Another Mai Tai? [Royal Hawaiian Hotel's Surf Room]

what the hell i'm so bummed right now like i just want to go home [Music] aloha folks welcome back to spike's breezeway cocktail hour i have a friend coming on the show tonight we've been buddies for a while but we've really never had the opportunity to hang out so i'm really excited about this but this next guest was like hey i have this great recipe for a mai tai and i was like oh no dude there's only one mai tai there's a there's one mai tai but there's not there's like several mai tai i've always been in the mindset that if somebody calls the mai tai the blank mai tai then yeah make all the mai tais you want the one mai tai 1944 trader vics i would love to bring on to the show my buddy jason t smith thanks man how are you yeah how you doing i am good what oh have you never had a tall guest before i've had several tall guests but not that tall so this will be fun okay so what is your connection to tiki uh well i don't really like tiki i just wanted to be on your show i say that because there's a small faction in the tiki community that claim i don't like tiki oh really this is a don the beachcomber logo tattooed on my forearm what more could i possibly do why do people say that you hate tiki i don't know but anytime someone crosses me or has a will about me they're like he didn't even like tiki he said it himself that's what they say i'm like wait crosses you oh yeah you know i'm a big personality sometimes people don't like big personalities but my wife and i are driving to the sip and dip in a couple weeks okay which is great falls montana yeah so we're gonna be in the car for about 3 000 miles to see a tiki bar yep not into tiki one bit who drives three thousand miles for a tiki bar that doesn't have good drinks that's the place where the mermaids yes that's where we're going we're going to go there so uh i've loved tiki since we discovered it we moved to southern california from cleveland imagine cleveland winters yes they're horrendous so did you ever go to the kahiki well i didn't but my wife did that was like they're like every couple of months they would run down to columbus yeah she didn't realize what it was until we got into the tiki scene and discovered it in like late 2000 early 2001 and then she's like holy crap i want to take hiki all the time i i think that happens with a lot of people where they don't understand like that they went to tiki places until much later in life oh wow that was like a big deal that i went to the royal hawaiian when i was a kid in laguna beach or whatever well one thing i noticed that you like to say is the uh my kai was built in 55 when it was 56. oh i say 51 yeah and you always put your little disclaimer up 56 oh yeah cause i screw it up yeah my mom was there opening here wow they were over for like two months of my grandparents yeah yeah took a five minute vacation to fort lauderdale and they were at the mike hi why is it opened my family's been going to mykai since 56. that's amazing yes but i'm not i don't like tiki one thing not i mean you want tiki life on the knuckles would that get it done with that did people stop saying oh what do i have to do to prove it you know when you take an obscure draw the beachcomber logo from like the 1960s and put on your forearm yeah that pretty much cements that you really dig tiki yeah that's immense maybe you need a whole trader vic's menu like the the dudes chasing the girls around on your chest no one's done that i haven't done the back piece yeah what the hell yeah maybe that's it so i did like a three-part thing on my ties yes and then you wrote me up and you're like hey dude let's do my tie and i was like well i but i already did three my ties and the funny thing was i hadn't seen the suck em up one just yet and then i'm like okay i suggest something you did already oh right and then i saw it suck them up i'm like oh that was an offshoot of the one i want us to make yeah yeah and so i'm like and there's a story that goes with it so i thought because your whole show is about the cocktails and the history yeah that's why i thought let's do this drink once i started learning about it i'm super excited to do that so we're going to make a mai tai yup from the what is the hotel royal hawaiian so the royal hawaiian is a big pink hotel that is uh colonial how would you call that architecture 1920s we have gotten rid of all the tikis from hawaii now we've built this gigantic palace on the beach which is going to boil down which is so funny because that on the beach comer basically came to hawaii and said hey uh things like the royal hawaiian tourists don't want to see that tourists want to see hawaii like the hawaiian culture so let's do that again oh yeah and so he came from hollywood and then he created the international marketplace and hosted hawaiian musicians and hawaiian artisans well he actually came from at that point chicago really oh you know because he was i thought you didn't like tiki yeah sorry this is a 14-hour one because i can i can drop you the knowledge on dons in chicago since i owned the the business ledgers for the whole company really oh yeah 1940 to 1982 chicago from the start of dons to the close of dons i have all the business books and it's amazing the information in there but when you read it imagine reading a 1940s ledger written in 1940s legalese oh yeah and you're not an accountant or a lawyer you're just a dude who likes tiki the first read-through i'm like try i need some water yeah right hell and then you start researching looking up names and figure out who the players are you're like whoa there's an insane story here and so we're talking about trader vic's and my side oh yeah so the interesting thing about this my title it really isn't like credited to trader vic i mean it was yeah but it is but you just have to know the the lore of it so right so when vixx opened in the international marketplace vic pulled out the last second and his partner said tough and they opened vixx so trader vic's had nothing to do with vic oh and so when you collect mugs from the trader vic's in waikiki turn into dagger which is polynesian pottery okay they're very collectible hard to find and they look like your seven-year-old kid made them sure but they're so collectible so vic wasn't even part of that but the royal hawaiian called them said yo vic can you come down here and refashion your mai tai and make it an island mai tai so we can promote hawaii so