Raymond Realista "Ray" Buhen

The men out front took the bows; the men who made the drinks were Filipino, and they worked in the back. When Don the Beachcomber opened in Hollywood at the end of Prohibition, the drinks that would launch a worldwide craze — the Zombie, the Missionary's Downfall, the whole book of "Rhum Rhapsodies" — came out of a back room where four young men hollowed pineapples, squeezed citrus, shaved ice, and guarded the secret syrups. Tiki historians call them the Four Boys. Only one of the four can still be named, and it is Ray Buhen.

Born on Bohol in 1909 and arriving in Los Angeles at twenty-one — reportedly to study, possibly for medical school — Buhen was tending bar at the Beverly Hills Hotel before he joined Don's Beachcomber in 1934. Unlike the others, he refused to stay in the back. "My dad insisted on working the front," his son Mike recalled. "He'd say, 'The more people you meet, the better off you are.'" Over the next twenty-odd years he became a journeyman of the tropical-drink circuit — the Seven Seas, Sugie's Tropics, and Stephen Crane's Luau, where he is remembered as the first Filipino to run the front bar. He kept the recipes in his head and kept them close.

On April 28, 1961, he finally put his own name on a door — or nearly his own: Tiki-Ti, a twelve-stool shoebox at 4427 Sunset Boulevard, in a former violin-repair shop his father-in-law owned. It was, and remains, one of the smallest and most fiercely loved rooms in tiki. The menu ran to dozens of drinks and carried Buhen's own inventions alongside the Beachcomber canon — Ray's Mistake, born in 1968 when he grabbed the wrong syrup; the Blood & Sand that sends a wind-up bull charging down the bar to a chorus of "Toro!"; and drinks that reached back to the islands, the Anting-Anting named for Filipino folk magic and the Chief Lapu-Lapu for the chieftain who killed Magellan in 1521.

Buhen poured until he was past eighty-eight and died in 1999, just shy of ninety, after roughly sixty years behind a bar. The room never left the family: his son Mike Buhen Sr. and grandson Mike Buhen Jr. still run it, and every Wednesday at nine the house raises a glass to the founder. He changed the family name from Buhion to sound more American and, his son has said, never spoke Tagalog in public — the quiet cost of the era he worked in. History gave the front-bar showmen the credit for inventing tiki. The truth is that a Filipino kid from Bohol was mixing the drinks the whole time.