The Grand Prix / Best moments of the competition by Randall Koral

I'm not going to tell you that spending a solid week drinking cocktails will make you smarter, but I certainly feel smarter after my week at the Havana Club International Cocktail Grand Prix. A good bartender, as everyone knows, is a smart bartender. Last week Havana hosted a flood of emissaries from the world's finest cocktail establishments, which means you couldn't swing a bar towel in the city without hitting a Mensa-certified mixologist. My conversations with them were almost as memorable as the cocktails they served me.

While we were waiting for the gala dinner to begin, an Australian bartender named Glen Hooper informed me of the monastic origins of various liqueurs — the Carthusian monks who gave us chartreuse, the Benedictines who gave us Bénédictine. (Don't ask me how that conversation got started because I don't remember.) Jeff "Beachbum" Berry, who I met standing in line to change money, bemoaned the difficulty of finding a good Tiki drink these days. Yes, in Havana you can still drop in to the Floridita for a Daiquiri (as I did several times last week), but you cannot, alas, go to Don the Beachcomber in Hollywood for a Zombie or to Trader Vic's in Oakland for a Mai Tai – both of those ur-Tiki bars are long gone.  Make no mistake: the 2010 Tiki landscape, sez Jeff, is a pineapple-strewn minefield. Should we doff our straw hats to those bars who have authentic, faux-Polynesian Village decor but who serve woefully inauthentic cocktails?

Should we deplore the nouveau Tiki poseurs who get the backdrop all wrong (antlers instead of blowfish!) but who manage to get the cocktails just right? Then there was the night after the competition was over, when I witnessed a heated 3am debate in the lobby of the Parque Central hotel between Mohammed Nazzal from Germany and a South African whose name I have forgotten. The former bartender was shouting in Arabic, the latter was shouting in Xhosa. I didn't understand what was being debated and neither, I gather, did the participants. It was something cooked up by Michael Menegos, who stood by filming this strange happening for posterity. And it was memorable.