Victor "Trader Vic" Bergeron

The stories he told about himself were better than the truth and he knew it. He was not born on a South Pacific island and a shark did not take his leg. Victor Jules Bergeron Jr. was born in San Francisco on December 10, 1902, the son of a French-Canadian grocer, and after the earthquake the family fetched up in Marin and then on San Pablo Avenue in north Oakland, where his father ran the Rock Island Grocery and his uncle Feret kept a saloon six doors down. Vic tended bar in it. He was a sickly boy — doctors took his left leg when he was six to stop tuberculosis of the knee, and by one account the disease cost him a kidney as well — and he grew up refusing to be treated as an invalid, a Boy Scout who played ball with the other boys and later a man who used the wooden leg as a stage prop. On November 17, 1934, with five hundred borrowed dollars, he opened a twenty-two-by-twenty-six-foot food-and-beer joint at 65th and San Pablo, directly across the street from his parents' store, and called it Hinky Dink's. To pull Depression drinkers through the door he sang, and he let them stick an ice pick in his leg.

The conversion came in 1937. He went south to look at Don the Beachcomber, carried on to New Orleans and Havana, and came home a believer; the hunting-lodge trim came out, bamboo and rattan went in, and his first wife Esther — who had been watching him swap meals and drinks for supplies and services for three years — gave the room its new name. What separated him from the other converts of that decade was the kitchen. Vic was a cook, and he built a Cantonese kitchen behind the rum: barrel-shaped Chinese barbecue ovens on a design two thousand years old, wood burned down in a brick pit and the embers shovelled underneath, the meat hung on hooks under an iron lid. Emeryville still fires them. And where his rival kept his formulas in coded bottles, Vic published — eight books across his life, from the Book of Food and Drink in 1946 to the Bartender's Guide that is still the one people mean when they say they own a Trader Vic's book. He gave the drinks away. It is a large part of why the canon survived him.

He said he built the Mai Tai at the Oakland bar in 1944, for friends visiting from Tahiti, and that one of them tasted it and said maita'i roa ae. The Beachcomber side has always claimed an earlier drink, and this guide does not referee that fight — the books in the Reading Room lay out the evidence properly. What is not in dispute is that a good deal of the rest of the list is his: the Fog Cutter and the Scorpion are credited to his bars, and the obituary writers reached for the ones with the loud names, the Missionary's Revenge and the Sufferin' Bastard. Nor was drink the whole of him. He painted in oils, cast bronzes, designed jewellery and collected fossils, and he ran the empire — twenty-odd restaurants and a nationwide fine-foods business — from the back of rooms he had largely designed himself.

He died at his home in Hillsborough on October 11, 1984, at eighty-one, a few weeks short of the fiftieth anniversary of the day he opened Hinky Dink's; the Chronicle called him an irascible, one-legged genius and his family buried him at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, a couple of miles up from the corner where it started. Here is the thing that makes him unlike every other founder on this chart. Donn Beach lost his own trade name and watched the chain from Waikiki. Stephen Crane's rooms went with the hotels. Skipper Kent's burned and faded. Vic's did not die with him: his grandchildren still run the company, the flagship still stands on the Emeryville marina where he moved it in 1972, and the Mai Tai he swore was his is poured every night in bars that never heard of him.