most people say a mai tai would juice no way sure that's awful now what it became in hawaii is awful this version that ass well the early versions of like the mai tai that were not the 1944 mai tai are still really complex cocktails they're like really good i'm excited to try this thing so this is the surf room mai tai the one that vic crafted for them so they could sell the islands so for this cocktail we will be using oranges limes lemons pineapple juice simple syrup orange curacao or jot light puerto rican rum jamaican pot still black and demerara rum all right let's make this thing you want to cut that thing in half yes okay well that is pretty slick it's okay it's getting it's losing its edge a little bit wow that's pretty nice though yeah so we're squeezing out one ounce of lime juice well we're getting away there should i scoop this up and put it back uh do you want to do the other one here yeah who was your guest that just chucked the lemon over there that was just sounds like one of my uh my girlfriends i had to watch that a couple times because it was so good oh i think it was one that had the crazy awesome eye makeup the blue that extended out brianna yeah yeah she's the kind of person that would just throw fruit around my house yep that was she was great so i guess we need another another lime these are uh yeah so we need one ounce total yeah uh for the two of us oh yeah but we've got another lime right here don't you worry [Music] you're getting grief you're squeezing bad when people watch your videos and leave comments i get grief from everybody about everything okay do you have youtube haters no i don't think i have well i have trolls i have one person that does thumbs down on every single video oh you only get one yeah my me and my mom my mom is 78 we host a youtube show live on sundays oh wow we get five thumbs down every time wow and it's my mom's show i just kind of host it we let her run it somebody just doesn't like your mom somebody hates on my 80 year old mother it's horrible yeah oh jeez and they watch the whole show because when we ask for a thumbs up at the end of the live show that's when they happen i go so you watch the whole show wow you've got the content the information you're going to use that to make money for yourself dare give my mother a thumbs down how bitter is that oh we've raised money for cancer and this and that and giving us thumbs down while we're raising money for cancer like how awful are you youtube's a vile place most of the viewers of the breezeway cocktail are terrific oh yeah most most of mine are awesome it's just those five you have one out of five cut that thing in half yeah we'll get this oh that was that was a bad half that wasn't two we need a half yep get in your hole quarter ounce per cocktail half ounce for the drink or for two you know there we go yup cool all right all right so half an ounce for two cocktails so wait you don't have a bigger one of these you jam this in there i usually do it by hand okay orange juice because you know they make bigger ones yeah like you can just go to bed bath and get a bigger one you go to amazon it just shows up like two days later my orange one started flaking off into my cocktails oh i didn't want to drink paint chips paint it when i squeeze these i kind of squeeze them from the top and then it kind of directs the the juice down i don't know if it's like a tested technique but it seems to work for me okay so one ounce of orange juice per cocktail and two for two okay so there's the orange juice so we're done with the juice oh we're not no okay but i will tell ya we don't have citrus growing out of our backyard and so we don't we don't get to pick it because we live in the desert we used to use this dole that was the oj pineapple so just two ounces of that and they still make it but i can't find it anywhere i always squeeze lemons and limes yep but sometimes when it came to the oj and the orange i just poured it out of this and it sounds easy i keep trucking uh so that's one ounce that's so that's for one cocktail so we need one more ounce oh yes on that side yeah i was looking at the wrong side i'm like what it worked out though what okay cool what this is one of those drinks that has like a lot of ingredients so if you're making this at home i hope you have stocked up because there's a lot a lot of stuff involved here should we go to the simple syrup sure quarter ounce per cocktail so uh half ounce did the math in my head and i was like god i hope i'm right that was five eights correct so quarter ounce of or shot per cocktail so another half ounce [Music] what's the last time you open this bad boy uh it might be a little bit oh my god really yeah got pliers if i was at home it was my own thing i would use my teeth my wife would yell at me and then uh all right we have a lovely assistant let me let me try it real quick all right let me show you i don't care i had an injury to my arm huh shut up quarter ounce of or shot per cocktail so half an ounce of oregano and orange it's like an almond liqueur syrup oh cause i watch you crutch yourself at every show the little thing comes out down the bottom syrup right now because i watch myself back and i go what'd you just say you idiot i guess that's corrected you on your show i feel bad but i just binge watched you the last two weeks i've watched like 72 hours of spike in the last two weeks now can i ask you a question did you ever think about that when you're making these videos that there's going to be people who will binge watch you do you ever think about your binge watchable i'm i never thought that anybody would watch anything so the fact that like we're just talking to a camera yeah i forget that there are literally thousands of people yeah who are studying us right now because that all of a sudden makes me terrified that doesn't bother me but i never you know i've been doing videos for a long long time and mine are usually live i do some pre-record stuff but yeah people who fight me when they're you know just getting into like selling lines that's what i do and i teach they're like oh my god i just watched like 14 of your shows in a row and i'm like i never thought of me being binge like you know shows being bingeable but if you get into it like i really got into watching you and just enjoying all your guests and the cocktails and the history i'm like and plus i was coming on so i'm like well i better be ready i got to see what's going on here you don't want