Harry K. Yee

The single most romantic gesture in the tiki drink — the orchid laid across the ice — was a housekeeping decision. Harry Yee explained it plainly to the journalist Rick Carroll in 1998: "We used to use a sugar cane stick and people would chew on the stick, then put it in the ashtray. When the ashes and cane stuck together it made a real mess, so I put the orchids in the drink to make the ashtrays easier to clean." That is the whole man in one answer. Nearly everything the world now reads as Polynesian atmosphere — the vanda orchid, the little paper parasol, the backscratcher standing up out of the glass — came off Yee's bar in Waikiki, and he never once pretended any of it was ancient.

He was born in Honolulu in September 1918 and came to the trade sideways. Work was scarce, a relative ran David's Cafe out in Kalihi, and in 1952 Yee started pouring there — seven years before statehood, before the jets, when Hawaii counted its visitors in the low hundreds of thousands rather than the millions. He moved on to Trader Vic's, and then to the property that would define him: Henry J. Kaiser's Hawaiian Village, which opened on Kalia Road in September 1955 and only became the Hilton Hawaiian Village when Conrad Hilton bought in and took over management in February 1961. Yee was its head bartender for more than thirty years. He reckoned he had made over a million Mai Tais, a drink he was always careful to say was not his — asked whose it was, he sided with Trader Vic.

What was his arrived in 1957, when a salesman for the Dutch distiller Bols turned up with a liqueur nobody had a use for. Blue curaçao was a solution in search of a drink; Yee looked at it and saw the water outside. The Blue Hawaii — rum, vodka, pineapple, sweet-and-sour and that startling blue — is dated by Hilton to January 3 of that year, and it is still one of the bestsellers on the property. The Tropical Itch came the same year with a Chinese backscratcher dropped in it, which sold so well that somebody had to go into the backscratcher business. The parasol, by his own account, went into a Tapa Punch around 1959; the drink is long forgotten and the parasol is on every beach on earth. The claim is not airtight — cocktail historians point at Donn Beach importing the things decades earlier, and Yee may be the popularizer rather than the inventor — but the trail into the modern glass runs through him.

He was frank about what he was doing and why. Tourists arrived asking for Hawaiian drinks that did not exist, so he and his colleagues built them: "catchy, not too strong and nice to sip." His own rule was simpler still — "a Hawaiian drink to me is something they don't get back home." After he left the bar he became principal of Honolulu's Bartenders Training Institute and spent years teaching young bartenders the drinks he had invented, which is an unusually direct way for a house style to survive its house. Hilton threw him a hundredth birthday party in the Ali'i Tower in 2018. He died on December 7, 2022, at 104 — a man who had outlived the golden age, the crash, and the revival, and lived long enough to watch a new generation of bartenders rediscover, one by one, the things he had worked out at a hotel bar to save himself trouble.