IN OUR TIME of pandemic-induced malaise and despair, it’s become vital to fumble around in the dark for any cultural source of joy or moment of relief: an all-night binge watch of “The Golden Girls” (RIP Betty White), keeping the Christmas lights up past December, endless baking, and, more importantly, eating. But there are lessons to be found in the hard annals of history that might help guide us through our anguish today. In the wake of the stock market crash of 2008, kids escaped into the Busby Berkeley–style pop of Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, and Katy Perry. In response to the high inflation and stagnation of the 1970s, couples started swinging and bought water beds to bring a little bounce into their bedrooms. And as the Great Depression raged through the 1930s, those who could turned to one new experience where you could leave your troubles at the door: tiki, that characteristic American mishmash of rum, fried foods, and vacation fantasy.

Tiki culture peaked midcentury — there were around 20 Don the Beachcomber restaurants at the height of its popularity — aided in part by Hawaii officially becoming a state in 1959, which helped a surf-and-sand cultural explosion hit the mainland. Tiki’s cool faded in the late 1960s, when hippies who wanted nothing to do with the kitschy lounge tastes of their parents became the new arbiters of taste. But it survived in fits and starts, with some scattered resurgences throughout the decades.

Some of the original tiki spots have held on — the last Don the Beachcomber closed in 2018, but its primary rival in the 1930s, Trader Vic’s, still has locations in Georgia, California, Qatar, and Japan, with a new one being built in the San Jose airport. Incidentally, in 1993, a New York location of Trader Vic’s in the Plaza Hotel was closed after 25 years by Donald Trump after he bought the hotel and declared the restaurant “tacky” (though some might consider Donald hating tiki as something of a ringing endorsement). Some of tiki’s characteristics have also been absorbed into the larger culture — think of Jimmy Buffet’s take-it-easy “Margaritaville” ethos and the resilient popularity of Hawaiian shirts. No less than Trader Joe’s owes its name (a reference to Trader Vic’s) and South Seas aesthetics to its founder’s interest in tiki.

A number of new establishments are reimagining tiki for the twenty-first century. Interestingly, they’re not labeling themselves as such. Take the curious Sunken Harbor Club, which opened in 2021 behind a bead of curtains and above the swanky chophouse Gage & Tollner in the heart of Brooklyn. It does not advertise itself as tiki or have palm trees and hula girls as decor, but it specializes in tropical drinks and recalls the more maritime side of tiki, with a ship’s wheel on the bar and a backlit blue mural of a mermaid behind it, which gives the entirety of the tiny space a calming ocean glow. The interior feels like the hull of the Pequod: lined from top to bottom in dark-brown wood, with lanterns and ropes hanging from the ceiling, and spears mounted on the walls. There are pork dumplings and cod fritters, with a sauce so spicy only a cold sugary cocktail as a quencher will do. The classic Mai Tai is on the menu, but so are some inventive new makeovers, like the Singapore Burrapeg, a Champagne-cocktail version of the old standby Singapore Sling. Also on offer is a tall rummy White Zombie with a grapefruit-and-flower garnish; it’s so strong that when I order it the waiter half-jokingly tells me there’s a two-drink maximum. “People don’t give tropical drinks enough credit for diversity of style,” Garret Richard, chief cocktail officer at Sunken Harbor Club, told the New York Times. “They think it’s all just crushed-ice drinks.”

A favorite spot in New York is Pokito, which is something like the Gen Z dive-bar version of a tiki locale. Nestled on a quiet block of South Williamsburg, the proprietors would likely not refer to the bar as tiki, but the interior is dotted with paper lanterns and drenched completely in hibiscus-pink light, with floors of green-and-white tile that’s been drastically chipped away from wear to reveal the concrete underneath, as though it weathered a bad storm. The drinks are bright, brilliant concoctions in shades of anthurium red, tangerine orange, parakeet green, and orchid purple (my personal favorite: the Lolita, with vodka, butterfly pea flower, lavender, and lemon), some served with a cocktail umbrella, and the vibe is easy and lounge-like, with long benches made to spend hours on.

But there’s nothing quite like the straightforward, tried-and-true tiki mainstays, like San Francisco’s Smuggler’s Cove, which serves over 700 kinds of rum and around 80 different kinds of mixed drinks. The absolute best, however, is the Tonga Room and Hurricane Bar, opened in 1945 and still in operation today, across town in Nob Hill, appearing like a hidden cave inside the majestic old Fairmont Hotel. The Tonga Room was designed with help from a Hollywood set director, and it’s cinematically and dimly lit, with a pool in the center made to look like a lagoon; every 30 minutes, the sound of thunder cracks and water falls from a sprinkler on the ceiling into a basin, like rain. A house band called the Island Groove floats in the center of the lagoon on a thatched boat, an actual old schooner that carried lumber between San Francisco and the South Pacific, playing wavy, Hawaiian-style surf licks.

To wash down your cashew shrimp and chicken fried rice, you can order rum cocktails like the Bora Bora Horror or Pineapple Royale, which is served, of course, inside a whole pineapple. Guava panna cotta and Baked Alaska, a meringue relic from an era long ago, are available for dessert. The room is cavernous and dark, which helps preserve just enough of its heyday glamour: if you squint, you can almost imagine the post-war revelers coming through, wowed by the novelty and newness of a place that felt like far away.

In the age of Seamless and fast casual and drab plastic takeout containers, there’s something freshly magical about the idea of tiki places like the Tonga Room: it’s restaurant as entertainment; adventure, even. There is no point in ordering delivery on your iPhone from a tiki bar — you have to actually be there, to touch the bamboo and wicker, to drink from the coconuts, to hear the artificial rain and thunder. "Every American needs this,” food guru Anthony Bourdain — who partly credits going to 1960s tiki bars as a kid for making him yearn to travel — once said of the Tonga Room. “Because if you've got no love in your heart for this place, you are a sick, twisted, lonely fuck.”

However cheap and inauthentic it all might seem, there is in tiki ultimately some kind of unlikely there there, a place where you can go and be immersed in something — a fantasy, a folly, an absurd dream only Americans could’ve come up with. It’s no wonder tiki was born during the Great Depression — it’s a sugar rush, a shot of saccharine serotonin, a technicolor relief from the real world. And in a difficult post-pandemic moment, when many of us are somehow still stuck in the house baking bread, tiki is a time and place apart from the home we have — somewhere, nowhere, everywhere, where the food is fried and the drinks are always as sweet as sunshine.