to be caught in some kind of trick question okay let's do the cure sound do you have a cure sound that you prefer so i have like four different ones so if you come to my house whatever you want i i can usually facilitate a friend of ours uh came over once and tried to stump me with a drink that had maple syrup like hang on a sec where's my maple syrup wow he's like dang i can't even stump you there was a dude at the blind rabbit and he made a cocktail called the topless hula girl and kind of for the the hula girls it has maple syrup and it's so good oh speaking of your awesome band i am at frankie's once a week for 12 straight years and until i binge watch you last week yeah had no clue that drink was named after you guys oh yeah the hula billy honey the whole heading so that was awesome i was like dang i drank that drink i'd see it on like i had no clue and you said it says the spike of rum i'm like spike how did i not realize that did you notice the stools from frankie's over here oh i didn't realize or the chairs yeah yeah you mean the most uncomfortable bar schools ever of all time you know they had like 24 chairs one comfortable and so we'd all try and fight for that chair when we got to the bar boss got to the point where he was like i'm sick of these things falling over he said they fell over all the time so now they live in my bar and they fall over in here it's cool okay so quarter ounce of curacao so half an ounce for two drinks i want to smidge over it's a little bit over i have a plant over here that i feed uh nice alcohol the one guest who did a dash that was like 14 ounces i was like oh was that uh was that tiffany i think i was like whoa playboy model tiffany she's just like yeah this is how i make a cocktail and i was like oh no there's a dash i'm like whoa what's a pore if that's a dash what's a pore it's very hard to correct um a former playboy model on really anything oh yeah speaking of when's the hair and makeup getting here because everyone that is on the show seems to be really done well i'm like you know i just changed my shirt and i wiped my head and i'm good i'm like yeah i'm ready let's do this well the girls always look really good but uh yeah we uh i hate that i shoot this in 4k because it's you know oh i'm gonna look extra ugly thank you all right so we're into the rums now and i'm hoping that we have two ounces of this don q otherwise we'll have to go and find something else but oh come on man oh no oh it's an ounce it's an ounce and a half should we finish it with some white stash sure yeah that sounds good okay so we're gonna add a little bit of this hamilton white stash it was really it's a lightweight never had any really oh what do you think about corks absolutely hate them because they dry rot away in vegas and you go to pull out a cork of your 30 year old rum and just snaps in half because there's no moisture in the air all right so let's call it right here thank you so much we'll see you if i lived anywhere else i would say oh i love them but wow really you know many times i've had to push the cork back in yeah then take the bottle dump it out through a strainer get all the little pieces out and then go get a generic cork to put back in happens way too often i was at a state sale the other day and they had some old whiskey yeah and i wanted to see how it smelled and i wanted to pull the cork off and it just crumbled in my hands and the people running didn't know us i just set the top back on i'm like i don't need any booze thanks and i walked away wow yeah i've never heard of anybody being betrayed by a cork yeah live in the desert and you'll see how you do not like corks okay they are your enemy this is a shocking revelation for me today uh let's move on to uh the demerara or yeah we can do the pot still black which looks brands breaking new brand news you don't need pot still black right you can use karuba or my normal korean i do this whole show me jason can't open stuff yeah i'm gonna stab this ah he says ed you made it too tough see these are good because they don't deteriorate like the regular corn yeah when you finish a bottle you keep these for when your other bottles and corks deteriorate you're like oh okay that'll be in that one see that's uh you know we haven't even gotten into what you do for a living so i think that'll be uh you want to do the two ounces there yep that'll be a conversation for sure because he's very thrifty [Music] you'll see what you did there yep totally wow this is getting uh extremely full so then the last ingredient is the demerara by the way i don't know if you do you use that uh yes we have that but we're gonna pass on this because i brought you a surprise i'll be right back all right surprise is that a what is that a ukulele case oh no that would be a single bottle of booze case and i brought you some old school oh my god i grabbed the wrong bottle it's empty you brought me an empty bottle oh it became empty oh there was a leak in it because i'm like there's no way i packed an empty bottle well i was going to surprise you bring you some old lemonheart but if we wanted we'd have to suck the lining right now it's tempting let me tell you another time i hate about cork a rory schneider who owns the reef gave me two bottles of deadhead rob i used to have a tv show i was filming my show in palm springs when it hit a record high it was in the back seat of my suv blew the cork right off so twist cap wouldn't have done that yeah i hop in my car go the hell's that just blew the cork off and spill our back seat so yeah so here's two ounces of i mean it was a good presentation look at the inside of this thing i'm right i'm just i'm so shocked i'm more excited about this guitar case for boots it does play how dry i am but the music box part is broken so this is a vintage thing oh yeah well how did i not know about this thing well you didn't know about the uh ice bucket uh divers helmet either just saying you know maybe you're not the tiki maybe we figured it out it's you not me i'm a sham i thought it'd be fun it was fun it was fun but my my room's in the lining so real quick we're gonna do two ounces of the demerara oh well when you come to my house uh i'll make you one because i got some more at home okay i will fix this mistake of mine so there's the cocktail right there you can see that it's a very full glass so it says to shake it right yep okay shake it and then strain it into uh you know and strain it fresh oh really fresh ice it's