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13 regional cocktail recipes, from West Texas’ Ranch Water to Maryland’s Orange Crush, to try around the United States or make at home.

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge

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To use the terminology “most important” when it comes to tiki bars seems like a paradox. Tiki bars were never meant to be important. Born in America’s post-Prohibition era, these bars became wildly popular in the 1950s and ’60s for celebrating a romanticized notion of island life. Bamboo and waterfalls, torches and exotic carvings, pupu platters and, of course, boozy rum drinks served in ostentatious drinking vessels. Yet, despite being predicated on a heavy dose of frivolity, tiki’s enduring legacy merits our respect, especially amid the genre’s modern revival.

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge

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24 aperitivo-minded bars in NYC, Las Vegas + Miami to try.

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge

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From the cradle of the Daiquiri to a New Orleans stalwart, these are the 10 historic bars that still inspire modern drink culture.

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge

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What the craft cocktail renaissance was to the aughts, the faux dive bar is to the teens and now ’20s. In New York, this is embodied in places like Ray’s on the Lower East Side, a painstaking replica of a dive (owned by actor Justin Theroux), and the Holiday Cocktail Lounge, an upscale joint inhabiting the cadaver of a real former dive in the East Village, and, of course, Dolly’s. The rise of faux-dive bars correlates to the decline of real dive bars, of which maybe a handful still exist in New York. These include Billymark’s West, Lucy’s and Milano’s. Each of these beer-soaked, time-worn, slightly sorrowed spaces leads the precarious, tenuous existence of an outlaw holdout. Both the real and the faux dive appeal to New Yorkers exhausted by the try-hard tropes of nightlife. Many of us moved to New York precisely for the chaotic ozone in which dive bars flourished. And whether or not it was dead by the time we arrived, the familiarity of a laminate wood–paneled room illuminated by neon has the ability to remind one of home, real or imagined. Home: a place without a shtick, sweatpantsville, a refuge from agenda.

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge

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When I was in the final round of interviews for perhaps the most significant job of my career, I got a curious email from my future editor. My writing was good, sure, and I knew about wine. But are you comfortable writing profiles? What a weird question, I thought—mastering the profile is journalist training wheels. But I considered the question in context, and deduced the subtext, which was: Would I be comfortable writing about rich people? Specifically those wealthy enough to have reached the top rung of what in Napa Valley are euphemistically called “vintners”? I wrote back, saying yes, of course I could write profiles, and yes, that included those of the rich, provided they’d done things that were newsworthy. I pointed to a glowing column I’d written about a guy who’d built a multibillion-dollar company in the Midwest before returning to farm pinot noir on the Oregon turkey farm where he grew up. I was hired.

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge

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Swim-up bars can now be found everywhere from Montego Bay to midtown Manhattan. But how and where did the idea first originate?

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge

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To use the terminology “most important” when it comes to tiki bars seems like a paradox. Tiki bars were never meant to be important. Born in America’s post-Prohibition era, these bars became wildly popular in the 1950s and ’60s for celebrating a romanticized notion of island life. Bamboo and waterfalls, torches and exotic carvings, pupu platters and, of course, boozy rum drinks served in ostentatious drinking vessels. Yet, despite being predicated on a heavy dose of frivolity, tiki’s enduring legacy merits our respect, especially amid the genre’s modern revival. “My focus has always been on tiki as an art form, not on tiki as mixology,” explains Sven Kirsten, setting a template for how we will best define the genre’s most important bars. A tiki archaeologist, designer and author of The Book of Tiki, Kirsten claims, “There are so few original bars left now that are great examples of the style, they need to be worshiped as temples of classic tiki design.” The closing of many original midcentury tiki bars, like Don the Beachcomber, means that the few remaining old icons are utterly crucial to understanding quintessential tiki. And while the drinks at aging tiki dens like Trader Vic’s or even Tiki-Ti might not be up to snuff to a modern craft cocktail drinkers, the “realness” of their fabricated Polynesian aesthetic remains a significant cultural artifact. “It is sad to see that the foodie community nowadays labels anything ‘tiki’ as long as it has some tiki drinks on the menu, and passes on places with tradition and historic context because their cocktails are not up to par,” says Kirsten. “This shows great ingratitude and ignorance to why the modern version exists at all.” Nevertheless, there are modern tiki bars that don’t just accurately pay homage to tiki’s past, but also elevate its drinks, using fresh fruits and high-quality syrups as opposed to the commercial “mixes” that became synonymous with tiki during its darker days.

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge