Don the Beachcomber's
Huntington Beach, California
Huntington Beach, California
In both the creation of "tiki culture" and the support of the local, middle-class surf community, this week's place has been irreplaceable. Actually, we'll see about that, as Don's closed last year; although the owners assure the public that it will be opened, elsewhere, again.
When your name is Ernie Gantt and you're from some dough-pop town in eastern Texas where there isn't much at all to do and nothing going on, you grow up yearning for a world of adventures in exotic locales. When you're old enough to leave home, the best way to realize those dreams in 1926 is to become a merchant seaman and sail off to those realms of exotica.
No one really knows what happened during Gantt's five years in the South Seas, but when he found himself beached and working as a bartender in Hollywood, he began to build his personal legend around his merchant experiences, however fanciful they may have been. When he opened his own bar he began his metamorphosis from Ernie Gantt to Donn Beach, adventurer and world traveler. To facilitate this transformation, he jammed any kind of nautical or tropical flotsam and jetsam he could find on the junk market into his bar, now named Don the Beachcomber's, and began his real adventures.
It wasn't just the tropical ambiance that his customers enjoyed, it was also Gantt's Beach's talent for mixing drinks; a talent that was truly remarkable. As he was a small businessman always struggling to make payroll, he relied on recipes made from rum, which was in those immediate post-prohibition days the cheapest booze on the market. The rum also complimented his decor. From that base he patented around thirty distinct concoctions.
Drink after drink was invented by Beach, including favorites such as the Navy Grog, the Cobra's Fang, and the classic Zombie. Between the drinks and the rattan stools and the ferns, not to mention the first examples of "Chinese cuisine" to be served in the United States, Beach created the tiki bar in that windowless and dark saloon. When celebrities [Bogart, Bacall, Howard Hughes, Erroll Flynn, Clark Gable, Bing Crosby, David Niven, Ernest Hemingway, etc.] discovered the place, Beach was able to expand from the original location to a chain of Don the Beachcomber's that ranged from L.A. County to West Lafayette, Indiana.
While in my New York years I was familiar with Beach's biggest competitor, Trader Vic's, from its location at the Plaza Hotel, I didn't discover what was the last remaining Don the Beachcomber's in Huntington Beach until a furtive, four-day surf trip to SoCal about a decade ago. On the final night, my surf buddies suggested dinner at the quintessential tiki bar and it was perfect. Not only was it still a place that served over-sweetened "Chinese" food and tiki drinks, but we were entertained by a collection of Polynesian musicians and hula girls. The indoor waterfall was particularly splendid, as were the tales told by the local surf bum habitues.
As Huntington Beach is known colloquially as "Surf City", and as surfers on both coasts are as appreciative of irony as the next person, Don's was a pleasant hang-out for the middle-class and wealthier shredders. Well, until the local taxes worked their inevitable magic and it closed last year.
The final owners maintain a lively Facebook page and website, however, and the big fish sign is still in place on the Pacific Coast Highway, just waiting for someone else to come along and resurrect that tiki god one more time.