kind of that's what i do it's kind of atypical of tiki drinks yeah maybe i'm doing her wrong uh marie king who most everyone knows she was sitting at my bar and i said i'm gonna make you a mai taiwan juice and she goes i will not drink it i said just wait like drink it and she took a sip and she goes oh wow i go see you think i was gonna make you a crappy drink no way well this is gonna be boy you had a spill now on macbeth i think this one's gonna be did it hold without making a mess oh god oh what was the put your hand on both my wife had a uh party at her house for managers on here and i was making cocktails and the boss was standing for everybody all right we had a great year here's what we're gonna do and i'm making a drink and the thing pops off right in the middle of his speech the cocktail goes up rains down on me the things are all bouncing around i'm like oops so scared of this thing like popping off i can't get a piece of your beard in here so i have two glasses here these are both from hawaii nice uh this is from society of seven from the outrigger hotel in waikiki i did some research on the society of seven do you have any idea what that is yeah they're uh like a family act like singing comedy kind of thing if i'm not mistaken oh am i right wait how'd you know that uh because i like tiki and all things hawaiian hoya they were like a variety act yeah they came out of a band called the fabulous echoes that i don't know so i think they were like a pop band through the 60s and then i think through the 70s late 60s and 70s i think they became like kind of this disco thing and i think that explains the font here besides mugs i have tons of my tie glasses i have never seen this class oh wow that's very rare to me yeah i tried to listen to some of their music not really my thing i think they were a group of chinese dudes from hong kong or hong kong dudes when we first got into tiki we bought every record that we could find hawaiian stuff yeah and then we were moving one time and i go hey perfect time to start listening like while we're unpacking totally a lot of it's [ __ ] holy crap and then i got the billy muir and then it all changed we put on pink hawaii and we stopped unpacking we're like what is this awesomeness and so you you really understood the difference between just stuff packaged for people who want to be part of hawaii and good musician absolutely yeah if you've not heard billy muir and pink hawaii go find it we were lucky enough to meet billy at bukilau and he was in his 90s still playing three days a week in fort lauderdale wow and he couldn't understand in his 90s why a bunch of 30 year olds were excited to meet him i've been hassled recently about my mint game and what's the hassle the hassle is somebody was like you gotta up your mint game and i was like i think my mint game oh this smells amazing yeah it's delightful my whole thing with mint i think eddie hamilton was like jeez why is there so much mint in this drink and i was like ed more mince the best mint okay so boom yeah it's so it talks about garnishing with rock candy so we're going to put the rock right up in front here like that talks about garnishing with a pineapple spear so if you want to grab one of these things all right i'm going to put mine right back behind here then it says a garnish with an orchid okay that looks incredible at the royal hawaiian yes you're in the base of the pink palace you're looking at uh the beach at waikiki you're looking at diamond head yep they're like here you go sir i mean perfect right my favorite place in this to surf in the world is waikiki it's not like the most challenging of waves but it's just picturesque picturesque yep here's a fancy paper straw oh thank you and so from the surf room at the royal hawaiian hotel in waikiki beach this is the surf room my time yep cheers oh oh oh cheers is that three ounces of rum to bounce it all right out oh wow okay first it's kind of got like a bite to it yup but then you're right then the rum kind of all smooths itself out all the fruit juices kind of meld together it's a cool drink now if you go to the royal hawaiian today this is not what you're getting right they are making better ones though we've been there you know in the last couple years many years ago we went and it was the let's pour a bunch of pineapple juice a little bit of rum and float some uh myers on top which is funny because i went to the royal hawaiian probably like 16 years ago and on the patio there they were making traditional pretty traditional cocktails yeah they got a pretty good job i think a lot of places and not just taking drinks but cocktails in general everyone got lazy like i get with my gardeners sure and then this new public of drinks and tiki drinks and everything they're like we want the whole kitten caboodle we don't want this half-ass it's from applebee's for a dollar crap right we want the real thing so yeah we've been to places over the last 20 years that we've been into this that oh the drinks have gotten better the alibi in portland's one of those places okay blair and i sat there before it got better and ordered i think my ties i love a good drink but i'll fish pretty much any drink sure we couldn't we couldn't now they've gotten so much better someone came in and redid their cocktail program to make you know not smuggler's cove right but not you know just swill yeah and so now it's good that was fun you know they make good drinks there plus it's a great place to hang out so good so this is a cocktail that you say you make all the time huh yep hold please oh wow that was hard when i expected it's rock it's rock candy it's literally named after a rock so it's kind of a typical trader vic's cocktail and that it's like kind of on the bitter side you can taste like the acidity of the fruit juices yup but it's a very it's a very complex cocktail yeah i actually went blind one night on these the lemonheart look at my prop let me use my proper something good since i got ruined this is a testament to over garnishing stuff sometimes because people will buy this stuff just because it comes with the rock candy stick all right so when this lemonheart was in business yeah this is the 80 proof okay the only difference in the entire label of the 151 was a little red triangle right here that big oh really nothing else was different so one night we decided to pre-game before going to a bar and i had three my ties but i didn't realize i'd pull out the 151 so nine