In tiki’s nascent days, Don the Beachcomber introduced drinkers to the pleasures of his “rhum rhapsodies.” Beach hired a mostly Filipino staff, unusual for the era, but kept his bartenders secreted in a back room. Obviously Goonies is our Pacific Northwest pirates! -Inside Passage owner Travis Rosenthal “It’s made with real boys.” The humor is droll, but the drink itself has layers beyond ube and rum. The bartender presents the Four Boys cocktail to an enthralled table. A smooth, violet concoction rattles gently inside a lumpia on a skewer waves from its depths like a cattail. Waves of dry ice “steam” cascade from beneath the lid. Inside Passage has exactly 10 of these dropping one would be an expensive party foul. It’s shaped like a rice cooker, plastered with stickers. The fajita eFFECt ripples once again as a bartender uses two hands to walk a turquoise mug toward one of the hut-like booths. As The New York Times puts it, a few white guys from Depression-era California “took rum from the Caribbean, food from Asia, and iconography from the Pacific Islands, put ’em all in a shaker, strained the results, and called it tiki.”
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Plus Akin, like plenty of others in her industry, had concerns about its other connotations.
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Something hard to come by in a room with large windows looking out on Pike Street’s Saturday night escapades.
“People desperately wanted Rumba to be a tiki bar,” Akin remembers. Edible flowers and umbrellas became flaming limes and miniature inflatable swans, then, once night, an entire child’s sandbox set repurposed as a drinking vessel.Ĭustomers dug it. Every Wednesday, Rumba’s staff set aside its usual MO-classic daiquiris and rhum agricole plucked from the back bar’s 750-bottle collection and sipped like a whiskey. Much of Inside Passage’s DNA, refined and codified, comes from those weekly tiki nights. They replaced colonial escapism with a different latitude of Pacific noir. The staff ditched certain elements (scantily clad ladies as decor, Māori religious idols as drinkware). “Things got soggy, quickly,” remembers Akin, who built the sturdy new wood versions herself, since the commercial market was a little light on drink vessels shaped like undead Amazon packages. Back at Rumba’s Wednesday tiki nights, it came in a taped-up cardboard box. The Amazombie 2.0 exhumes tiki’s classic zombie cocktail, with a trio of cachacas-from local company Novo Fogo-in place of rum. But this style of bar usually means tiki. San Francisco has Whitechapel, which mimics a steampunk train station Los Angeles’s Scum and Villainy channels Star Wars geekery.
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One that spirits you away from adulthood’s email-answering, parking spot–finding mundanities, to an elaborately designed room full of ornate drinks. “Immersive bar” is the industry term for a place like this. “Have fun!” a two-top of strangers, high on flair, exclaims to me one night as I navigate the compact space for my first seat at a bar since early 2020. Hot rod fabricator turned bar buildout auteur Notch Gonzales architected the result of these labors she goes by the name Kiki. Some of the town’s most dazzling bartenders spent last spring at home crafting fake cephalopod suckers.
It’s a testament to Inside Passage’s many visual layers that the enormous tentacled sea creature suspended overhead in a perpetual state of mid-slither, isn’t necessarily the first thing you notice when that door slides shut behind you. A sliding door inside Rumba, Capitol Hill’s library of distilled cane spirits, is the sole portal to this tiny new bar, where drinks go beyond rum and Northwest touches reorient traditional tiki culture to our own shores. Is this a little like buying a wine because of its cool label? Well, yes, but it’s easy to understand the need for some decision-making guidance at Inside Passage, a borrowed reality of underwater cocktail bravura.
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