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During the 1970s I spent at sizeable quantity of evenings at Trader Vic’s in Toronto, when it was handy for concert venues that demanded a certain level of inebriation. My friends and I made valiant efforts in the limited time-per-visit allowed us to get through the entire menu of fancy drinks, paper umbrellas fluttering everywhere.

We didn’t know a menehune from the man in the moon, and the next day recalled little of what we’d learned about the difference.

The mai tais alone invariably slowed us down because they were so good you had to keep going back to them after souring up on Castaway Sharkbites and fruiting out with Swiss Family Rob Roys.

The Toronto version of the ocean-wandering chain of tiki restaurants was in a posh-ish hotel, so to try and dissuade the manager from thinking we were Compleat Alcoholics, we grazed through many platters of the admittedly sublime Crab Rangoon and Cheese Bings and occasionally some Cosmo Tidbits too.

Recently all those little soggy parasols and stacks of undulating plastic swizzle sticks came tumbling out of my memory bank while reading an article at AmericanHeritage.com about the origin of Trader Vic’s and its even more venerable predecessor, Don the Beachcomber, the original tiki bar.

On twisting the Internet teat a little further, a whole tiki topography emerged from the nostalgia nebula. The boozy restaurants may not be as popular as they once were, but the island cult has branches all over cyberspace.

The American Heritage article, explaining “how sex, rum, World War II and the brand-new state of Hawaii ignited a fad that has never quite ended” (hang on – sex??), was paraphrased by Wayne Curtis from his new book “And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in 10 Cocktails”.

He writes that Victor Jules Bergeron, the real Trader Vic, and Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt – who founded Don the Beachcomber and actually changed his name legally to Donn Beach – “were the Stanley and Livingstone of the mid-century American jungle, blazing a trail deep into the world of pop fantasy and artifice from which America has yet to fully emerge”.

You just know this story is going to be good.

Gantt transplanted from New Orleans to Southern California in 1931, via Jamaica, Australia and the South Pacific, just 24 but already “something of a protobeatnik”. While working in LA restaurants, parking cars and doing a bit of bootlegging, he somehow befriended folks like David Niven and Marlene Dietrich, and thanks to them and his collection of South Pacific artefacts, got jobs as a technical adviser on films set in the islands.

Gantt soon turned a tiny former tailor shop off Hollywood Boulevard into a bar called Don the Beachcomber, packing it even tighter with all his island flotsam, old fishing nets and a menu of cheap rum-based drinks like the Sumatra Kula. The place got written up in a New York newspaper by an appreciative early customer who dragged his buddy Charlie Chaplin in, and fame ordered a round for the house.

Curtis mentions Howard Hughes getting pissed up there one night in 1936 and allegedly killing a pedestrian while driving home. Nothing about that in “The Aviator”, but at any rate the joint was so popular that the following year Gantt moved to a bigger spot and changed his name to match it.

During World War II, with his ex-wife Cora Irene “Sunny” Sund left in charge of the bar, Donn was injured when his ship bound for Morocco was attacked by a U-boat, so the Air Force put him in charge of the European hotels and restaurants where airmen spent their R&R – Capri, Venice and on the French Riviera. When he got back to Hollywood, he found that Sunny had turned the Beachcomber into a nationwide chain!

“Donn signed on as a consultant and then packed his bags for Hawaii, where he opened his own unaffiliated Don the Beachcomber in an up-and-coming resort area called Waikiki Beach.”

With palms and thatch, it was “part Space Age, part Polynesian meetinghouse”, and had a resident myna bird that shrieked “Give me a beer, stupid!” Late at night it always seemed to rain, so customers would order more drinks to wait it out. Actually, it was the pitter-patter of water from a garden hose that clever Donn had installed.

In his New York Times obituary in 1989, Donn was given the Thomas Edison treatment, not least for having invented 84 drinks, including the mai tai. That’s where Trader Vic comes in.

“I want to get the record straight,” Curtis quotes Victor Bergeron as saying. “I originated the mai tai. Anybody who says I didn’t create this drink is a stinker.”

The San Franciscan son of a French Canadian waiter and grocery-store operator, who’d lost a leg to tuberculosis as a child, was running a small beer joint and luncheonette in Oakland called Hinky Dinks in 1937 when he discovered more exotic booze while on vacation in New Orleans, Trinidad and Havana. Back in California he went to visit this place everyone was talking about, Don the Beachcomber.

