A historic fad fades away, only to be resurrected by the underground
At first glance, Denver might seem a million miles from the tropical beaches of Polynesia, both geographically and culturally, but the Mile High City has a surprisingly rich history of tiki bars dating back to the 1950s. Our introduction to tiki is all thanks to two titans of the tropical cocktail named Donn Beach and Trader Vic Bergeron, who birthed a craze that swept across midcentury America before succumbing to the merciless fate of all fads.
However, this is a tale of redemption. Tiki culture rose from the ashes, and the scene today overlaps many other underground subcultures, including old-school punk, burlesque, hot rods, pinups, goth and rockabilly. Tiki’s aesthetics challenge the notions of high- and low-brow culture by elevating what bourgeois tastemakers dismiss as kitschy, gaudy, and polarizing.
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The word “tiki” is derived from Māori creation mythology. Like biblical Adam, Tiki was the first man to walk the earth and the father of all humanity.
Fast-forward to 1945 when American GIs returned home from the Pacific after WWII and brought with them tales of tropical islands and half-naked women in grass skirts. Thanks to the booming post-war economy, a full-blown tiki craze soon engulfed the nation. Sometimes referred to as Polynesian-Pop, tiki snuck its way into popular music, television, movies, architecture, home decor, dining, and cocktails. Polynesian-themed restaurants opened from coast-to-coast, offering patrons an escape from the drudgery of the American rat-race.
These were high-culture establishments, where one could don their finest attire and dine like a jetsetter, sampling delicacies from far-flung tropical lands while swigging down potent rum concoctions with menacing names like the Cobra’s Fang, Shark’s Tooth, and Scorpion Bowl. Tiki bars soon became the go-to stomping ground for the biggest celebrities of the day, including Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Howard Hughes, and even President Nixon.
Although tiki is heavily inspired by the Pacific Island peoples, it doesn’t pretend to represent authentic Polynesian culture. It’s a midcentury American invention whose aesthetic is an exaggerated tropical fantasia. During the Cold War’s ever-present atomic threat, tiki bars served as a technicolor panacea for the woes of modernity. A getaway to the Garden of Eden with cocktails. To this day, any tiki bar worth its salt is based around this fundamental idea of escapism.
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In 1954, the legendary creator of the Mai Tai cocktail, “Trader Vic” Bergeron, chose Denver’s Cosmopolitan Hotel on Broadway and 17th as the site for his newest tiki bar. Vic was a larger-than-life character, with a pungent vocabulary and ribald air. He had a penchant for weaving colorful tales and, on more than one occasion, let customers stick an ice pick into his wooden leg.
Denver’s Trader Vic’s was an immediate hit—elaborately decorated with giant shell lamps, South Seas mosaics, a two-man outrigger canoe suspended from the ceiling, and other tropical curios Bergeron personally collected from Tahiti, Pago, Samoa, Tonga and New Guinea. Denver’s hoopleheads packed the place every night. Whenever Vic passed through Denver, he would hold court with local journalists—regaling them with colorful tales to fill the society pages.
By 1978, Trader Vic’s moved to the Denver Hilton on 16th (now the Sheraton Downtown). The building’s mid-century modern design and swanky location kept the clientele happy for the next few years, but by the 80s, America’s love affair with Polynesian-Pop had waned. The Greatest Generation, with their memories of the Pacific during WWII, were supplanted by cocaine-snorting Yuppies, and, in 1984, the Denver Trader Vic’s shuttered its doors forever.
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When Trader Vic moved his Denver operations to the Hilton in 1978, the vacated space in the Cosmopolitan was immediately snatched up by the Don the Beachcomber restaurant. Donn Beach, born Ernest Raymond Gantt, lived an extraordinary life of adventure. He worked odd jobs on steamships across the Pacific during the Great Depression, amassing a treasure trove of Polynesian collectibles along the way. Washing ashore in California during Prohibition, he became a rumrunner, supplying speakeasies with bootleg hooch from Hawai’i.
