The 1 Hotel Hanalei Bay, situated at the foot of the Napali coastline, can lay claim to one of the most stunning views on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, or perhaps anywhere in Hawaii, or perhaps even the world.

But the dozen or so guests in the resort’s open-air
1 Kitchen restaurant in August had their backs to the view, more intent on the bottles of rum, curacao, orgeat, juices — and was that a bottle of Pernod? — being unpacked by a very energetic, tall surfer dude with a backward ball cap.

The dude, Johnny Quinn, is a bartender at the 1 Hotel’s Kai Maika’i bar, and each Monday he teaches a cocktail-building class called The Perfect Mai Tai to curious vacationers.

“The most celebrated tiki cocktail in the world, and for good reason,” is how the 1 Hotel Hanalei Bay’s website explained the class.

I hadn’t come to Hawaii with the sole intent of seeking the perfect mai tai — I was here for a long-delayed vacation and to see the 1 Hotel Hanalei Bay, which opened in March (its previous incarnation was a St. Regis) and resort updates on Oahu. 

But the 1 Hotel Hanalei Bay wasn’t wrong about the celebration. Like a painkiller in the British Virgin Islands, a dark ’n’ stormy in Bermuda, a Negroni in Italy or a Guinness in Ireland, the mai tai leads nearly every Hawaiian resort’s bar menu and is a necessary part of luaus, sunset cruises and any place where a hammock joins a palm tree. 

I myself had been on Kauai for less than 24 hours before coming into contact with my first mai tais at the open bar at the Smith Family Garden Luau in Kapaa. After that, I became fascinated by the way the drink was woven into the environment of different Hawaiian resorts and a part of today's Hawaiian tourism. 

Like many of Hawaii’s modern traditions, the mai tai is not native to the state. It originated in California, then migrated to the Islands via a steamship company, where it cemented its position as the ali’i, the chief, of the tiki world.

A crash course in mai tais

The Perfect Mai Tai class at the 1 Hotel Hanalei Bay is listed on the resort’s giant chalkboard of daily events, and reservations are required. Quinn has been leading the class since the 1 opened. Alexis Eaton, the director of marketing, public relations and programming for the resort, said all of its mixology classes are “so popular.” 

“We’re trying to figure out how to manage it because we have so much demand from our guests wanting to participate and loving it,” she said.

As Quinn bopped around, searching for ingredients and mixing, shaking and straining with gusto, he took us back to midcentury tiki culture, the birth of the drink and the feud between two famous cocktailers, “Trader Vic” Bergeron and Donn Beach, the proprietor of Don the Beachcomber, over who invented the mai tai.

According to legend, the first mai tai was mixed by Bergeron at his famous Trader Vic’s restaurant in Oakland, Calif., in 1944, and it included J. Wray Nephew rum, lime, orange curacao, rock candy syrup and orgeat, with a mint garnish. A story that I heard on the Islands, reproduced on the Trader Vic’s website and the cocktail menu at the Halekulani in Waikiki, says that Bergeron gave the drink to friends of his visiting from Tahiti, who tasted the drink and pronounced it “mai tai roa ae,” meaning, “the best” or “out of this world.” Needless to say, the name stuck.

Beach, who also laid claim to being the mai tai’s originator, used grapefruit, falernum and Pernod in his version, according to online recipes. Neither is anything like the pineapple-with-a-cherry-on-top and rum-float version that most people associate with mai tais. 

In all, Quinn mixed four mai tai recipes: A reproduction of the original Trader Vic drink; one of Don the Beachcomber's; one inspired by the later, fruitier Royal Hawaiian mai tai; and a "modern" version of his own. He poured a shot glass-size taste for each of us on each round and shook up four full-size versions with the proper presentation and garnish, which he urged guests to take.

Now, I’m generally an imbiber who doesn’t like sweet drinks, so I haven’t counted the mai tai as a favorite. But the class perfectly changed my perspective on what a mai tai is — and what it can be.