ounces of rum wait you'll drink three mai tais before you go to a bar we did that night we're younger and they went to the bar and it was fall and it was vegas we were outside by the fire and i had like a couple beers and then the fire just went from this big to this big and i couldn't see straight and i go how the [ __ ] am i blind so we had to sit there for a long long time before we went home yeah and then i was playing the bar that say i'm like oh not only was i drinking a lot of booze i'll drink a lot 151 too like yeah that's that'll get you all right so i have a question for you yeah have you had other guests bring you gifts as part of the show i brought you a thrift gift and this one did not spill out i love gifts that's rad when's the last time another man gave you clothes so you i asked for your measurements those were exact measurements are your exact measurements i don't know what brand because the tag is gone but yeah that's so you that's rad yeah oh my god thank you so much there you go so you said you're running out of shirts so because those shirts yeah i have a whole closet of vintage dresses and men's shirts i'm glad you brought me a shirt and uh not a dress oh hang on thank you so much that's a gift i do have others if you like to try them on later those are for sale um yes i would actually well thank you so much so i do have this for you this is a spike's breezeway cocktail sweet enamel pin thank you sir yeah that blue on this orange anybody that's on the show gets one of these things and then anybody that wants to subscribe to the 10 tier on the patreon they also get one of those plain ways to get entertainment nowadays if you enjoy this entertainment do it you know i brought that shirt because i have binge watched him uh for a couple weeks now and all that free entertainment is worth a cool vintage shirt to me not that you should always pay for it but if you've been if you enjoyed what you've been watching i feel like this is turning into a pbs special from the brother from love i appreciate that thank you so much oh yeah and folks if you enjoyed this please be sure to like comment subscribe to the channel if you aren't already also go follow everything that uh the jason t smith youtube thrifting board on facebook is where if you if you want any help with ebay or thrifting the thrifting board i have a hater group so if you see me in a bathtub that's the hater group hater group yeah if you see me tiptoed on a beach that's the real group all right don't end up in the hater group so follow all of this stuff aloha thanks dude thanks brother yeah okay why is the rum all done what you gonna do brother with this my tire runs wild on you i don't know it's so funny my old my old roommate was like six four or something and he's like dude you gotta lift all of the lamps and stuff up in here and i was like i've hit that one three times already yeah that's the one and i'm always like i don't really have a problem hello are you are you under here or do you call roger is it origin that's what i call it what do you call it where's john or jay i'm fancy three ounces of rum most my ties not three ounces and i i'm sweating into it so that's gonna give it a little uh essence of jason so [Music] i've been hassled by that i guess we should talk about your career because i think your career is super interesting i think it also ties into tiki but also vintage and collecting and all those kinds of things what do you do for a living i am a porn star what no i thripped for a living oh yes i i buy old people and resell it that's all i do but i also teach others how to do it so i make a living from the reselling of old stuff like i would sell these glasses kind of thing they're gonna sell these glasses and then i teach others how to do it too but i could teach them how to be their own boss you just take have your time you take a little bit of money you go to a thrift store estate sale whatever find a few things you can turn your 20 bucks into 200 real real easy when i teach you how to do it that way you're gonna work for the man in your retirement you can work for yourself and it's kind of fun you know i got a lot of friends that sell on amazon so they're buying wholesale products okay but when they buy a thousand widgets they just get a thousand widgets yeah and they make a lot of money sure i don't make as much as them but i'm on the treasure hunt it's all about the treasure hunt it's 100 about you never know when you walk around that corner and there's a red clark severed head mug which is waiting for you you never know when does that ever happen well i never found the ring clark in the thrift store but the first good mug we found we first got to tiki was the steve crane kuma the yellow and the red one wow so uh my wife is very short i'm six five she's like five foot and three quarters and i didn't know we got married but that works out well she does all bottom shelf stuff i do all top shell stuff oh so you can split your attentions so when we do antique stores or antique malls i do from this shelf up and then she comes behind me and does this shelf town i see so i already left the booth yeah but on the bottom shelf in the back labeled clown i'm like three boots ahead and she goes hey and i turn around and she's like holding it like a triumphant like i've got the prize it's the clown monk ten dollars so as a reseller guy yep is that something you resell well we didn't have one so i went right into the collection i have since found like three or four others have you really oh yeah oh so you still find a lot of tickets but see that's the thing it's not part of your life no you go out and do it when you can it was part of my life in college i would go like three four times a week to like thrift stores like we were talking about off camera ebay happened like literally ebay was created while i was going to these thrift stores and then instantly everything dried up because there were all kinds of people that were reselling on ebay that's a cool thing about kids nowadays like uh kids nowadays my neighbor's kit works for me she's 19. she started when she was 17. she's in college but she still lives at home she goes to unlv but she sells too and so i'm like i'm thinking man when i was in college if because i had to go like go work at domino's for a while worked in the factory for a while yeah if i could make money on my dorm and i have to go to a job and report to the man and punch a clock make money while you're sleeping