Smuggler's Cove

There are bars where you go to be seen, and there are bars where you go to disappear into a small wooden room with three hundred kinds of rum and a drink that is on fire. Smuggler's Cove, on a forgettable block at the edge of the Civic Center, is the second kind. You will not find it from the street unless you are looking. You are meant to be looking.

Push through the door and you are in a ship. Or rather, you are in someone's deeply specific idea of a ship — three floors of low-lit wood, brass lamps, carved tiki idols in the corners, ceiling beams hung with bottles, fishing-net details, and a staircase you will not entirely remember climbing. Find a seat. Order a Mai Tai. Not the orange-juiced sugar bombs your aunt drinks at the resort buffet — a real Mai Tai, the 1944 Trader Vic recipe, two rums and lime and orgeat and a sprig of mint floating like a small green flag of surrender.

Then order a Navy Grog, served with a frozen ice cone the bartender has carved by hand, because they are a serious person doing serious work. Then a Three Dots and a Dash. By the time the third drink arrives you will be slightly aware that the room is, in some imperceptible way, listing slightly to port, and this is fine. This is, in fact, the desired outcome. The bartenders are not phoning it in. The owner — a man named Martin Cate, who has done as much as anyone to drag tiki out of the dustbin of irony and back into the light — is somewhere in the building, probably sniffing a Demerara.

You will leave smelling like cinnamon and burnt sugar. Your hangover will have a specific tropical character. You will think about it the next morning, and the morning after that, and at some point a few weeks later you will realize you have been thinking about it ever since.