“The Trader Vic mai tai is a lime punch with rum,” Quinn told me later. “It’s lime and citrus forward, it’s got a few different rums, and that lime-citrus balance along with the orgeat brings out some of the caramel and darker flavors in the rums.

“The second drink is almost like a cool, mixology drink, kind of like the last word cocktail … where you put in ingredients that make no sense and they come out as something that’s completely different. That one's really, really cool,” he continued. 

The third one, "the Royal Hawaiian, that’s the tropical one. That's where that whole lineage comes from.”

Last but not least was Quinn’s own interpretation of the cocktail, which uses KoHana agricole rum from Oahu and macadamia-nut orgeat to give it “100% Hawaii-born ingredients.” He called it “modern” and an “homage” to the Trader Vic version. 

The mai tai is so malleable, the class is even a learning experience for the teacher. Execs from wine companies and Ko Hana Distillers have dropped in to audit the class or provide feedback; other experts, he said, will just “chime in.” A guest even mailed Quinn a hardcover book on mai tais after recommending it during class. “It’s on my coffee table at home,” he said.

Quinn modestly did not call his concoction the “perfect” mai tai. As I wandered away from the 1 Kitchen with a pineapple-shaped glass of mai tai in my hand, and into the adults-only pool, I wondered: Is there such a thing?

Just in this resort alone, there are different mai tais on at least three different restaurant menus, which speaks to the sheer ubiquity of the drink and multiple ways to tweak and present it. At the Kai Maika’i bar, according to the 1's website, there’s the Mai Tai-Roa Ae, made with Kuleana Nanea rum, sweet vermouth, passion fruit, pineapple, citrus, orgeat and a KoHana Kokoleka rum float. At the flagship restaurant, Welina Terrace, it’s the Kauai’i-tai. At the Sandbox restaurant adjacent to the main pools, it’s simply called a mai tai. 

The doctor is in

After flying from Kauai to Oahu, I made tracks for the Four Seasons Resort Oahu at Ko Olina, where the doctor is in the house.

The Four Seasons’ ode to the mai tai is Dr. Mai Tai’s swim-up bar at the adults-only pool. The bar, which opened in 2021, is actually a retro trailer with the windows removed, more akin to a Volkswagen bus that surfers might tool around in on the North Shore than an alfresco bar at a luxury hotel.

But Four Seasons resort manager Jason de Vries said Dr. Mai Tai’s has “completely become a signature of the resort.” The bar sold 11,000 drinks last year. 

In its original incarnation, a bartender in a lab coat would make the rounds at the pool deck with a bar cart. But when the resort wanted to design the swim-up bar, de Vries said, it commissioned local artist Nick Kuchar to handle the trailer’s cool-vintage-meets-modern design, and the hotel’s director of engineering created a sliding tray that bridges the literal gap between the bartender in the van and the guest in the infinity-edge pool. 

The bar-cum-bus has two mai tais on offer: The Nai-Nai Nitro Mai Tai, with its use of grapefruit and Pernod, appears to go the more Beachcomber route, while the Kaena Point Nitro Mai Tai seems a more traditional Vic’s version.

As for naming the bar after the mai tai itself, “I think it was to celebrate that … it's a symbol of paradise," de Vries said. “And I think you translate that to Hawaii really so well, and it’s become the iconic drink of Hawaii.” 

Making the mai tai Hawaiian

Technically a native California cocktail, and usually mixed with a blend of Caribbean rums, one way resort bars make the drink their own is the use of Hawaiian spirits and mixers, as in Quinn’s final “100% Hawaii” mai tai. 

For example, one could use an orgeat made with macadamia nuts grown on the Hamakua Coast instead of traditional almond orgeat. The website for Hamakua Coast Premium, maker of the orgeat, includes a mai tai recipe. 

A name on many F&B managers’ lips appears to be Ko Hana Distillers, and visitors en route from Oahu’s southeast side to the North Shore may pass its headquarters in Kunia. It uses Hawaiian sugarcane — ko, in Hawaiian — to make agricole rum. "Grass to glass" is how Royal Hawaiian bartender Kui Wright put it to me. 

