Mariano Licudine

If the front-of-house showmen took the bows, the men who actually built the drinks were, again and again, Filipino — and Mariano Licudine is the one Florida remembers. They called him the Houdini of the liquids, and for once the tiki-bar hyperbole undersells the man: the Mai-Kai's entire cocktail program, the thing that still makes Fort Lauderdale's last great Polynesian palace worth a pilgrimage, came out of his head and stayed there. Born in Manila in 1907, he took one of the more improbable roads into the trade — the pineapple fields of Hawaii, a hospital job in Santa Barbara, and a Hollywood stretch chauffeuring Laurel and Hardy and mixing their Scotch-and-sodas — before he ever stepped behind a serious bar.

That happened in 1939, when he went to work at Don's Beachcomber in Hollywood. A year later Cora "Sunny" Sund — Donn Beach's first wife and the business mind who ran the mainland company while Donn was overseas — chose Licudine to help open the new Don the Beachcomber in Chicago. He stayed sixteen years, learning the guarded Beachcomber canon and, in the manner of the house, keeping the recipes locked in his own memory. One of those was a strange thing he had been quietly developing for years: coffee, rum, juices, and spice served cold. Chicago never put it on a menu. Florida would.

In 1956 the Thornton brothers, Bob and Jack, poached him to run the bar at the restaurant they were building in Fort Lauderdale. His contract is dated August 30; the Mai-Kai opened that December, and Licudine finally got to do things his own way. He wrote an ambitious 43-drink card, much of it descended directly from Donn's recipes and much of it invented outright — the coffee riddle became the Black Magic, and the Mai-Kai's Jet Pilot took Don the Beachcomber's Test Pilot as its starting point rather than claiming to have hatched it. The drink of his that travelled furthest was the Derby Daiquiri, an orange daiquiri that Tim “Swanky” Glazner’s research places on the Mai-Kai’s very first menu. Rums of Puerto Rico registered it on August 1, 1958, and that November it was among a reported seventy cocktails put before judges at the rum board’s competition in the Eden Roc at Miami Beach; by February 1959 it had been proclaimed the official drink of the Florida Derby at Gulfstream Park, a designation Esquire noted the same year. When New York’s Cue magazine printed the recipe, Manhattan restaurants began selling it as the “$100,000 drink,” after the size of the race’s purse. Gulfstream let it go eventually. The Mai-Kai never has. Unusually for a bartender of the era, he worked out front, a name and a face the Thorntons put in their advertising.

Licudine poured at the Mai-Kai for twenty-three years, retiring in October 1979 and dying the following year; he is buried in North Lauderdale, a few miles from the bar. What he left behind is rarer than a signature drink — it is a whole living menu, held so faithfully that generations of Mai-Kai bartenders have poured his builds essentially unchanged, straight through the room's four-year, twenty-million-dollar restoration and its 2024 reopening. He was the living wire between Donn Beach's Hollywood book and Florida's temple, and the wire still hums.