Late bartender’s daughter unearths lost recipes of Tiburon Tommie’s
- Francisco Martinez
- Jul 29
- 8 min read
Updated: Aug 3
When Debbie Selby sorted through her late father’s belongings earlier this month, she expected to find a few mementos from his bartending days. What she discovered was a treasure trove of cocktail history — long-lost drink recipes from Tiburon Tommie’s, the legendary tiki bar that helped define downtown for nearly four decades.
Tucked among John McAllister’s personal items was a bartender’s cheat sheet containing not just the restaurant’s famed mai tai recipe but originals and local twists on several other cocktails previously thought lost to time: the Pier 41 Awful, with banana, rum, half-and-half and anise; the Paradise cocktail, a tikified version of a gin-and-juice classic; and the ever-popular scorpion, a shared behemoth served in a bowl with a half-bottle champagne float.
“I really thought I would just find it on the scrap of paper — and then to find the whole cheat sheet, I was like, ‘Oh my goodness,’” says Selby, who grew up on Tiburon’s Claire Way and now lives in Corte Madera.
McAllister served as one of the original bartenders at the Polynesian-themed Tiburon Tommie’s, which operated at 41 Main St. from 1958 to 1995. The mai tai, famous for its inclusion of apricot brandy, became so popular that owner Tommy Cox renamed the restaurant from Tiburon Tommie’s Pier 41 to Tiburon Tommie’s Mai Tai in 1963.
The recipe has its own place in local lore and has since been preserved by the Belvedere-Tiburon Landmarks Society: equal parts lemon, orange and pineapple juices, gold and dark rums and the apricot brandy.
McAllister spent about a decade bartending at Tiburon Tommie’s, from its opening until about 1970, when he left following a heart attack, Selby said. Previously, he’d also been a mainstay of the small original bar that Cox operated as Tommy’s Pier 41, even creating that establishment’s tagline of “Look for fun at Pier 41,” according to a 2017 Landmarks retrospective.
Selby said her father, who died in 1998 at age 64, likely took home the cheat sheet to have as a reference for making drinks at home or impressing friends at parties. She immediately posted her findings to a Facebook group called Tiburon Native, receiving an enthusiastic response from members who didn’t realize the recipes still existed.
The 65-year-old said the post received replies like, “This is incredible” and “I’m going to make it right away.”
“I just took the picture, and it kind of went from there,” Selby said. “Everybody was so interested in it.”
Tiburon’s transformation
Tiburon Town Historian David Gotz said Tiburon’s transformation from a working-class community, with its grocery stores and service businesses in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to a tourist destination gave Cox “perfect timing to come over from San Francisco” to open up.
Cox, a former Mark Hopkins Hotel bartender, first purchased existing bar Rossi's in late 1955, decking it out in a nautical theme and naming it the Quarterdeck — sometimes misreported as The Oar House — before it became Tommy’s Pier 41 a year later. In 1958, building co-tenant the Corinthian Pharmacy moved to The Boardwalk shopping center, allowing Cox to take over the space for an expansion six times the size of the original bar, according to Landmarks. He brought in Johnny Won, the chef at Skipper Kent’s Zombie Village in Oakland, as a partner and embraced Polynesian, Māori and other South Seas themes to turn the place into one of the Bay Area’s most popular destinations by the early 1960s.
“To have one in a little town like Tiburon was pretty interesting, and it was the place to go when you had parties or events — it was a special place,” Gotz says of the tiki bar. “It was just that kind of place to go to have a great event with your friends.”
A history lesson and expert analysis
The mai tai’s name is derived from the Tahitian word “maita’i” meaning “good,” but there are conflicting claims over who invented the drink and when it was first served. Trader Vic’s founder Victor Bergeron, who opened the original Oakland location as Hinky Dink’s in 1934, claims to have created it in 1944. But the drink didn’t get placed on a menu until the early 1950s, said David Wondrich, a Brooklyn-based writer and historian focusing on cocktails and other alcoholic beverages.
Bergeron first placed the drink on the menu at a Seattle establishment he owned, “but it did not do a goddamn thing up there,” Wondrich says.
Bergeron was hired by Matson Navigation Co. in 1953 to devise tropical drinks for its California-to-Hawaii cruises. It was during those cruises that the mai tai eventually caught on, Wondrich says, and it also benefited from being served at the then-Matson-owned Royal Hawaiian luxury resort in Waikiki.
Trader Vic’s version of the recipe includes amber rum, dark rum, orgeat, curaçao and fresh lime juice, and Wondrich says Bergeron trained bartenders to make it to his exact specifications.
“But it was a secret recipe,” Wondrich says, “so everybody else in Hawaii had to kind of figure it out.”
The drink caught on quickly because of how delicious it was, with Wondrich saying Trader Vic’s version had “a little extra subtlety,” and because of how easy it was to make.
Sam’s Anchor Cafe in Tiburon has its own version, borrowed from the Monkeypod Kitchen restaurants in Hawaii, that tops the drink with a passion fruit foam.
Tommie’s version, described on the menu as “a Tahitian kamikaze,” swaps the lime for lemon, uses orange juice for the curaçao, adds pineapple and then makes the creation its own with apricot instead of orgeat, a sweet almond syrup.