The distillery offers rum tastings daily, and tours of the facility start at $25, including a rum flight. For travelers more interested in the process, an estate farm tour includes a walk through KoHana’s sugarcane fields and costs $45. 

And yes, KoHana also sells a premixed mai tai cocktail, perhaps for a sunset drink on the lanai.

Ending where it began

I knew if I wanted to round out my mai tai education, there was one place I had to go. 

That destination is the famously pink Royal Hawaiian hotel, now part of Marriott’s Luxury Collection. The Royal Hawaiian is practically synonymous with mai tai culture, as it’s generally acknowledged to be the official birthplace of the cocktail in Hawaii.

Shipping line Matson Co., which owned the Royal Hawaiian (and its sister resorts, the Surfrider and the Princess Kaiulani), in the 1950s commissioned Bergeron to create a drink for their Hawaii-bound tourists, and he gifted them the mai tai. 

The Royal Hawaiian Resort’s beachside bar is called the Mai Tai Bar, and it takes great pride in its namesake cocktail. There are at five on the menu. 

If you’re in Waikiki, look up Wright, the Mai Tai Bar’s head bartender, who took me through three of the choices. 

The Vic’s 44 is a nod to the classic. For all those guests who belly up to the bar and say, "I don't like a sweet drink" (guilty!), Wright recommends the Vic’s 44. "It’s probably our second-biggest seller.”

The iconic, 1953-era Royal Hawaiian Mai Tai adds fresh squeezed orange juice and pineapple and the dark-rum float to the mix. "Pineapple was a huge industry in Hawaii," Wright said. "And [Bergeron] said, 'Hey we have all this fresh pineapple; let's use it." Where the Vic’s 44 is rum forward and bright, the Royal Hawaiian is smooth and luscious. 

Wright also attributed Bergeron with developing the rum float, which gives the modern mai tai its distinctive two-tone color, saying that as the story goes, he’d top off friends' drinks with an extra splash of dark rum.

The third drink in the lineup, which Wright called the “big dog,” is the Ali’i Mai Tai, which uses KoHana rum, muddled pineapple and a coconut-banana foam. “It not only changes the flavor, it changes the texture of the drink,” Wright said. “It’s just a whole different experience, it’s something fun, it looks cool.” 

It’s a premium, all right: $40 a glass. Despite the price tag, Wright said the bar sells “a bunch” of Ali’is. “When you're on vacation, you want to have the best,” he said. And since “mai tai” means “the best,” it only makes sense. 

A hotel spokesperson said the bar sold 124,000 Royal Hawaiian mai tais last year alone — that’s nearly 340 a day. 

“And we have a lot of people who come here and do the whole list,” Wright said, pointing to the bar’s menu. 

Check, please

My flight to the mainland was leaving the next morning, but I reckoned I had one final chance to taste a mai tai, and that was at House Without a Key, the alfresco restaurant and lounge at the Halekulani, adjacent to the Royal Hawaiian. 

House Without a Key fully reopened last summer after a pandemic-era closure and an refurb. It still features low tables for sunset-hour cocktails, pupu and live music. But an addition to the restaurant is a pool bar, on which leather-bound cocktail menus are set up. 

“One of the most popular drinks at House Without a Key is Halekulani’s mai tai,” the menu proclaims, adding a quote from its head bartender that the mix of fresh juices and simple syrup gives it a “perfect balance” of tart and sweet. 

The Halekulani mai tai arrived, and I could see from the cocktail book that it harks back to the traditional Vic’s recipe, with a Lemon Hart 151 rum float and, of course when in Hawaii, an orchid garnish. 

I sat there with the sunset, Diamond Head in its glory, a Hawaiian melody in my ear and a bit of Lemon Hart foam on my upper lip. I can’t say that I have the taste buds to choose the “perfect” mai tai. To me, they were all pretty damn good.