The World's Best Mai Tai is Hiding in an Office Building

If you had to guess where to find the world's best mai tai, you might throw out the kind of sunny tropical locale that befits tiki umbrellas and pineapple. And you wouldn't be entirely wrong: the world's best mai tai is indeed in Hawaii, but it's not being made at a breezy beach bar or luxury hotel. Instead, the world's best mai tai is hiding at Bar Leather Apron, a reservation-only cocktail paradise in a Downtown Oahu office building.

The morning after I visited Bar Leather Apron, I felt like I must have made the place up in my head, or maybe I'd seen it in a movie and confused the memory with reality. The first night I tried to find the place, I circled the building in disbelief, then gave up and went back to my Waikiki hotel. On the second night, I knew I had been in the right place, and made it to my reservation.

Walking through a fluorescent-lit bank lobby at 9 pm looking for a drink felt surreal, but not as surreal as entering Bar Leather Apron. "Having people think it's such a weird space is part of the experience," co-owner and head bartender Justin Park told me as I drank the bar's famed mai tai. Mama Cass's "Dream a Little Dream of Me" played softly in the background.

"When you kind of transport someone from what they're doing or where they are to somewhere maybe they haven't been—that's Bar Leather Apron."

Park, an Oahu native, began his bartending career in 2002, but he started really focusing on cocktails six years ago.

"I was running a bar called the Manifest and I wanted to do something that would separate us from the other bars. We had no real concept. It was just a bar," Park said. " Cocktails were trending really hard on the east coast and mainland, and all over the world, so I started researching cocktails, traveling."

Park's went to New York with his wife and hit up bars like Death & Company, PDT, and Milk and Honey. "I was super-inspired, I wanted to do that here. I liked the cocktail culture," he said.

He got back home and started experimenting behind the bar at Manifest, even though his customers weren't necessarily well-versed on craft cocktails. "People were interested in it still, even during that time. I knew people were curious beyond just the beers and shots, which is what bar culture in Hawaii was," Park said.

Park began delving into serious spirits research, focusing first on gin. "I bought like every gin I could get. I learned everything I could about gin." Next came whiskey, then he started entering, and winning, international cocktail competitions.

By this point in Park's career, Oahu already had just about everything else mainland America did. "Why not try to make a world-class bar?" Park said. He partnered with Tom Park (no relation), the owner of Leather Soul, a swanky men's shoe store. The duo found the location for Bar Leather Apron in the same building as Leather Soul's first location. It wasn't ideal initially.

"It was a huge bar," Park said. "It was too much space." They worked with the landlord to reshape the unit to a third of its size. The Park partners wanted to open a bar reminiscent of the intimate drinking dens of Japan. In January 2016, they did just that.

Park learned quickly that the 25-seat place had to be reservation-only. "We knew we needed to control how many people came here at certain times," he said. It's not an exclusivity thing, it's a timing thing. The drinks require a lot of attention to detail (read: you're not getting a drink here quickly). "We're not going to be able to be a bar for anyone to walk in at any time. We wanted to control the pace and the experience."

When your drink hits your table, you appreciate that attention to detail immediately. Take the world's best mai tai, created by Bar Leather Apron bartender Art Deacons. When Deacons created the drink for the World's Best Mai Tai competition, he served it with headphones that played Santo & Johnny's twangy steel guitar classic "Sleep Walk."

"I asked judges to put on the headphones before. Listen to the music, then drink," Deacons told me. He created a complete sensory experience by adding sound, touch, taste, and smell elements to his competition entry, and won the judges over in addition to winning $10,000 and the title of world's best.

In the dimmed, elegant Bar Leather Apron hideout, I didn't need headphones to win me over. The cocktails spoke for themselves: there's no real secret to creating the world's best mai tai after all.

"It's like any drink: balance. You don't want it too sweet, you don't want it too strong," Park said.