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A Book Adds Rigor to the Laid-Back World of Tiki Cocktails

A Chadburn cocktail, part of a new book about the tiki aesthetic.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times

One of the richer paradoxes of the cocktail world is that, for all their Hawaiian shirts and beach-bum bonhomie, tiki aficionados are among the most doctrinaire pedants you’ll find in any bar.

Just ask Martin Cate, the owner of the beloved San Francisco tiki bar Smuggler’s Cove, and a bit of a stickler himself on the proper tiki aesthetic.

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The new book by Martin and Rebecca Cate.Credit...Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

“It is quantifiable,” Mr. Cate said. “When I hear people say: ‘Oh, tiki is whatever. It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s just a good time,’ now, no. That’s not true. To me, that’s as crazy as walking into the Guggenheim and declaring it to be Art Nouveau. There are definitions in this world.”

Mr. Cate and his wife, Rebecca Cate, recently set out to record those definitions in “Smuggler’s Cove: Exotic Cocktails, Rum, and the Cult of Tiki,” published in June by Ten Speed Press. The book is as much a lifestyle manifesto as it is a guide to a particular bar and its drinks.

At 352 pages, it contains not only recipes for dozens of cocktails — some historic, some original — but also a history of the tiki movement in America; an accounting of its revival and quirky major players; a dissection of the décor of Smuggler’s Cove and the people who created it; a novel categorization of rum types (based on production method, not color or country of origin), and an exacting definition of what the term “exotic cocktail” means.

In the Cates’ opinion, the term has to do with the way drinks were created in the 1930s by Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt, a.k.a. Donn Beach, founder of the Hollywood bar and restaurant Don the Beachcomber, and the acknowledged godfather of the tiki lifestyle and drink style. (This section goes on for pages. Tiki drinks may be fun, but nobody said they were simple.)

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Martin Cate making the Chadburn cocktail.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times

“We wanted to say, these drinks don’t exist in a vacuum,” Mr. Cate said. “Tiki cocktails are part of a larger story of ‘Polynesian Pop.’ It’s part of this four-decade fantasia, this obsession with Polynesian arts and culture, which included music and painting and art and architecture.”

The volume has proved a quick success. The lei-wearing demographic has predictably picked up the book, but so have some unexpected parties, including people who have been led to the bar by the book, rather than the other way around.

“I didn’t expect that,” Mr. Cate said. “I thought people would already know the bar.”

Recipe: The Chadburn

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: An Aesthetic Universe Under a Small Paper Umbrella. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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