He completely revamped his restaurant and his wife rechristened him Trader Vic, complete with a tale of having lost his leg to a shark. He’d never visited the South Seas, but you’d swear he must have to look at his restaurant.

“Bergeron would take the idea launched by Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt and upon it build an empire,” Curtis writes.

“South Pacific culture had a small but growing hold on the American pop imagination in the 1930s, as the middle class began to embrace a bowdlerised version of an old avant-garde favourite. Primitive art from the South Seas had fascinated the cultural elite since at least the paintings by Paul Gauguin in the late 19th century, and through a sort of obscure cultural alchemy, these primitive forms became popularised and marketed in the form of the tiki statue – an outsized carved wooden figure of a human form, often grotesquely exaggerated. It soon took its place in the American living room.

“The restaurants existed in a perpetual twilight, lit by propane torches and the fiery eyes of island. The 1937 Bing Crosby movie ‘Waikiki Wedding’ introduced more Americans to the exotica in their backyard. Then came World War II, which further directed America’s attention to a little-considered region of the world. When the war ended, returning servicemen brought home stories and snapshots of Pacific lands.

“In 1947 the Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl had set off from the coast of South America on a raft to test his theory that Polynesia had been settled by the Incas; his account, ‘Kon-Tiki’, became a runaway bestseller. In 1959 Hawaii joined the Union amid fireworks and hullabaloo, and two years later Elvis added his own brand of fuel to the South Pacific infatuation with his movie ‘Blue Hawaii’.

“Disneyland opened in 1955, and among its first rides was a Jungle Cruise, in which boats drifted through tropical scenes; a few years later the park’s creator presented an attraction called the Enchanted Tiki Room, where 225 birds chattered and danced among ‘tiki gods’ … Aloha shirts took off, driven in part by the ukulele-playing TV host Arthur Godfrey’s fondness for them. If it had thatch and torches and colourful fabrics and little statues (which Donn Beach liked to call his ‘cannibal gods’), the public wanted more of it.

“The American cult of tiki moved into the suburbs and beyond. Apartment buildings, bowling alleys, trailer parks, Laundromats and corner restaurants were dressed up with tiki heads and masks, rattan walls, dried blowfish and electric tiki torches …

“If there was a cult at the tiki palaces, it was that of the tiki drink … Restaurants sought to outhustle one another in concocting the most outrageous cocktails, giving them names like Pele’s Bucket of Fire, Sidewinder’s Fang, Molucca Fireball, Tonga Surfrider and the Aku-Aku Lapu.”

Unfortunately, gradually, inevitably, Curtis says, “tiki became tacky”. Trader Vic’s most famous branch, at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel, was closed by owner Donald Trump in the 1980s. Bergeron handed the chain over to his children and retired to paint and sell jewellery.

Irony will always find a way to turn creepy into camp, though, and the great tiki turn-around came in the late 1990s. “Tiki mugs that had languished in Salvation Army shops were snapped up and traded on eBay, and tiki aficionados gathered at tiki events and went on road trips to search out the survivors of the era.”

Curtis cites “tiki historian” Sven Kirsten as complaining asbout the “Jimmy Buffetisation” of tiki, which I take umbrage at because Buffet is, you know, great, but I can see how things got a little kitschy. Unfortunately Curtis loses me again with his conclusion.

“Beneath the gloss of kitsch, a touching sincerity informs many of those who today seek out lost tiki culture, folks who view it not just as a campy safari into the heart of faux-Borneo but as a search for a genuinely lost American civilisation.”

He then mentions a couple of popular tiki zines and books and the websites TikiRoom.com and CriTiki.com, and I also found MrBaliHai.com, BeachbumBerry.com and Mumu’s blog, which is something else again. These people are passionate.

Interestingly, the politically correct among the tiki worshippers sometimes fret about “offending living Pacific islanders”. I always thought I was doing them a favour whipping back the grog, but then Gauguin and the men of the Bounty probably thought they were too.

About a year ago a colleague handed me a CD of startingly non-kitschy new Hawaiian music by that guy who sings the haunting island version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”. I thought of pulling out the drinks blender and revisiting Margaritaville, but then I just sat and listened and enjoyed.

Remember, aloha means “hello” and “goodbye”.

Below, proof that I come by my interest in tiki culture honestly: My parents queuing up for the Tiki Room at Disneyland in California, circa 1970.