we perfected it.”
The drink has been the focus of some culinary imagination over the years. The Ritz-Carlton Kapalua on Maui has a different version of the drink at each bar or restaurant on the property—including a Mai Tai milkshake at the beachfront Burger Shack. At Chef Peter Merriman’s Monkeypod Kitchen, the drink has homemade macadamia nut orgeat and is topped with liliko’i (passionfruit) foam.
Mai Tais are also a standby at that other culturally questionable canard in Hawai’i: the luau. Like the Mai Tai, the luau itself isn’t rooted in pre-contact Hawaiian culture any more closely than the fact that it was common for feasts or celebrations to be periodically held. The modern-day luau is more a relic of mid-century American culture than anything Hawaiian, as tourism promoters of the era looked for ways to incorporate Hawaiian culture into ways that would be palatable as a paid tourist attraction.
That’s the fine line that tourism businesses in Hawai’i have to walk, even today. Mai Tais, luau, and pineapple aren’t Hawaiian (if the definition of “Hawaiian” is anything that would have been found in Hawai’i before Western contact)—but they’re enjoyable, and that’s a prime consideration in attracting leisure travelers. Culture, however, is also a strong consideration—in 2021, 73% of respondents in a visitor survey ranked “to experience other cultures” as Very/Extremely Important as their reasons for taking a vacation.
But while visitors seek cultural experiences, they’re not typically seeking advanced degrees in local culture, more of a “survey course,” and the luau and Mai Tai have evolved to serve as the sort of carrot to draw visitors to that experience.
At the Andaz Maui at Wailea Resort, both the original 1944 Mai Tai and the modern updated version are available at the resort’s Feast at Mōkapu Lūau. During the performance, the song and dance tell the stories of the ahupua’a, or land division, that the resort sits on and those of the island of Kaho’olawe, visible just across the Alalakeiki Channel. Visitors even learn that the Hawaiian word maika’I, meaning “good,” is analogous to the Tahitian word maita’i.
Kalikolehua Storer, the resort’s cultural advisor, explains that the Mai Tai is just one of the cultural markers introduced by the visitor industry—like the luau—that pique visitor curiosity. “It was purposeful back then, as visitors did not see the other parts of our culture, so splashes of language—like maitai and maika’i—were purposeful as icebreakers, perhaps.”
It’s those icebreakers, she says, that get visitors interested in getting out and exploring. As Kumukahi, the culture and community relations director at the Hyatt Regency, puts it: there is “more than Mai Tais” to Hawai’i and Hawaiian people. “Cultural experiences are far beyond the walls of the hotel.”
If it takes a Mai Tai to get visitors in the mood to learn more—she’s all for it.