Zach Malm has only been into tiki 18 months and that time he visited a ton of tiki bars including Smuggler’s Cove, Zombie Village and Sunken Harbor Club to name a few. And in that 18 months Zach decided to build his own tiki bar! It’s called the Meka Leka Hideaway and if you like Pee-wee Herman, you know exactly where the name came from…
What is the tiki scene like where you live?
Zach- I guess I’ll let you know when I find out. I don’t know, we’re so new to this, we haven’t been to any tiki bar twice except Zombie Village in San Francisco, because we stayed a block away from it. In my direct area, just north of Seattle, there’s a cheesy tiki bar with a lot of sports on tv that we checked out once. In my general area, my favorite experience has been at Inside Passage. I just loved the feeling of being in that space, how much thought went into every part of it. The lamps, the color, it being a bar-within-a-bar, the nods to local history.
What brought you into the tiki lifestyle and how long has it been part of your life?
Zach- Ha, this may be a record for your blog, but tiki has been part of our lives since May 2023. So…18 months. I really didn’t know anything about real tiki culture prior to that. I barely even drank. I’m 42 and I’ve never been drunk my whole life. Never learned to like beer or wine, kind of forced myself to learn to like cider, then we went to Disneyland with our kids in May 2023, a long pandemic-delayed return after our first trip in 2019, and while planning the trip, Amanda found Trader Sam’s and put me in charge of getting a dinner reservation, which meant waking up early exactly 60 days prior to going. We had a great time there, and elected to get 2 mugs and a bowl as souvenirs. I was expecting cheap plastic mugs, they didn’t tell me the price until I got the bill and it was literally the most expensive “meal” of my life. I actually left my wallet there, probably because of how stunned I was by the bill, but also because being there put my head in another place. I ended up having to walk a mile and a half to retrieve my wallet after we’d already gone back to our hotel, and my feet were already killing me from all the walking all day at the park. So, I guess technically, I’ve been to Trader Sam’s twice.
Anyway, after we got home I told various friends about it and one said that their little ritual after returning from a Disneyland trip is to make tiki drinks, and I thought, “oh, right, so those were all ‘tiki’ drinks”. And as I thought about it, I realized that all the drinks I’d ever really liked were rum-based. Mojito, Dark ‘n Stormy, Pina Colada, things like that. Not tiki drinks, but I realized tiki drinks were almost all rum-based, and full of flavor, and thinking of how much I enjoyed the experience of being in Trader Sam’s, that started me down the rabbit hole. A few months later, my wife and I had the chance to take a short trip by ourselves, and picked San Francisco simply because going there cost the least number of miles, and in looking up what to do there, we saw there were a bunch of tiki bars, so I made a list of ones to check out. We went to Smuggler’s Cove, Zombie Village, and the Tonga Room, and after that I was totally hooked. Now, I don’t think I’m neurodivergent, but my most neurodivergent-coded trait is my ability to obsessively focus on a new area of interest, find out as much as I can as quickly as I can. Long story short, 4 months later we started turning the unfinished half of our basement into the Meka Leka Hideaway.
Can you give a little history of how the Meka Leka Hideaway came together?
Zach- My mom’s dad owned a bar downtown back in the 50s, called the 1911 Tavern. About a year ago, I went through some of the local archives at the downtown Seattle library, because they had a matchbook from the 1911 Tavern, it had my grandpa’s name on it and everything. It’s the first time I’d seen any physical remnant of space. While I was there, since I had to book time, I figured I’d check out some of the local tiki history, so I looked through and scanned menus from long-gone Seattle restaurants like the Kalua Room, The Outrigger, and The Polynesia, which was also built in 1961, right on the pier. Our house was also built in 1961, our whole neighborhood was one of the many things built in the lead up to the 1962 World’s Fair, which our parents had gone to and told us about, so when we started visualizing our bar and discussing theming, we knew we wanted to incorporate the Fair and local history. So, while we were going to antique malls, thrift stores, garage sales, salvage shops, and so on looking for tiki décor, we also got lots of World’s Fair things.
The half of the basement that is now the bar was unfinished. The previous owners had painted the cement floor, stapled a sheet to the joists for a ceiling, and put up a mish-mash of plywood, pegboard, etc. for the walls. So, and Amanda had to convince me to be this thorough, but we made sure to start with a great foundation, which meant we went down to the studs, replaced all the insulation (some of which was just a rolled-up piece of carpet), put up drywall, then plywood over the drywall to support hanging décor, ground the paint off the floor, installed a subfloor, then the floor.
We had an electrician add 2 circuits and add a bunch of outlets in the ceiling and the wall, so all the lamps plug into the ceiling outlets, which we can turn off and on with a light switch. We didn’t want to use smart home devices, like an Amazon Echo or Google Home, we wanted everything as analog as possible. And to bring it back to the local thing, when it came time to build the actual bar, we found live edge planks of 1000-year-old cedar from the Washington coast, cut down in the 70s, but only recently turned into planks, and Amanda spent weeks finishing them for our bar top.
So, there’s local stuff all over the place. Even the menu I put together – I drew and colored the drinks, then scanned and finished it in Photoshop, and the finishing touch was adding an emblem in the middle that was from the front of the menu for the The Polynesia that I’d scanned at the library.
Any story behind the name of your bar?
