Few things say Hawai'i with as much tropical kitsch as the mai tai.

Maybe it's the tiny paper umbrella stuck into a slice of fresh pineapple. Or the orchids as a garnish. Definitely the coconut shell drinking glasses. It's a drink that locals would rather laugh at than order.

But for generations of tourists, the mai tai has been the king of Waikiki beverages. Every hotel has a mai tai on its menu. Every bartender has a favorite recipe.

"It's Hawai'i's most famous and best-selling cocktail," said travel writer and author Cheryl Chee Tsutsumi. "Like surfing, hula, Diamond Head and Waikiki Beach, it's a Hawaiian icon."

During the past 18 months, Tsutsumi has become something of a mai tai expert, but not because she's a seasoned barfly — in truth, she seldom drinks. Wooed and inspired by what she calls the mai tai mystique, she authored a guide to its colorful history, "The New-Wave Mai Tai," (Watermark Publishing), that includes 53 recipes that break the tiki tacky stereotype.

The traditional mai tai includes rum, orange curacao, orgeat, simple syrup and lime juice. Afficionados have refined that list: premium rum, freshly squeezed juices and no syrup. The challenge is to balance sweet and sour, and serve the drink cold.

In her book, Tsutsumi gave the belittled mai tai a makeover.

"We did not want standard mai tai recipes," she said. "We wanted recipes with a twist, something different, so we have some weird ones in here."

One uses blueberry jam. Another uses sherbet. There's a mai tai shooter made with Jell-O, a mai tai topped with li hing mui powder, a mai tai with champagne and a potent recipe that includes amaretto, Southern Comfort, gin, Midori and rum.

"If you were to ask someone what is a mai tai, basically now anything goes," Tsutsumi said.

Tsutsumi started collecting recipes in February 2007. She began by sending e-mails to travel industry contacts, hotels, bars, restaurants, "anyone in a kitchen" and asked them to come up with their favorite mai tai. One hotel manager held a party at her home so that friends could help her refine her recipe.

At Planet Hollywood Honolulu, the bartenders selected two mai tais based on how many of each that their customers ordered. Both wound up in the book. Bill Elek, a bartender who now manages the bar at Planet Hollywood Honolulu, said a good mai tai needs quality ingredients.

"It has to be tropical and have a great, juicy tropical flavor," he said.

"A key thing, too, is you have to make sure you shake the drink. You have to shake it up to mix the ingredients."

Elek sometimes made as many as 50 mai tais in a day, mostly for tourists who wanted what they had seen in their travel brochures, umbrella and all.

"I do drink them," he said. "It's a good drink to have when you want to relax and chill."

Ironically, the author drank her first mai tai after she began research for the book. Tsutsumi was at Pinky's Pupu Bar & Grill in Kailua with a friend who ordered one.

"I said, 'That's really touristy ... I want a sip of that.' And it was a strong one. I said, 'Wow.' I was expecting something lighter, but it had a lot of alcohol in it."

The recipes in the book were selected from more than 90 suggestions, said Tsutsumi, who still prefers a chardonnay to a mai tai.

"I tasted some, not all," she said. "I would have been flat on my back. The photographer and the art director had a great time, though. They sampled. They definitely sampled."

BEHIND ITS INVENTION

As much fun as it was to choose new recipes, Tsutsumi, a history buff, delighted in what she learned about rum, the mai tai and especially the two rival restaurateurs who each claim to have invented it.

Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt, founder of Don's Beachcomber in Hollywood, created the Mai Tai Swizzle in 1933. The drink became his best known concoction. Gantt would later change his name to Donn Beach and open a tiki bar in Honolulu's International Market Place called Don the Beachcomber.

In 1944, Victor Jules Bergeron Jr. — founder of Trader Vic's restaurant in the Bay Area — combined shots from a 17-year-old bottle of J. Wray Nephew Rum from Jamaica, lime juice, orange curacao from Holland, orgeat from France and rock candy syrup to create a new drink. Bergeron served it to a Tahitian friend who said "Mai Tai — Roa Ae," which was Tahitian for "out of this world." He dubbed the drink mai tai and watched as it became an instant success.

Through the years, both men engaged in friendly arguments over who really created the mai tai.

Tsutsumi decided not to take sides. She fact-checked everything with their respective families and called it a draw.

"I think they were, in their time, innovators," she said. "They both loved to mix drinks. They both loved to experiment and they were both colorful characters."

When Tsutsumi was editor of Aloha magazine, a job she had for 17 years, Mainland readers would write to ask where they could find the tastiest, most authentic mai tai.

Often, she told them to get one with a view.

"Every mai tai is the real mai tai," Tsutsumi said. "It has become, not so much the ingredients in it, but the legend and what you make out of it. It is as much where you are drinking the mai tai and the experience as much as it is what is in the glass."