The Barracuda didn't come out of a Polynesian-themed bar in California — it came out of a bar cart on an ocean liner. Genoese bartender Benito Cuppari built an early version aboard the Cristoforo Colombo in the late 1950s, then refined it in 1965 at Bar Lido on the SS Michelangelo, naming it after a Portofino beach club run by a friend of his. The drink won the Long Drink category at the 1966 AIBES national competition in Italy, and by 2011 it had enough of a track record to make the International Bartenders Association's "New Era" list (it was retired from that list in a 2024 update, alongside the Yellow Bird). Difford's Guide carries it in their Top 100 Tiki/Tropical directory, and the Cuppari origin story is corroborated independently across multiple cocktail references, not just Difford's own page.
A cruise-ship bar's answer to tiki: same tropical instincts, filtered through an Italian liquor cabinet.
A Tiki Drink That Never Saw a Tiki Bar
Cuppari was working the transatlantic Genoa-to-New York run, first on the Cristoforo Colombo and then, from 1965, at Bar Lido — one of seven bars aboard the SS Michelangelo. He built the drink around what an Italian liner's bar would actually stock: a column-still gold rum for the tropical base, and Galliano, the vanilla-and-anise liqueur that Italian bars of the era pushed hard, in place of the falernum or orgeat a Don the Beachcomber disciple might reach for. He named it after the Barracuda Beach Club in Portofino, a nightclub his friend managed and one of the more talked-about nightspots in Europe at the time.
The drink's win at the 1966 AIBES national competition in Saint Vincent gave it a paper trail, and Galliano's own marketing pushed it onto more bar menus through the 1970s — including, per multiple accounts, a stint on Trader Vic's lists in London and New York. It carried IBA "New Era" status from 2011 until the category was trimmed in 2024. None of that traces back to the Ritz-Carlton in Key Biscayne; despite a similarly named, more casually sourced recipe floating around some modern round-ups, nothing in the corroborated record ties this drink to that hotel. The Cuppari/SS Michelangelo history is the one that holds up across independent sources.
The Spec
This build follows the version most consistently published today: gold rum and Galliano shaken with pineapple and lime, cut with a touch of rich syrup, strained up, and finished with a pour of sparkling wine rather than built long over ice.
Galliano, not orgeat or falernum
Swap in a tiki bar's usual almond or spiced sweeteners and the drink stops being a Barracuda. Galliano's vanilla-anise-herbal profile is the one ingredient every published version agrees on, and it's what separates this from a generic rum-pineapple sour.
Sparkling wine as the top, not the mixer
The shaken base is built strong enough to hold its own once diluted by the wine — treat the sparkling pour like a Champagne cocktail's topper, not a splash of soda. Cava or a dry Prosecco both work; save real Champagne for something that isn't getting shaken with pineapple juice first.
Bottom Line
The Barracuda is proof that tiki's DNA traveled well outside the Pacific-themed bars that get all the credit for it. Golden, herbal, and finished with bubbles, it's a legitimate — if under-known — entry in the tropical-drink canon, documented origin and all.