Landmarks’ copy — “from Bill MacKay, provided to him by the head bartender, c. 1970” — says the dark rum in the drink was likely Myers’s Original Dark Jamaican rum, though McAllister’s cheat sheet instead states Demerara rum, a regional specifier for those from Guyana.
“This is like the other Hawaiian recipes, where people basically had to kind of figure it out as they went along and come up with something that was close enough,” Wondrich says. “As long as it tasted good, nobody was really going to complain.”
He says the Tommie’s mai tai “looks like it would go down just fine,” adding that the natural ingredients included in the cocktail recipes found on the cheat sheet show reasonable restraint, “certainly no stronger than a large dry martini.”
Other drinks included on McAllister’s cheat sheet are a mix of close-to-the-original canon recipes from the wider tiki-bar lore, Wondrich says, while others “seem more or less original to Tiburon Tommie’s, or at least weren’t standard tiki formulas.”
One original is the Pier 41 Awful, a slight twist on the banana cow — a blended drink of lemon and pineapple juices, gold and dark rums, orgeat, half-and-half and a banana chunk served in a beer glass. The “awful special,” as the menu describes it, adds a half ounce of Pernod, an anise liqueur.
The mai tai’s apricot brandy also shows up in another Tommie’s drink, the Paradise cocktail. It’s traditionally a simple cocktail that also includes gin and orange juice, sometimes with a splash of lemon. Tommie’s rum version is essentially the bar’s mai tai with a splash of grenadine, though here McAllister’s cheat sheet specifies dark rum, not Demerara rum.
Other nonstandard drinks include the Zombie, which bears little resemblance to the Zombie of Donn Beach fame that remains a staple on tiki menus, and the Dr. Funk, where Tommie’s version is just sweet and sour, rum and a chunk of pineapple. It was originally created by Dr. Bernard Funk, a German-born physician in Samoa, as a medicinal tonic with grenadine, lime and soda water. Beach added light rum to make it a tiki drink.
Wondrich says there was often a floating pool of names used for tiki cocktails, while the individual recipes for each were mostly proprietary to the watering hole.
“You had to kind of make it up as you went along, and that’s what you see here,” he says.
“I would have loved to have a drink at Tiburon Tommie’s. It sounds like a fantastic place.”
Memories of Tommie’s
Selby said she remembers Tiburon Tommie’s having a welcoming, festive atmosphere filled with family and friends. She says she only visited the restaurant with her father, and she noted he was treated like a celebrity within the bar.
“Everybody knew him the minute we’d walk in the door, and we just walked into the kitchen,” Selby says, adding that her dad would goof around with Won, Tommie’s chef and its eventual owner from 1976 to its closing. “Everybody that worked in that kitchen was happy to see him. It was just a friendly thing.”
Selby remembers bartenders making her a Shirley Temple to drink as she sat with her dad at the bar, adding the restaurant “felt like home to me because I spent so much time in there.”
Born in Bremerton, Washington, in 1933, McAllister moved to Tiburon in childhood after his father landed a job as an electrician in Marin City. McAllister attended local Tiburon schools, graduated from Tamalpais High School and later spent two years in the U.S. Navy.
Selby says she doesn’t remember much of what her father told her about working at Tiburon Tommie’s, as she was young during that time, but she has vivid memories of McAllister being the life of the party, as people would drop by their house all the time.
“He’s just someone that everybody liked,” says Al Selby, Debbie’s husband of 41 years. “He was very charismatic.”
Debbie Selby says she never had the chance to meet Cox, Tommie’s owner, but she knew Cox was a close friend of her dad’s and supported McAllister however possible. With the family living at The Hilarita apartment complex around the time of Selby’s birth, Cox helped McAllister buy the family’s Claire Way home, where they moved ahead of Selby’s first birthday.
In addition to working as a bartender at Tommie’s, McAllister also worked at the Corner Market owned by the Mantegani family in high school, which is how he met his future wife, Dolly Madison. Most of his professional career was working for what’s now the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, including stints as a toll collector and in the district’s vault before retiring at 55. He also would spend the occasional weekend bartending at the San Francisco Yacht Club, where he created his twist on a Ramos gin fizz that proved to be a hit; Selby says she’s still hoping to find that recipe.
Despite McAllister leaving bartending for a more stable career with benefits at the bridge district, Tommie’s influence still reigned supreme in his life, Selby says. Required to wear aloha shirts while bartending, McAllister continued to wear the shirts until his death, she says.
And while she’s happy to have found the cocktail recipes of the beloved institution, she says she won’t be trying them out. She’s been sober 29 years and is retired from a career as a drug and alcohol counselor. But the mai tai from Tiburon Tommie’s is “the best mai tai in the world as far as I’m concerned,” she says.
She’s pleased to be able to share the recipes with others, she says, especially knowing that many have longed to try one of Tiburon Tommie’s drinks again.
She encouraged others to try out the recipes, and to sip to her father’s memory.
“Toast John. Toast Tommie’s. Toast Tiburon,” she says.
Executive Editor Kevin Hessel contributed to this report. Reach Tiburon reporter Francisco Martinez at 415-944-4634.