Southside Sips: Coche Comedor’s Pago-Pago

Sometime Sag Harbor dweller Jimmy Buffet was onto something when he released his 1979 album Volcano with the tropics-dreamy song, “Boat Drinks”:

Boat drinks
Waitress, I need two more boat drinks
Then I’m heading south ‘fore my dream shrinks
I gotta go where it’s warm

Fast forward 25 years to a barstool where you can peruse the new “Tiki Time” menu at Amagansett’s Coche Comedor, and you’ll understand why these drinks have stood the test of time and are having an extended moment.

What’s a boat drink? Not to get too persnickety about it (because really, if we’re talking about tropical things, persnickety has no place here), they’re kind of… tiki adjacent. While tiki drinks, born on the West Coast, tend to be more complex and spice-driven, boat drinks are what Isaac the cruise ship bartender from “Love Boat” hands you. Something juicy; something tropical; but most of all, something Fun with a capital F. The kinds of drinks that come with flowers or umbrellas. And probably a straw.

For Chimene Visser Macnaughton, beverage director of Honest Man Hospitality, Tiki love bloomed while living in San Francisco in the ’90s at the famed Tonga Room in Nob Hill. It’s a drink style that stuck with her. This and the carefree beauty of Boat Drinks inspired the happy-making libations she initially created for Coche Comedor, which has leaned tropical since it opened in 2019. The Boat Drink category, you see, shimmies in snugly next to the requisite, classic Margaritas for the authentic Mexican menu here.

For summer 2024, Macnaughton created a whole new menu she’s dubbed Tiki Time, and it’s chock full of juicy deliciousness. “For Coche, and especially our ‘from day one’ loyal clientele, these ‘Tiki Time’ offerings are a return to liquid F-U-N, and a heeding of summer’s siren call to “DRINK BOAT DRINKS!” she says.

One of those Tiki Time libations is the Pago-Pago, a drink that actually was born in 1940 (a pastime Macnaughton relishes: researching the juice out of beautiful drinks lost to time). It has a little daiquiri DNA, but she swaps out the requisite sweet-leaning rum — typically distilled from the sugarcane byproduct, molasses — with a Martinique-made rhum clement, a grassier, funkier, some might say more pure rum product distilled straight from fresh sugar cane. With the intriguing additions of Green Chartreuse and créme de cacao — part of the original 1940 recipe, but with a little extra bump of the latter and the modern Macnaughton addition of mole bitters — you might be like Buffet and order two more, too.