“This is your captain speaking,” a voice says over the loudspeaker. “We’re casting off for our cruise around the island of San Baltazar. In the unlikely event of an emergency, please secure your own cocktails before helping others.” The sound of waves whoosh behind my head, and a frenzy of bubbles cascades around a wood-paneled room festooned with taxidermy fish and flickering lanterns. This is Sunken Harbor Club, and I am in heaven. I am also in a tropical bar in Downtown Brooklyn. This nautical bolthole is hidden above a 19th-century chophouse and has quickly become one of my favorite places to get a drink. But these aren’t just any old drinks, of course, they’re tiki cocktails—and the genre is in the midst of a new golden era.

Up until recently, my general impression of tiki had been, to put it plainly, unflattering. I’ve long associated the category with syrupy cocktails and cultural appropriation. And while I had enjoyed the occasional beachside Mai Tai, it wasn’t until the last couple of years that I dove into the nuances of this nearly century-old tradition, emerging a convert. This tradition began, as many American obsessions do, in Los Angeles.

If you were in Hollywood in the early 1930s and not a teetotaler, there was a decent chance you’d have ended up at Don the Beachcomber. The legendary tiki bar (rather, the original tiki bar) was located on North McCadden Place and opened just as Prohibition came to a close. It was conceived by Donn Beach (born Ernest Gantt), who spent his teens and early twenties traveling throughout the South Seas and the Caribbean, including a brief stint rum-running. Beach transported mainland imbibers to these distant shores with his immersive interiors and “rhum rhapsodies” made with fresh juices and homemade syrups served in hollowed-out coconuts and pineapples. It was a resounding success, and soon enough, Don the Beachcomber was a star-studded watering hole, attracting clientele like Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable, and Marlene Dietrich.

From there, tiki took off. Victor Bergeron opened Trader Vic’s in Oakland, Polynesian Pop swept through a post-war America that had spent years fighting across the Pacific, Hawaiian statehood arrived in 1959, and tropical bars cropped up in all corners of the country. It was an all-out craze. By the time the late ’70s came around, however, the dream had soured. Artificial ingredients sent quality into a nosedive, cocktail trends were skewing simpler, and the Vietnam War held a mirror up to the hollow cultural escapism tiki was selling. After several more years of decline, the movement nearly went the way of the dodo—until a cohort of devotees sparked a new wave of enthusiasm.

Among those revivalists was Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, who spent the better part of the 1990s and 2000s doing what amounted to archaeological work. “Since it was pre-internet, I originally started by looking up old magazines in libraries, searching for vintage recipe guides in used bookstores, and scouring swap meets and paper ephemera shows for old Polynesian restaurant menus,” Berry says. He eventually realized the recipes for these drinks were largely kept secret. Fortunately, there were a handful of old-school bars still open.

"In the mid-1990s, Ray Buhen was still mixing at the Tiki-Ti, the bar he’d opened in 1961 in East Hollywood,” Berry says. Buhen was one of the original ‘Four Boys,’ a quartet of Filipino mixologists who were instrumental to Beach’s success and the tiki movement overall. “He was almost 90 years old then, but he still remembered his early days working at Don The Beachcomber’s in the 1930s.” Even then, Ray was tight-lipped about his recipes. “Whatever the drink was, he would always bark that the ingredients were ‘rum and fruit juice!’”

Berry and his wife Annene (who had worked as a bartender) began trying to reverse-engineer some of the tropical cocktails they encountered on their travels. He published his first book in 1998, which persuaded some of the old-timers to share their top-secret recipe booklets. “But most recipes were encoded to prevent theft, or scribbled as ‘notes to self’ by bartenders writing in shorthand,” he says. Combining evidence with guesswork and experimentation, he started making drinks from scratch, published five more books, and opened a bar in New Orleans called Latitude 29. This happens to be the same bar from which my curiosity for tiki was born; all thanks to a happenstance visit last October, and one wondrous Pandan Painkiller.

Since that fortuitous day I found Latitude 29 (and returning twice more on the same trip), I’ve come to grasp the potent appeal of this subculture. First, the immersive setting is paramount. “Ideally, when you walk into a tiki bar, it’s like walking onto a movie set,” says Garret Richard, who is the chief cocktail officer at Sunken Harbor Club and co-author of Tropical Standard. This idea has been a key pillar since the very beginning. “Donn famously hooked up a hose on the tin roof of his Hollywood location and would turn it on at night to trick his guests into thinking it was raining outside,” Smuggler’s Cove owner Martin Cate tells me. Nearly a century later, this craving for escapism hasn’t faded, with immersive experiences trending across industries. “You see bars designed like spaceships, train dining cars, or crashed airplanes; all of these places are trying to transport guests somewhere else,” says Alex Lamb, director of the documentary The Donn of Tiki. “In a lot of ways, that traces back to Donn Beach’s original goal of giving people not just a drink, but an experience.”

The cocktails themselves deserve their own dissertation. While many trendy tipples of our times rely on minimal ingredients, layering to achieve complexity is a hallmark of tiki cocktails. A return to fresh juices, homemade syrups, and evocative spices swirl together for cocktails that are both bold and balanced. (A recent drink order at Sunken Harbor Club combined a blend of Martinique rhum with wormwood amaro and falernum—heaven!) And though rum is the focus of most tiki menus, other spirits are entering the conversation. “Contemporary recipes in today’s neo-tiki bars use different base spirits,” Berry explains, “a lot more gin and whiskey, cachaca, pisco, tequila and mezcal, to keep up with modern tastes.”

So what keeps me coming back? The thrill of being transported to another reality while sipping on something special, ultimately. It would be easy to write this notion of tiki off as kitsch, but upon examining the history and cultural context of the genre, I’m left eager to learn (and taste) more. Tiki’s origins are rooted in colonialism and imperialism, but with this revival, the insensitive iconography is giving way to a reimagining of what an immersive experience can look like.

Below, a brief guide on where to order your next tropical cocktail.

4427 Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90027

“The Tiki-Ti has been family-owned since 1961. The house specialty is the Ray’s Mistake, a secret recipe that regulars (myself included) have been trying to figure out for decades. If you’re not driving, try a Great White Shark, which has a bite like one.” —Jeff Berry

100 2nd Ave, New York, NY 10003

Billing itself as a “tropical hellscape,” this satanic tiki bar serves up tropical classics in a goth-inflected setting, complete with an eight-foot altar and bat taxidermy.

650 Gough St, San Francisco, CA 94102

Named one of the World’s 50 Best Bars, this San Francisco tiki destination feels like the belly of a pirate ship, complete with over 1,300 rums.

2834 N River Rd, River Grove, IL 60171

“For a historic room with wonderful art and a much-improved cocktail experience, Hala Kahiki is really magical and sometimes overlooked.” - Martin Cate

372 Fulton St 2nd Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11201

Once you’ve settled into your booth, cocktail in hand, be sure to ask about becoming a member at the Sunken Harbor Club. You’re given a ‘passport’ booklet that contains 36 challenges. Complete 12 of these and you qualify for membership.

2310 30th St, San Diego, CA 92104

Imagined as a crash-landed spacecraft on a tropical alien planet, this sci-fi tiki bar offers tropical classics in an extraterrestrial setting, complete with a shuttlecraft-turned-bar and menus that resemble flight manuals.

321 N Peters St, New Orleans, LA 70130

“Secret menu options: behind the bar, we have a Rolodex with over 100 off-menu vintage tiki drink recipes. Popular requests include the Cobra’s Fang, Skull & Bones, and the original 1934 Zombie. Or just tell our bartenders what kind of flavor profile you like, and they’ll pick an index card for you.” —J.B.