Who Is the Skipper?

It starts with Donn Beach

When the Skipper is a kid, he looks up to his hero — Donn Beach, American adventurer, businessman and World War II veteran. When Prohibition ends in 1933, Beach opens an extraordinary bar in Hollywood called Don the Beachcomber: the first prototypical tiki bar, and the start of a worldwide culture.

What followed borrowed from everywhere — Polynesia, South American exotics, the West Indies, Hawaii — and tiki bars became an escape for people who wanted somewhere upscale, comfortable and a little bit secret. Beach's place filled with Hollywood regulars; a book about him names Marlene Dietrich, Bing Crosby, Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh among them. The motto was "If you can't get to paradise, I'll bring it to you."

Almost a hundred years later

The Tipsy Skipper exists to carry the integrity of that original thing forward — the version our parents and grandparents loved, not the plastic-cup version that came after. There's a real nostalgia we're trying to recreate here, married to the cocktail culture we grew up on.

Which is why the recipes that survived are still the backbone of what we pour: the Zombie, Three Dots and a Dash, the Mai Tai. Made the way they were written, on a rum shelf deep enough to actually do it.

A boutique lounge in horse country

We're in the heart of downtown Ocala — a boutique, tiki-themed upscale lounge with rotating seasonal handcrafted cocktails, fresh-pressed juice, and secret menu items hidden throughout the town. Small room, dark, warm, and a little bit 1957: carved tiki, paper parasols, string lights, enough neon to make everyone look good. Next door to the Marion Theatre, which turns out to be the best possible neighbour a bar can have.

The ambition, stated plainly: to be one of Florida's best craft cocktail bars. Two hours from either coast, in the middle of horse country. We're aware of how that sounds.

And the thing on the wall

There is a black-and-white monster movie running silently behind the bar. It's been on since we opened. Nobody has ever asked us to turn it off, several people have asked us to turn it up — it has no sound — and at least one first date has been saved by it.

Fifties tiki and fifties creature features are the same cultural moment: rubber monsters, lagoons, exotica records, and a very confident idea about what "the tropics" were. Sitting under one with a Zombie in your hand is the most authentic thing in the building. If something webbed appears to be climbing out of the bottom of this page, that's why.