A Vintage Daiquiri From the ’40s Is Back in Action

Back in 2013, Paul McGee was putting together the opening menu for Three Dots and a Dash when he came across a cocktail called the Pago Pago in Jeff Berry’s Beachbum Berry Remixed. Immediately intrigued by the Daiquiri-like drink’s combination of rum, green Chartreuse, lime, pineapple, and crème de cacao, he set out to create his ideal recipe. Through the years, he’s served several versions, at Three Dots and Lost Lake in Chicago and now at Echo Lake in Brooklyn, the recently opened bar he owns with former Punch editor Chloe Frechette.

Though McGee found the Pago Pago through Jeff Berry’s work, the drink is credited to the Ronrico rum brand circa 1940. That same year, the cocktail appeared in the second edition of Hyman Gale and Gerald F. Marco’s The How and When, which was published in Chicago by a chain of high-end liquor stores. “I loved at the time that it had a Chicago connection,” McGee says. This edition featured a robust tropical drinks addendum with nearly two dozen recipes ripped from Ronrico marketing materials.

The U.S. imperialist ethos of the period, and of tiki culture, is written right into the Pago Pago’s very name: It’s the capital of American Samoa, which was colonized in 1900, and, though the Pago Pago’s origins don’t lie in the early tiki bars of the period, McGee sees some of the hallmarks of that genre in it. “This could be a Donn the Beachcomber drink,” he says. “He’s best known for using dual citrus and layering a lot of different flavors.” Perhaps it’s this quality—and the inclusion of industry-favorite Chartreuse—that explains why it’s been retroactively subsumed into the tiki canon by 21st-century bartenders. 

Originally, the recipe called for Ronrico’s “Red” expression, a 90-proof, dark, heavy-bodied rum. For his first iteration of the drink, McGee’s Pago Pago called for a four-year Flor de Caña gold rum from Nicaragua, a brand popular with tropical bartenders at the time that features a lighter body and a fairly neutral, vanilla-forward profile. Since then, he’s used a variety of rums, including a combination of Probitas and Transcontinental Rum Line’s High Seas blend. His current favorite to use is Worthy Park Silver, an unaged Jamaican rum.

His choice of crème de cacao has changed, too. He started out with Marie Brizard, which has a lighter, sweeter profile, and nowadays he favors Tempus Fugit’s rich, vanilla-laced liqueur that offers a deeper chocolate flavor.