ah it's so great but i do it now i know and you were talking about earlier again off camera we had like this big conversation off camera uh he was talking about how you just bought like what six thousand dollars of each vhs no six thousand vhs tapes yes six thousand seven hundred dollars for seven hundred dollars in denver i live in vegas i had to run a moving truck and drive it back down to vegas all by myself yeah and you go like what are you talking about vhs tapes there's no money in that in 2021 for some odd reason videos are so hot and if you have unopened ones and they get graded by the official grader the price skyrockets into the thousands for videotapes so tell me about kill bill so when i got the 6 000 videotapes home my lovely wife and i shall we sort them out and so there's 38 tapes a box we pulled out all the new ones and set them aside the sealed ones oh kill bill seal put that over there and then i found a kill bill one and two unsealed and so i paid 11 cents a piece 12 cents a piece i put the kill bill use one two together sold it today for 30 bucks 30 bucks 24 cents and 30 bucks now that sealed one it's quite a markup yeah i see that someone had a sealed one that was graded by the official grading company and theirs was sealed but in lesser condition their corners were beat up mine wasn't okay they got 9 200 for it you can buy a lot of stuff for 9 200 you buy a car for 9 200 uh i gotta go because i'm gonna go on the hunt for kill bill i can't even believe that that's my job and so my job is to figure out what's hot in any given moment sure you know it's like when famous people pass away the way people mourn the passing of their favorite singer actress sports star nowadays is they go online and buy something immediately that's when people are looking to buy it the most okay so it's like one of your tips the size of the waves can depend how big the artist is uh i'll give you a trivia question okay what was farrah fawcett's biggest mistake in her death dying she died on the same day as michael jackson oh she she passed people mourned her for about 90 minutes and then the biggest singer in the world ever passed and no one remembered fair past yeah and so that's you know we live in a fickle world people's attention is like what so what you got to do is if you're going to sell online for a living you know what was hot 10 years ago might not be hot anymore and i see a lot of people complain they're like man my sales suck and platforms are awful i'm like you're selling the wrong stuff at the wrong price i mean living out of it so do you still do auctions or do you you set prices and go mostly set prices with the best offer so i kind of keep my price up a little bit higher than it should be okay offer you know buffalo exchanges yeah okay so i bought something that i didn't know exactly what it was but the price was right okay five dollars and it looked like a flight suit for you know an uh guy in the air force but it didn't look right it looked like it was a fun flight suit okay and so i have a facebook group where what's a fun flight suit red and it would zip at the ankles and it had white openings kind of like a disco flight suit oh but it had patches about vietnam and south asia and stuff like that okay so i knew it was something cool and for five bucks i'm like i'm bringing it home so i have a facebook group thrifters and resellers and online sellers help each other and i said what is this yeah and so some people in the military said oh it's called a party suit parties and here's a picture of me and my party students look people in my group are like here's me and my person party soon so when you go to events after you retire yeah instead of wearing your full like dress outfit okay you wear your party suit and you'll have patches on based on when you were in the service yeah huge collectors for this gigantic okay so i put it up at a starting bid of 199 with a buy it now of 500. okay so a guy made me an offer and i encountered a 400 because i thought that'd be a good point and he declined i'm glad he declined oh seven days later 802. my five dollar investment wow so part of it is knowledge part of it's dumb luck and uh being in the right place at the right time that's on the rack you know kind of thing yeah uh but knowledge definitely helps and you know smartphones yeah nowadays you know when you were thrifted in college and when i started this it was my poor wife when i first started this before smartphone she'd be at her office and i would call her with barcodes of music and i go can you type this into amazon she's like i'm trying to work around office and then the smartphone got invented she's like oh thank god i'm done looking up your stuff yeah but i would just go sit in the corner of the store and go okay barcode you know just read them all yeah right and nowadays anyone can have research within their pocket one moment please that's everything that's worth money old booze bottles empty worth big money so if you have a bar a tiki bar and you have some old rum when it gets empty don't throw it away don't just put in your bar it's worth some serious cash sell it online if you don't know how find me i'll help you and not only that this came from a garage this is trader vic's pomegranate cereal nice back when they were a little bit less inhibited inhibited inhibited inhibited inhibitivity and they had like the topless girl on the cover and now you couldn't do that certainly now because things but when ed hamilton was here he's like he was like can we use this uh pomegranate syrup and i was like it's probably 50 years old and he's like so no i was like what are you ed no okay gloria wanted to tell you and i think i've told this before on the show i was walking through a thrift store in stockton california and this is before the book of tiki so there wasn't a whole lot of knowledge about what tiki was but i kind of knew that there was this thing surrounding these mugs so i find this thing on a shelf and i look at the bottom and it says federal law forbids sale or reuse of this bottle blah blah blah nothing about trader vic's nothing about anything i shook it and there was like a piece of cork in here which was like a premonition so you can get bad but shortly thereafter as ebay happened i saw this on ebay for 900. i paid a dollar so i don't think this happens all the time well does it oh yeah it does this happens all the time look i buy stuff like that on you man resell it on ebay oh if you