08/04/2026
We salute Harry Yee and his Blue Hawaii!
In 1950s Waikiki, tourists kept walking up to the bar and asking for "a Hawaiian drink." There was NO such thing.
"Those days when tourists came in, they said, 'Give me a Hawaiian drink,'" Harry Yee remembered years later. "We didn't have any Hawaiian drinks."
So he invented one. Then he kept going.
Harry Yee never planned any of it. He started pouring drinks in 1952 at David's Cafe, a relative's place in Kalihi, because jobs were scarce. He moved through Trader Vic's, then landed behind the bar at Henry Kaiser's Hawaiian Village on Waikiki Beach. He stayed more than 30 years as head bartender.
In 1955 he dropped a vanda orchid into a cocktail. Not for beauty. Customers chewed the sugar cane garnish and dumped the pulp in the ashtrays, and cleaning them was miserable. "I put orchids in the drink to make the ashtrays easier to clean," he said. "I wasn't thinking about romance."
The most romantic gesture in bar history started as a cleaning hack.
In 1957, a salesman from the Dutch distiller Bols walked in with a problem: a liqueur the color of the ocean that nobody knew what to do with. He asked Yee to build a drink around his blue curacao. Yee mixed it with light rum, vodka, and sweet and sour, looked at the glass, and named it after a Bing Crosby song from 1937.
The Blue Hawaii.
The same year, he jammed a Chinese back scratcher into another new drink and called it the Tropical Itch. In 1959, by his own account, he slipped the first little paper umbrella into a drink called the Tapa Punch. The Tapa Punch is forgotten. The umbrella conquered the planet.
Two years after that, Elvis filmed a movie called Blue Hawaii in the islands, and Harry Yee's blue drink went worldwide with it.
Here is the part nobody thinks about. A cocktail cannot be copyrighted. Bols sold the liqueur. The hotel sold the rooms. Hollywood sold the movie. Harry Yee got a bartender's paycheck, and the next afternoon he tied on his apron and worked his shift.
He mixed the world's vacation for three decades, more than a dozen invented drinks. His own pour, after work? "Cognac, straight," he said. "Good cognac."
The whole world knows his drink. Almost nobody ever learned his name.
Every family album in Hawaii has the photo. Somebody's anniversary at a Waikiki table, a tall blue drink, a kid who went home clutching the paper umbrella.
Then, in September 2018, the Hilton Hawaiian Village threw a birthday party inside the resort where he had spent his working life. Harry Yee was turning 100. The Blue Hawaii on the menu that night was 61 years old.
He died on December 7, 2022, at 104. The same resort still pours the Blue Hawaii today, nearly 70 years after he first mixed one. And somewhere on Earth tonight, someone will pull a tiny paper umbrella out of a glass because a Honolulu bartender wanted cleaner ashtrays.
His daughter Marilyn says his favorite words were "Everything in moderation."
Harry Yee spent thirty years mixing the drink the world cuts loose with, and never needed one himself. He gave every vacation on Earth its little flag. Paper, on a toothpick. It was enough.
Image courtesy: Hilton Hawaiian Village
