Starting with an innocent comment by Rebecca after a home Tiki party, the book details Martin’s journey through the San Francisco Trader Vic’s, to opening Forbidden Island in Alameda, and finally to creating Smuggler’s Cove in 2009, which is now consistently heralded as one of the world’s best bars. For a person just getting into rum, it can be overwhelming trying to learn which brands are from which countries, how a “Jamaican rum” tastes different from a “Virgin Island” rum, and so forth. It’s thoroughly readable and provides a gentle introduction for the newcomer enthusiast while still dropping plenty of tidbits to keep the hardcore rum and Tiki zanies happy. Whether your bringing the whole family or enjoying a night off from the kids, we have plenty of options for everyone. I learned it firsthand from Martin while spending days with him on a bus travelling to Jamaican distilleries as part of an ACR/WIRSPA sponsored tour.

Smugglers Cove 1 - Wide Horizons Holiday Park - Hoseasons Smugglers Cove 1 - Wide Horizons Holiday Park - Hoseasons

My own two cents: Photocopy the pages with the rum categories and keep them tucked into the book to avoid flipping back and forth between a recipe page and the suggested rum list. And no book on the Tiki revival would be complete without the origin story of how Smuggler’s Cove came to pass. Even among the cocktail enthusiast population, the Tiki crowd is particularly passionate and eager for fresh material.This might seem academic, however the book uses the categories (rather than specific rum recommendations) in every recipe. Here, Martin and Rebecca don’t attempt to outdo Jeff in his quest to cover every angle and the life story of early Tiki bartenders.

Smugglers Cove Booking | Smugglers Cove Smugglers Cove Booking | Smugglers Cove

In that light, the only surprise is that Martin and Rebecca Cate’s new book, Smuggler’s Cove – Exotic Cocktails, Rum, and the Cult of Tiki, took so long to appear on the cocktail book scene. Even if you’ve read all of Jeff Berry’s books multiple times, don’t pass up Smuggler’s Cove, with its distinctly different style and spin. It’s entirely natural to want to list these excellent bottlers, but short of classifying each of their ever-growing list of expressions, they don’t fit cleanly into any one of the book’s categories.

Some marketers love to promote additive-laden ethanol from a multi-column still as equal in value to a premium pot still rum from, say, Hampden Estate in Jamaica. Your two examples are fairly extreme in that you’re comparing two dry rums against two sugar bombs, but your point would still be well made even if the nuances were more subtle. Somewhat of a “Tiki insiders” secret for years, the book puts the technique squarely into mainstream awareness. The book’s final few pages feature recipes for Smuggler’s Cove ingredients (orgeat, cinnamon syrup, etc.

Smugglers Cove | Pub and Restaurant | Carvery Home | Smugglers Cove | Pub and Restaurant | Carvery

It would be beneficial if this additional nudge (in parenthesis) was used more widely throughout the recipes. It’s an entirely fair criticism of cocktail recipes in general that specifying an exact spirit–say… Plantation Five Year–seeds trepidation in the mind of the reader who may not have that exact product or doesn’t yet have the extensive, hard-won knowledge to know a good substitute. A recent trend in the cocktail world is for high-end, world class “destination” bars and celebrity bartenders to further extend their brand and cement their reputation via authoring a book.There’s absolutely something to be said for experimenting with different rums within the same recipe. Plus, people’s palates are different – an ultra-funky, high hogo Jamaican might enrapture one person (say, me) while turning off another (say, Mrs.