Legend has it that one day in 1944 the bartender Victor Bergeron, who went down in history as 'Vic the Trader', was visited by two friends in his Oakland 'Trader Vic's', the bar that ten years earlier had been given a Polynesian theme with a makeover. Ham and Carrie Guild, those were their names, were from Tahiti, and Vic the Trader tried an entirely new recipe to welcome them: light and dark rum, Curaçao, orzata, lime. Carrie tasted and immediately exclaimed: "Mai tai-roa àe!" - which means 'delicious' in Tahitian. The Mai Tai was born.

As often happens in the world of cocktails, where reality is intertwined with myth, given the great and immediate popularity of this drink, many bartenders have tried to attribute its paternity, starting with the mythical friend and rival 'Don the Beachcomber', who traced the invention of the Mai Tai back to 1933, although the recipe was different. Vic the Trader reacted with some vehemence, declaring: 'Anyone who says I am not the inventor of the Mai Tai is a dirty liar', and publishing in the 1970s the original recipe, in which the rums are precisely codified, supposed to be a Jamaican amber and a Martinican amber.