The Lagoon of Mystery with Jayme Blaschke

What’s shakin’ cocktail fans?
Welcome to Episode 196 of The Modern Bar Cart Podcast!

Thanks for joining me for this interview episode, where we track down the best and brightest minds in the spirits and cocktail world so that we can share their secrets with you. This time around, I hang out with Jayme Blaschke, creator of The Lagoon of Mystery and host of A Moment of Tiki. He’s a home Tiki bar architect and a renaissance man when it comes to tropical botany, exotica, calypso, and bossa nova music, current tiki trends, and more.

In this tropical deep dive, some of the topics we discuss with Jayme include:

• How a brush with homelessness and an off-hand comment made while floating in a pool spawned a passion for tiki and led Jayme to build and cultivate his beautiful home tiki bar, The Lagoon of Mystery.

• A virtual walk-through of some of the building materials, design choices, and escapist landscaping that morphed Jayme’s Texas poolside patio into a transportive oasis that plays “Dive In” movies during the summer.

• Some thoughts on how to relate to Tiki culture as a white guy – which Jayme and I both are. We offer perspectives and concrete resources that will help you learn about colonialism, appropriation, and how to celebrate Tiki tastefully in the 21st century.

• A fun romp through the many genres of island-appropriate music that you can use to flesh-out your Tiki playlist – including exotica, calypso, bossa nova, and modern indigenous compositions that will whisk you away to a tropical landscape.

• Along the way, we discuss what kind of Tiki bar could boast a mechanical bull, how to avoid weevils in your bamboo, why NOT to drink green beer with J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis, and much much more.

Jayme leads by example. In every aspect of his passion for Tiki, he does the work. He knows the plants in his garden. He can rattle off musicians and albums from many decades of exotic music. He knows what Donn Beach was doing in 1937 (as opposed to 1936 or 1938). And while “Tiki” to some might represent a “getaway” or a “reprieve” from the modern world, you get the definite sense that, for Jayme, the escapism of Tiki is an escape “TO” a place like The Lagoon of Mystery, rather than an escape “FROM” real life.