don't educate yourself yeah i i pick up tiki mugs all the time and turn around and with the right title the right price but how do you not just keep them well we have a huge collection and the shelves are full and so new stuff comes in all the time and then so we have to go what doesn't bring us joy anymore or what has skyrocketed in value since we bought it because although i love all this stuff yeah every tiki collection should be in flux constantly it should never be set like no tiki bars ever set sure kind of like walt said about disneyland yeah it's never done okay so your new stuff should come and go all the time if tomorrow you find out this bowl sells for two thousand dollars i would sell it because you know what you're gonna find another one thrifting sooner or later oh but i'm like the guy that's like no it's mine i'm like the guy is mine on like 20 of the holy grails that i have like the red clark severed had the tiki bob oh you have a separate head oh yeah i got most of that people look for really tiggy bob elvis you do mo moherns and her uh husband stephen were over there today and he saw my shelves of all the skulls and there's one skull that somehow made it out without any teeth missing you know the trader vic skull where the teeth are missing like there's three teeth missing like that one right there yes yeah this one has the full set of teeth now it's off the same mold how one's got out he goes you have the one with all the teeth i go i'm so happy that someone came to my house that understands how cool that is because most of our friends are like that's nice yeah and they go where's my drink right but to have someone come and go you have the one with all the teeth is awesome how did you find the elvis tiki bob on ebay someone was asking way too little well so i used to see those come up and there were reasonable prices for people that had some money at the time that those were coming up at those prices i had zero money and so now i look back and i go like i could have gotten one of those for a couple hundred dollars so the run clark server had i paid 800 now that's usually worth about 1500 or 2 000. okay so the person who had it they ran an auction on ebay seven days starting bid 2 500 no one bit i'm like i'm gonna watch this yeah second auction 2200 no one bit third auction 2 000 no one bit 1800 okay we're a month in and they're not getting their money you know oh yeah so they keep doing that so it's like opening bid 800 i'm like click i got it for 800. that's like about half price of that wow yeah and so all of my wife's like you just paid 800 for a tiki mug i'm like yes but one that's worth 1500 so if we need to sell it for any reason yeah we double our money yeah but and and you know if you if you know that mug while that paint goes away ours is pretty good paint the pinks the reds are all there i mean that's like probably one of the top most desired tiki mugs and it's weird because it's almost not really a tiki mug it was like maybe from a magic show or something so wren clark was a magician and he built a tiki bar in the basement of hilton or some hotel when you go down the elevator it's like you're going under the world or under the sea and then each room was kind of like uh dante each room was like the cannibal room and this and that yeah so in the bar the menu you know usually you see the menu with the picture of the mug well the menu was the guy holding the severed head and so that's the drink you got and it was like a dollar and a quarter and you got to keep the mug can you imagine to go into a tiki bar and get a full drink with rum and the mug and take it home for a buck and a quarter no i can't totally can't so the voodoo grog that we did last week right there was a special glass for everything and it was literally one of my like holy grail mugs or glasses or whatever you want to say i i really love the glassware of trader vics they did some incredible stuff and it's something i've been searching after for a long time and i've like i said on the show i never found one in the wild so i paid for it on ebay they were asking 450 for the glass and i was like ooh a lot of money for the glass but also it's for the show so i would pay that kind of money in order to create content but i didn't i was like how about 200 bucks and they're like yeah cool wow you actually got a deal i got a deal i'm under the 300 glass the glass is 350 bucks all the time totally and and all the paints good and everything oh yes i saw it the paint's really good so those deals do happen when you see the deal you really got to jump on it i'm going to make you sick now you know dr z jeff oh yeah you know jeff's uh voodoo grog class story mm-hmm did i sell something oh that's got an offer for a tiki mug for 180 this guy's on call like 40 bucks for it like a surgeon he was at the long beach swap meet 20 years ago okay found an unopened case of them or what of the voodoo groggy asses and i think he got him for like the whole case for like fifty dollars or a yeah it was like 24 glasses i mean you know i've done good things like that yeah never like that's just like the story of legend like well that's just i mean that's right place right time it's just that long yeah yeah i've got skills and i've got tools but luck it plays a big role because being always in the right place at the right time that fountain right there with the guy spinning came from the the long swap meet got him for a hundred bucks that's a good deal they work right away or did you have to fix them no i had to like put a pump in him so and i built the whole thing that witco bar over there i found on craigslist for 200 shut up yeah somebody gave me a tip there's like a whole video on youtube like of me just like with a cell phone camera going uh yeah i'm going on this journey to go find vintage witco and they're like yeah also we have like this 50s fridge that works uh do you want that too like for 50 bucks and i was like yes i'll say i got five banded rattan furniture yeah couch two chairs two side tables coffee table craigslist one hundred dollars with the original cushions which were shot i tell my wife she comes in from work and she opens the garage and i've set up a little lounge in the garage and i'm just sitting there on the couch like drinking my time like boom hundred dollars now i did pay to have nice new cushions made sure i ordered a nice atomic print we did a great job but but people go you got all this for a hundred dollars like oh