Zach- “Meka Leka Hideaway” (pronounced “Mecka Lecka”) is a reference to Pee-wee’s Playhouse, and Jambi the genie’s signature phrase, which I’ve seen spelled different ways and is supposed to be gibberish that sounds Hawaiian by way of Yiddish, so we use a Hawaiian-style spelling, but the phrase is “Meka leka hi, meka hiney ho” (and in the Christmas special, which we watch every year, he adds a “Meka leka hi, meka ho ho ho”). The name doesn’t match our theming, so Amanda in particular feels uncommitted to the name, but we did hide a Pee-Wee’s Playhouse diorama in the wall, visible through a peephole with a button to turn on the lights in the diorama, and we found a tiny tropical drink in a tiny coconut and a tiny barrel that says “rum” at a dollhouse miniatures shop, so Pee-Wee’s holding the drink and Pterri the pterodactyl is arriving with the rum. So, the “hideaway” aspect is that the connection between the name and the theming is literally hidden in the wall. But I think the non-literal connection I make is if you’ve seen the documentary Beauty is Embarrassing, about the artist Wayne White, one of the main designers of the Playhouse sets and characters, or know anything about the production, a lot of it was creative people doing things they’d never done before but going for it, and making it by hand, and that was our approach to making our bar. We did almost everything ourselves, and almost everything we did was something we hadn’t done before. So, it was a really exciting and scary creative project from start to not-ever-finished.
How far have you driven to buy something tiki that you saw online?
Zach- Lake Stevens? What is that 25 miles? A guy in the local Ohana Facebook group was moving cross-country and selling most of his home bar, so I went up for his garage sale and picked up a lamp, some glasses, and a few other things. The biggest ordeal I’ve gone through in buying a tiki thing, though, was renting a U-Haul to go to South Seattle to buy the display cabinet, which we’d found at a salvage place, and I was recovering from a strained hamstring I’d suffered from spending too much time on a step ladder, doing unbalanced work every day for weeks, hanging plywood panels and bac bac and such. The cabinet was too good to pass up, but I re-strained my hamstring carrying it into the house with a friend and for the next week I was in the most pain of my life – hurt to sit, hurt to lie down, had to start physical therapy for the first time. That was 3 months ago and I’m still feeling it. But I have the cabinet.
What is your favorite Tiki drink? Why?
What is your favorite Tiki bar? Not including your own?
Zach- The Leilani Nouveau, from Smuggler’s Cove. It was the first drink I had when we went there, and when we got home I wanted to learn how to make it so I could make it for my friends. It was one of the best drinks I’d ever had, and it’s what I think of as the signature drink of the Meka Leka Hideaway. We’ll always have that one available. I think my favorite tiki bar is the Sunken Harbor Club in NYC. My best friend lives out there, and I went out to visit him a couple months ago, and convinced him to go to a couple tiki bars with me, but that one was just phenomenal, a perfect balance of amazing drinks and amazing design, another bar-within-a-bar situation where once you go up there, it’s like a portal to another time and place. Absolutely loved it, can’t wait to go back sometime together, since I kind of feel bad that Amanda didn’t get to experience it with me.
Outside of great drinks, what do you think are essential elements in creating the perfect Tiki environment?
Zach- I like the mid-century style stuff, pre-tiki “bamboo bars” full of beachcomber décor. I don’t need actual carved tikis, though we have a few small ones in the display cabinet. I’m all about the dark, atmospheric vibes and handmade stuff. Not necessarily horror dark, just dark. No TVs, no white walls (as Bamboo Ben says), no windows, but lots of colorful lamps and enough organized chaos to make your eyes wander and have you see something new every time you go. I built an insulated cover on a hinge for the one window in our space, so it’s still there and accessible if we need it, but you wouldn’t know if unless I told you. I wanted to totally control the environment. The music doesn’t have to be exotica, but I feel like the vibe of the space, what you feel when you’re in it, should match the vibe of what exotica tends to create, so I think the best tiki bars will play exotica music because that’s what feels right in the space they’ve created.
What does the future hold for you and your home tiki bar?
Zach- Hopefully a whole lot. We have so many ideas. The whole time we’ve been building it, we’ve talked about the space being a template, a creative prompt where when you understand the visual language you’re working in, you’ll get ideas all the time for things that could work in the space. For example, from the start, Amanda has wanted to make a cave wall area, so even though we put up the bac bac and carved trim everywhere, we were figuring we could layer on other things in certain areas later, like faux rock. We want more visual texture. We want friends to notice something new every time.
And putting this space in the context of our particular time and place, we hope our friends can see the tiki bar as a mental health resource, that they can come over and be in the space and soak up the vibe, with or without a drink, because the next 4 years could get very dark and scary and we’re not going to be in a good place if we just try doomscrolling our way through it. I’m sorry if this disappoints conservative readers of the blog, but in a very real way this tiki bar wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t had a pretty traumatic experience of the first Trump administration and gone through a major reevaluation of who I am, what I believe, what’s important to me, and how that impacts my approach to life. So, this whole project is a quest to create a space where it’s almost impossible to not be present, a space that engages my senses and helps me feel more alive.
Anything else you would like to add?
Zach- I’ve really loved how positive and encouraging the tiki folks I’ve met have been, online and otherwise. The Adventureland Tiki Room Builds was a particularly great resource for learning how to do a bunch of this stuff, and I also learned a lot from both Spike’s Breezeway Cocktail Hour and A Moment of Tiki on YouTube. A year ago, I’d never done flooring or drywall, never used an angle grinder or a router or a speed square, never worked with bamboo or torched wood, never made a lamp, there are so many things I know how to do now, and it’s been a blast learning and creating and somehow not totally screwing up along the way. I love the DIY spirit of home tiki bar building, and hope to keep learning and keep creating for a long time.