Aloha,

Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt was born February 22, 1907. After leaving home in 1926 and traveling around the Caribbean and South Pacific he landed in California and eventually opened a place called Don's Beachcomber where he served an unusual combination of potent tropical drinks and Cantonese food. The first Don the Beachcomber restaurant opened in 1937 and began to attract some of the most famous names in Hollywood.

Gantt, who would later change his name to Donn Beach, worked to fill the post-Prohibition cocktail vacuum in America and began to create exotic cocktails that would become legendary—including the infamous Zombie. He would later go on to run rest and relaxation centers for the United States during the Second World War and create the International Market Place in Waikiki while contributing to the post-war tourism boom in Hawaii.

He had many competitors and the Don the Beachcomber concept was copied many times, most famously by Trader Vic. The Moai recommend the book Sippin' Safari by Jeff "Beachbum" Berry for a great telling of this story.

Recreating Don the Beachcomber cocktails has always been a challenge because early on Donn became very secretive in order to protect the recipes that made his restaurants unique. Many of the recipes were in code and used secret ingredients and mixes. His signature restaurants did not survive his passing and many of those recipes went to the grave with him. Or did they? Sippin' Safari may have cracked the code and revealed the original Zombie recipe to a modern audience. You be the judge.

Two Don the Beachcomber locations recently opened in Hawaii and there are also reports that new locations may open in Marina Del Rey, California, and Las Vegas also. There is also late breaking news from Chuck Purrington, the owner of Kona in Huntington Beach, California, that the property has been saved and will reopen as a Don the Beachcomber.

This famous name seems poised to make a comeback.

Keep the torches burning,

—Tagata Maori Rogorogo