How to Make the Perfect Mai Tai
JK Grence
Ring the bell, it's time for Last Call, where JK Grence, bartender at Shady's, serves up booze advice and recipes. Got a burning question for your bartender? Leave it in the comments and it might be answered in a future column.
After working for five years at the now-shuttered Trader Vic's in Scottsdale, the Mai Tai has become my very favorite drink. No other drink conveys a festive, tropical mood like it. Even those horribly sweet, neon-colored things that pass for Mai Tais in bad Chinese restaurants are still alluring for their retro charms. But, once you've had a real Mai Tai, everything else is just rum-spiked Kool-Aid.
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Goodness knows I know the history of the drink better than anyone else in Arizona. You see, one day in 1944, Vic was trying to come up with a new drink, and he wanted it to be simpler than some of the complex creations he'd done in the past. He started out with a bottle of 17-year rum from J. Wray & Nephew of Jamaica. He added some DeKuyper orange curaçao, a small dollop of French orgeat (almond syrup), the juice of a large lime, and a little rock candy syrup to balance the flavors. In went half of a lime shell to give the drink a little color.
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