‘I Like A Pina Colada’: The Great Pina Colada Quest – Part One

BY SALLY CONOR

The pina colada may well the lamest drink in the cocktail canon. It is streets ahead of all the others in terms of sheer naffness, and inspired what is quite possibly the worst song in history, thereby increasing its already formidable lameness. Probably the only thing more embarrassing than ordering a pina colada is ordering a VIRGIN pina colada. Pina coladas are so lame that they’ve come full circle and are now officially awesome.

Bar 3, Sky City
The pina colada that started it all.
I was at the Montana Book Awards back in July and was feeling rather fruity. I wanted a special drink, something I’d never had before, something exotic and zingy. ‘I know!’ I thought to myself, thinking I was oh-so-clever and tongue-in-cheek, ‘I’ll order a pina colada! Hilarious!’
The drink took ten minutes to make. The bartender crafted it with such care that you might think he had harvested the pineapples from Fiji himself. It was clear he was A Master. Eventually he presented me with a tall glass filled with a fluffy, faintly radiant lemon-coloured liquid and topped with delicious chunks of fresh pineapple. There were no glace cherries or umbrellas in sight.
I sipped it.
I almost cried with delight.
A really good cocktail is kind of like a cake. When it’s done right, all the ingredients cohere and become something other than the sum of their parts. It’s a chemical thing. This was a Pina Colada in capital letters, because I could no longer taste the juice and the liqueur and the coconut cream, I could only taste delicious tropical ambrosia. I was kind of like how I would imagine Hawaii to taste if it were a drink. It was perfect, right down to the creamy coconut foam on the top.
At this moment, a new obsession was born. I made it my mission to taste as many pina coladas around Auckland as I could.

Deschlers, High St
From an ecstatic high I tumbled to the deepest of lows.
I should have known this was a bad idea when the bartender grumpily made my friend and I go and buy our own coconut cream. I’m not joking. Some fumbling gestures resembling making a drink followed… he may even have consulted a cocktail book. For a pina colada! Possibly the most famous albeit lamest drink ever! Something was whizzed up in a blender. We were presented with two glasses of ungarnished goo.
VISCOUS was the word that instantly sprang to our lips. VOMIT was another one. As in ‘this is kind of like how I imagine it would taste if someone drank a pina colada and vomited it up into a glass’. We were forced to attempt to ‘drink’ the beverage using a spoon, due to its viscosity. It was the single worst cocktail experience of my life. We tried to exchange our glasses of spew for a different drink and the bartender was unapologetic and rude. Don’t do it people! Not for pina coladas. And probably not for anything else either, except maybe if you get a hankering for a seedy old man.

Food Alley, Albert St
I’ve long been a fan of the $2 cask wine at Food Alley. Imagine my excitement when I noticed their incredibly naff cocktail menu. Pina colada! Singapore Sling! Pink Panther! It’s all there, you should check it out. And all only $7! If you’re downstairs that is… upstairs they’re only $6.50! I ordered one upstairs and it arrived bedecked in an adorably naff glace cherry. Yay! It was a very utilitarian drink. Requisite pineapple and coconut flavours present but not a lot of alcohol detected and that glorious alchemy that occurred in the Sky City cocktail bar apparently hadn’t eventuated here. However, it was tasty, refreshing, and less than half the usual price.

These are my first tentative forays into pina colada connoisseurship. There will be many more. What I’m really looking for is somewhere that will serve me a pina colada in a coconut shell. When that happens I may well dance a hula of joy. I’ll keep you posted.



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