If you step inside the Diller Room in downtown Seattle, you will find an award-winning bartender making award-winning Tiki drinks.
His name is Justin Wojslaw…
Continue reading “Tiki VIP # 4 Justin Wojslaw (The Diller Room Seattle, WA)”
What is the oldest bar in Seattle?
I’m finding out that the answer isn’t as simple as it might seem. I definitely got this sense as I’m talking with Peter Andrijeski of Seattlebars.org. “You have to think about a few things,” Peter said. How long has the bar been in business? How old is building? A bar may be in a building that’s really old, but that doesn’t mean the bar itself is that old as well. The correct answer is the Merchant’s Café, which is located in the oldest part of Seattle: Pioneer Square.
A few years ago, Peter had the grand idea to have a drink at every bar in Seattle. That’s right gang: every bar in Seattle. How would one go about doing this? Can this even be accomplished? Peter was going to find out!
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David Bowie. We all loved him and his music. But why? What made him so special? I believe it was because Bowie always was two steps ahead of everyone else. He truly was a trendsetter. It takes guts to be into something no one else is doing and to break all the rules on how something is supposed to be done.
Bowie was a music trendsetter. Tiki has its own trendsetters. The Tiki revival started in the ’90s. Dawn Frasier was already ahead of the rest of us. She was living the Tiki lifestyle back in the ’80s.
Remember the ’80s? It was a decade of new wave and pop music, arcades and Atari, and bad clothing and hairstyle choices! Pastel pants and mullets: need I say more? While we were watching MTV, Dawn was painting Tiki landscapes and collecting Mid-Century furniture. When the ’90s finally came around and we started rediscovering Tiki culture, Dawn had already lived in Fiji for a few years.
There are two things I love about Tiki bars: they create mood and they create an escape. When you live where the weather isn’t the greatest, it’s nice to have a place that you can go and forget about what’s going on outside. I live in Seattle and it’s all about escaping the rain. If you live in upstate New York, you want to get out of the snow. If you live in a city where all you see are buildings and sidewalks, maybe going somewhere that has palm trees—even fake ones—would be nice.
Tiki Brian is out of Baltimore and if you’ve ever been there, you know that it’s a tight city with small streets and big buildings. It’s truly the concrete jungle. If there ever was a place that could use an exotic escape, Baltimore would be it. Tiki Brian created an exotic escape by creating a podcast: the Exotic Tiki Island Podcast!
Continue reading “Tiki VIP #1 Tiki Brian of the Exotic Tiki Island Podcast”