yep everything got packed into the truck and i had to drive like this and i couldn't take the freeway because i couldn't see out the windows so i just had to go surface streets all the way from north vegas down to henderson i'm like i'll get home slow yeah and speaking of that i was driving my econoline pickup with the whitco bar in the back and with the refrigerator standing up with a tonneau cover i couldn't see behind me the tonneau cover was trying to blow off so i was like changing lanes and if i just like change lanes real slow and if somebody honked at me aggressively i was like ah sorry it was i can't see i got terribly dangerous oh yeah we've all done that i mean we're in the tiki for two minutes you picked up something that didn't really fit in your vehicle you're like i'll get it home somehow well you have to i do feel a little bit big behind this part but not as bad as i thought it would if you'd like to bar back for spike reach out to uh spike aol.com wait hold on there's an airplane this is the worst sound stage 16 years ago or something and on the patio there oh great brady i'll get your rock candy in my drink keep your drink on my rock handy you stop turning around towards me like that it's very uncomfortable so spike very uncomfortable so there's the eternal struggle between frankie's and the golden tiki you don't really want to hear the answer yes i do two tiki bars in las vegas i almost said california that's not there's only one twinkie parking loss oh yeah i mean i have been at frankie's one day a week for 12 straight years yeah we used to hang out as a gang and everyone was kind of filtered away and i was thinking about it not too long ago like all right there's some weeks i'm there like four times because people come into town there's a couple weeks i miss here and there but i'm like thinking about the last 12 years it's been one day a week for 12 straight years okay so frankie's stinky room is the spot oh yeah hey you didn't ask me the question you asked everybody else what what's your favorite tiki bar oh yeah what is your favorite tiki bar well i'm glad you asked spike here's how i think you should ask that question okay after the maikai what's your favorite tiki barb there was an episode a while back where i think i said that where i was like okay we have to put a moratorium on saying the maikai's because everybody knows it's the best it's like the biggest the best like okay but i would say it's a tie uh between undertow which no one ever mentioned on the show phoenix which is one of the most incredible tiki bars of all time i hear great things about undertale so the drinks are on point to a martin kate level the magic is on point with disney around the bar there are portholes like you're underneath undertow and there's a 90-minute show going on the porthole so and it changes throughout the years okay but you will leave doc you'll get into a gun battle a cannonball with another ship and really the lights will go off in the bar and red smuggles are pouring into the bar like it's absolutely amazing it's more of a whole disney experience yeah but also with incredible cocktails amazing and the staff is one of the best full staffs i've ever hung out at a bar with but up there and i've only been there twice up there with that is dirty dicks is that france yeah but i hear the great things about that place weird name yeah but i hear incredible things about the cocktails i think he's bartending at tiki oasis like a couple of years ago yep good to see you so he's an american yeah live in paris and open up dirty dicks and he's a gracious host okay took me underground to show me the operation you gotta go behind the bar you can actually go down the stairs yeah yeah not just the fake stairs like brianna and yeah and his bowl drinks like you know a lot of bars have one bowl drink he was like seven and he wanted to show off so like it was me and my wife and a friend who happened to be in paris at the exact same time yeah we had three bowls in front of just three of us so i'm like oh okay i'm a good drinker but yeah slow down scotty like i don't need my own bowl drink because i'm like this is sad compared to his garbage balls oh these bowls like i got to get to the drink where is it really so much garlic yeah like wayne's world oh yeah garth where you're like excuse me yes you ever get to paris okay dirty dicks is amazing but phoenix is a lot easier to get to yeah you've not been there undertow will change your world in terms of tiki bars i always feel like a good bar staff and good cocktails and like the whole presentation it's almost like seeing a good band because you walk in and you go oh my god everything's perfect and there is like an emotional reaction to it where you go this is exactly where i want to be right now oh by the way i love the tgt i love conga hut you know i we live in southern california for four years we're here all the time i love all those but let me tell you if i'm like okay i gotta go one place not to my kite because that's number one always but man undertow i don't get enough of it their menus are full books with these thick stock papers yeah and it tells the whole story of the captain and then how the cocktails work in like they go such the extra mile to make it this whole immersive experience that is good yeah there's been a couple bars that did an immersive experience and i'm like nope oh man well we'll talk about this yeah that's off camera right yeah cause i i think i know what you're talking about man we can do this like for five more hours and uh i think we should probably call it here but we should do this again sometime come to the denison and we'll do this in the den of sin is our home tiki bar yeah doug horn did our logo with all kinds of like you've got glassware and art all kinds of cool stuff we we've never done the ceiling and the treatments on the walls but when you see the mass of our collection you'll be like everyone else can go whoa yeah yeah but we got a lot of good rums and uh uh i'd love to have you make some more cocktails all right let's plan on that sounds good all right the end [Music] so [Music] good [Music] you

Channel: Spike's Breezeway Cocktail Hour

Views: 4,980

Rating: 4.9616613 out of 5

Keywords: tiki, tiki bar, how to drink, educated barfly, tiki drinks, Jason t smith, mai tai, royal hawaiian, vintage, retro cocktails, rum drinks

Id: In3uUo09Rkc

Length: 47min 22sec (2842 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021