Hollywood, California · 1934
Zombie
Limit two. That was printed on the menu, and enforced.
- Created by
- Donn Beach (Don the Beachcomber)
- Tastes like
- Deep, spiced, deceptively smooth for its size
- Glass
- Tall chimney or Zombie glass
- Garnish
- Mint sprig
Ingredients
- 1 1/2 ozPuerto Rican gold rum
- 1 1/2 ozJamaican dark rum
- 1 oz151-proof Demerara rum
- 3/4 ozfresh lime juice
- 1/2 ozfalernum
- 1/2 ozDonn's Mix (2 parts fresh grapefruit juice to 1 part cinnamon syrup)
- 1 tspgrenadine
- 6 dropsPernod or Herbsaint
- 1 dashAngostura bitters
Method
- 1.Combine everything in a blender with 6 oz of crushed ice.
- 2.Flash-blend on high for no more than 5 seconds — you are chilling and aerating, not making a slushie.
- 3.Pour unstrained into a tall glass and top with fresh crushed ice.
- 4.Plant a mint sprig at the edge so it hits you before the drink does.
Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt — who renamed himself Donn Beach — opened Don the Beachcomber in Hollywood in 1933 and effectively invented the tiki bar as a form. The Zombie is his masterpiece and the drink that made the format famous.
The house story is that he mixed it for a regular fighting a hangover before a business trip, and that the man came back days later complaining he had been a zombie the whole way. The two-drink limit was real, printed, and enforced by the staff.
Donn protected his recipes obsessively. Syrups were pre-batched into unlabeled bottles marked with codes, so bartenders could build his drinks without ever learning what was in them.
On the record
The genuine 1934 spec was lost for seventy years. Jeff "Beachbum" Berry reconstructed it from a notebook kept by Dick Santiago, one of Donn's bartenders, and published it in Sippin' Safari in 2007. Nearly every Zombie poured between 1950 and 2007 — including most of the ones in tiki-branded rooms — was an invention with the right name on it.
Thatch note
Two. That is the entire note. Donn set the limit for a reason and ninety years have not repealed it.