“Mai Tais are very tiki in that they’re very hard to balance,” says Kavé Pourzanjani, owner of Paradise Lost in New York City. “All the tiki [drink] problems apply: They’re often too sweet, and if your lime juice isn’t fresh it completely ruins the cocktail.”
Experts Featured
Chloe Frechette is the executive editor of Punch.
Paul McGee is a New York–based rum expert and former owner of Chicago’s Lost Lake.
Kavé Pourzanjani is the owner of New York City’s Paradise Lost.
Kathryn “Pepper” Stashek is the head bartender at Bar Kabawa in New York City.
Though the Trader Vic original ranks among the simpler tiki recipes on paper, its four key ingredients—rum, lime juice, orgeat and orange liqueur—are not an easy combination to get right. And the ways in which things can go wrong have evolved over the years. “Ten to 20 years ago, ‘too sweet’ was a concern,” said Kathryn “Pepper” Stashek of Bar Kabawa, also in New York. “I think now we can skew too dry.”
Stashek and Pourzanjani were joined by rum expert Paul McGee and myself to go in search of the ultimate Mai Tai. We were looking for a drink that was bright and had a pronounced rum backbone, without too much funk. “You should taste all the elements, but the goal is that everything comes together coherently,” said McGee.
Naturally, one of the biggest variables among the recipes was the rum choice: No two recipes called for the same blend. Some even incorporated other sugarcane spirits, like clairin and charanda, into their recipes. Trader Vic used a 17-year-old Jamaican rum in his original recipe, so the judges were looking for something that had the richness that comes with age, but were open to a split base so long as it did not throw the drink out of balance. “Those bolder rums that bartenders favor can backfire in a Mai Tai,” said McGee.
But rum was far from the only consideration. As Stashek noted, “I’ve had good Mai Tais with any number of different rums; there are a lot of different blends that work. I want to know what orgeat you’re using.” She added: “I don’t want it to be too syrupy, but I want to taste almond in there.” As with the rums, no two recipes used the same orgeat; six were housemade, including one that used cashews in lieu of almonds, while three were store-bought.
The unanimous winner was Garret Richard’s Mai Tai, which also took top honors at our last Mai Tai tasting, in 2019. His recipe splits the rum quotient between an ounce and a half of Denizen Merchant’s Reserve 8-year rum—a blend designed specifically for the Mai Tai—and three-quarters of an ounce of Coruba Dark Jamaican rum. His orgeat of choice is the store-bought Latitude 29 formula, while the orange liqueur is split between Clément Créole Shrubb, a rhum agricole–based liqueur, and Grand Marnier, which is Cognac-based. When this drink came out, the last in our tasting, Stashek noted, “This hits all four notes that I’m looking for, and in the right order.” Pourzanjani declared, “That tastes like a Mai Tai.”
Second place went to the Mai Tai from Josh Schaff at Cayo Coco in Birmingham, Alabama. His recipe builds off of an ounce of Appleton Signature rum, complemented with a half-ounce each of Planteray and Myers’s. (The bar uses limited-edition versions of each, but Schaff suggested the flagships of each brand in their place.) In addition to the house orgeat (which blends almond milk with sugar, orange flower water and rose water), Demerara syrup and Pierre Ferrand Dry Curaçao round out the recipe. The judges found it bright, with a pleasant candied orange quality, and not too dry. The rum blend was mellow, prompting McGee to dub it “a Mai Tai for the people.”
In third was the Mai Tai of Will Pasternak, a New York bartender formerly of the rum bar Blacktail. His recipe combines two rums—Appleton Estate 12-year and Rhum J.M Blanc—alongside two orange liqueurs, Orgeat Works toasted almond syrup, lime juice, rich cane syrup and a few dashes of saline solution. The judges appreciated the inclusion of a bolder agricole-style rum. “It’s a balanced Mai Tai where you can taste the rum,” said Stashek. In other words, it ticked all the boxes.