On the day when Prohibition ended in 1933, he “officially” opened Don’s Beachcomber bar in Hollywood, decorating it with his Polynesian collection. Seeking to distance himself from his bootlegging arrest record, he legally changed his name to Donn Beach. Thus was born the legend of Donn the Beachcomber—inventor of the world’s first tiki bar and Polynesian-Pop culture.
Before Donn, cocktails consisted mostly of alcohol with a splash of flavor. But Donn’s signature drinks, collectively dubbed his Rhum Rhapsodies, were something unique. Previously considered a cheap intoxicant, Donn elevated rum to be respectable. By blending rums and mixing them with fresh juices, he invented most of the classic tropical cocktails we still love today, including the Pearl Diver, Navy Grog, and Zombie.
Briefly, from 1978 to 1984, Denver cocktail enthusiasts had the enviable choice to imbibe the world-renowned tropical elixirs of either Trader Vic Bergeron OR Donn Beach—the two most iconic names in the entire history of American tiki culture. But, just like Vic’s, Don’s would not survive the 80s. Without much fanfare, Don the Beachcomber closed its Denver location in 1986.
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Whereas Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic’s featured top tier cuisine and cocktails in an upscale setting, the Tiki Kai Supper Club in Denver was something a bit more proletariat and, dare I say, lascivious.
The Tiki Kai attracted customers by serving up a glitzy dinner show along with the meal. These were full-blown luau performances replete with jungle drums, hula dancers, and flaming machetes. But the Tiki Kai’s real claim to fame was a scandalous sexcapade which pushed the boundaries of Denver’s mid-sixties puritanical decency standards.
In 1966, management struck upon the idea to add “topless waitresses” and immediately ran afoul of Denver’s Vice Squad. The police bust was front page news for months and waitress Elizabeth Madrid was eventually fined $100 for “performing a lewd act while serving drinks clad only in red tights and a baby-doll sheer pajama top with pasties.”
Reverend Donald O. Larson of the Denver Association of Evangelicals responded to the hullabaloo by demanding a ban on all topless performers in Denver.
“The relaxation of the norms of dress for waitresses, barmaids and topless strippers is not only a flagrant display of exhibitionism and vulgarity, but it also is an assault upon the dignity of womanhood,” the honorable reverend pontificated. “The forces of immorality have initiated a brazen and blatant attack on the major cities of America.”
The Tiki Kai carried on for a few more years before finally closing its doors in 1969.
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By the 80s, the Polynesian craze had fizzled and most of the original tiki bars were demolished. But a curious thing happened in the 90s—punks, hot-rodders and lowbrow artists rediscovered the handful of surviving tiki bars and kickstarted a tiki resurgence. Everyone from John Waters to David Lynch to the Cramps began sneaking tiki references into their work. By the mid-aughts, it became an underground trend for Gen X hipsters to roadtrip across the country and hit as many of the golden-age tiki lounges as they could before they vanished forever.
Thanks to the present-day craft-cocktail movement, we’re in the midst of a third wave of tiki. There are over a dozen tiki festivals across the U.S., and the Denver-Boulder area has 5-9 tiki bars, depending on how hard you gatekeep. Adrift, Hell or High Water, the Electric Cure, Swalo’s and Bernard’s Tiki Room are all sure to wet your whistle. There’s a Denver Tiki Tribe Facebook group with around a thousand members, a local chapter of a tiki secret society called the Fraternal Order of Moai, and plans are in the works for Denver’s first goth-tiki festival in 2026.
I reached out to Lexi Healey, impresaria of Denver’s Hell or High Water and the Electric Cure tiki bars, to get her take on the scene today:
Denver’s tiki scene makes about as much sense as a beach in a snowstorm, yet here we are—mixing Mai Tais a mile high like it’s the tropics. With a new wave of wildly creative bartenders shaking things up, a die-hard tribe of eccentric tiki enthusiasts, and national collaborations fueling the momentum, Denver’s tiki revival has officially arrived.