Talking the Yachtsman bar and tiki with Phoebe Esmon

That the latest wave in Fishtown would bring up a sprawling, faux-German beer garden, a Brooklyn-ish barbecue barn, and a factory-size coffee-bar-rum-distillery is hard enough to conceive. But that a modest corner tappie on Frankford Avenue would suddenly turn into a bamboo-trimmed tiki bar? Impossible! Or so it would have seemed until the recent boom. And that the new bar would be called the Yachtsman only underlined its intentional out-of-placeness in these once defiantly blue-collar precincts. We talked about this fish-out-of-waterness with bartender extraordinaire Phoebe Esmon, who with her fiance, Christian Gaal, concocted the drinks at Emmanuelle's as well as at Yachtsman. She looked deep into the soul of tiki and tried to make sense of the palmy, beach-bum ethos of it all.

Q. Some of Fishtown's original settlers and re-settlers aren't too pleased with all this current hubbub. What do you say to them?

A. Everyone complains when their neighborhood is crime-ridden and dilapidated. And then they complain when folks move in to make it better. It's a tricky balance.

Do they even know what tiki is?

It's part of the popular culture at this point. They know that rum and blenders and umbrellas are somehow involved. Why would they necessarily know more?

How do you define tiki? In a Facebook post, you once wrote it was a celebration of native island culture and the "otherness" of all things nonwhite and non-European at a time when America was still decades away from desegregating; a fantasy akin to Gauguin's romance with Tahiti or "Josephine Baker's befeathered banana dance" that took Paris by storm.

Well, it's rum-centric with a Caribbean, maybe African or island vibe. If you think about the time it was created in the imagination of Don the Beachcomber in Hollywood in 1934 - the time in history between the wars, civil unrest, the economy up and down - that time period described a lot of the mood of today.

So the point of tiki - besides an excuse to order a Mai Tai - is what?

A. The point of tiki is to take you out of your everyday life. Any bar is where you can leave your troubles at the door. And the tiki bar takes that idea as far as you can go. You can step off Frankford Avenue into a weird Polynesian paradise where the sun is always shining and a coconut full of booze is handed to you. You can escape from all your cares . . . if only for the length of a drink.

I noticed the piña colada with that spear of pineapple leaf jutting out is named after you. Did you add "Phoebe's Pina Colada" to the list as a personal signature?

A. No, I told them [owner Tommy Up, among others] not to put my name on it. But you see how that turned out. You know we don't use corn syrup here. It's evil and it should be stopped. But we make our own almond flavoring, spice blends, galangal syrup, papaya and pickle garnish. I make the coconut cream out of coconut milk, some fats and sugar, for the piña colada.

So maybe you had a place on the menu after all?

A. You know Don the Beachcomber - his real name was Don Beach - his second wife's name was Phoebe. Phoebe Beach.