Talk:Mai Tai

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[edit] Falernum

the recipe calls for "flaernum"... I googled it and there are only 12 hits on the entire web. I think it could not be right.

  • You are wrong. The correct spelling is falernum. And it is the correct ingredient if you are making the Don the Beachcomber mai tai, which is 10 times better than the Trader Vic version -- or any other, for that matter.... Hayford Peirce 18:46, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

The ingredient is called "Falernum". It is available in limited supply throughout the US. Contact your local distributor. I recently bought a case of John D. Taylor Velvet Falernum from a store in the midwest. Falernum is used in many wonderful Tiki cocktails, but not the Mai Tai. With respect to the opinion above, there is only one Mai Tai. It was invented, as shown in the article, by Trader Vic. Don the Beachcomber invented many wonderful drinks, some using Falernum. However, he did not invent the Mai Tai. And contrary to popular belief, a Mai Tai contains no pineapple. Making a drink called a Mai Tai and using different ingredients is like making a Singapore Sling using Rum and Coke. Unfortunately, the Mai Tai is one of those popular drink names that is thrown around casually by many drinking establishments.

If you read a long newspaper article by a Honolulu columnist that concerns a lunch he arranged between Don and Vic towards the ends of their careers, Vic admits that Don invented it before he did. A google search will find this. It's also repeated in the Don the Beach. recipe book that his niece published a couple of years ago. Falernum can also be bought on the Net from daVinci in Seattle, who sell their flavored syrups widely -- but not the falernum. Hayford Peirce 21:04, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
The article is several degrees of hearsay. Trader Vic had a signed affidavit affirming that he created the drink in 1944. While it is entirely possible that Donn Beach created "a" drink called the Mai Tai, it is not "the" famous Mai Tai, and the flavors of each are so different it is impossible to think that TV's drink is an attempt to duplicate the DB recipe (or the other way around for that matter). In the end, Trader Vic's affidavit would hold up in court--Donn Beach's hearsay would not. --ThirtyOneKnots 15:57, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Spelling

The article states "An Internet search for references coupled with the word "rum" shows 40,600 hits for "Maitai" and 38,400 hits for "Mai Tai", so correct usage for this drink can apparently be either one word or two."
Well, I did Google "maitai rum", and actually got a lot of hits that actually use "mai tai". So I Googled

"mai tai" rum -"maitai"

I got 165,000 hits; then I tried

"maitai" rum -"mai tai"

and got 9,250 hits (as well as a query from Google asking if I really meant "mai tai"), and some of those entries were camel-case (ambiguous). So using the famed Google test, it seems the two-word version is preferred almost 18 to 1. Just to be on the safe side, I checked Oxford, Merriam-Webster, and American Heritage online; they only list the two-word version. So I'm pulling the spelling sentence. Cheers. --SigPig 06:29, 1 July 2006 (UTC)


[edit] "Maitai" is not tahitian

Incidently the tahitian word is not "maitai" but "maita'i" ! where you find a glottal stop between the second a and i and you can easily understand that when you discover that the same word is "meitaki" in Marquesan language or "maitaki" in Cook islands maori.... stefjourdan@caramail.com