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Tropical Tiki treat

Slip into a sarong, let down your hair and sip some amazing cocktails from coconut shells all this month at the Blue Bar

Photo: Bhagya Prakash K.

Tipsy on Tiki Cocktails are in Tiki style, a concept taken by sailors from the Polynesian Islands, who added a dash of coconut and fresh fruits

Round silver mirrors dangling from the ceiling with palm leaves and Hawaiian dancers in a bar surrounded by a pond in a rainforest.

Aloha! You will have to head to the Blue Bar at Taj West End for the Tiki Cocktail Festival.

On all this month, the Tiki Cocktail Festival is not your sipping-champagne-mixed-with-cola-from-a- wine-glass but rather drinking a revitalising fruit cocktail served in carved coconut shells, hollowed pineapples and wooden glasses.

With Bartender Joel Scholstens Lindsay mixing and blending some of the most refreshing cocktails and juices, you’d just need to slip into a sarong, put your feet up and sip on.

Most cocktails are in Tiki style, a concept taken by sailors from the Polynesian Islands of the Pacific, who added the flavours of coconut and fresh tropical fruits.

So after sweating it out on a hard day on the rough seas, what better way to cool off and dance the night away like you’re holidaying on some exotic tropical island than sipping on a Tiki-style drink?

Joel says: “There’s nothing new about Tiki, for it has been around for the last 150 years — it is the island drink after all.” He notes, “Tiki came back in vogue in the 1960s and it was just something that happened.”

Joel, who’s from Sydney, Australia, but has been serving his thirst-quenching cocktails for the last eight years in Vietnam, China, Florida and more, says that you’ll have to be brave enough to try Joel’s Jungle Juice, which is a concoction of Dark Rum and a secret mix of liqueurs and juices served in a pineapple!

And with a sly smile the jolly bartender says that “it is a safe cocktail…it doesn’t taste alcoholic but actually gets you drunk!”

For the bartender, London is the best place to be for “everything new in the beverage industry happens first over there so you get plenty of opportunity and exposure.” But Amsterdam is Joel’s favourite city to just relax and do some sightseeing.

So get dressed in your grass skirt or a tie-and-dye sarong, hook in some long chandeliers and munch on some grilled New Zealand lamb chops in barbecue sauce or a Vietnamese assorted grill.

And then lean back when you ask Joel for more of your favourite fruit to be added into the cocktail that is pierced with umbrellas and swizzle sticks that just “needs a pair of sunglasses to slide on” for that feeling of pure Tiki exhilaration.

AYESHA MATTHAN

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