The Elusive Dreams is a modern tiki cocktail created by bartender Demi Natoli at Patterson House in Nashville, later published in Chloe Frechette's 2020 book Easy Tiki: A Modern Revival. It's built as a direct riff on Cuba's classic Hotel Nacional Special — rum, pineapple, and lime — but Natoli swaps the traditional apricot liqueur for rich banana liqueur and doubles down on pineapple with both fresh juice and pineapple-infused rum. A cinnamon syrup layered underneath nods to Don the Beachcomber's old trick of hiding baking spice in a tropical sour. The result reads dessert-adjacent without tipping into cloying, which is a harder balance than it sounds.
Same bones as a Hotel Nacional, dressed for a different decade.
A Nashville Riff on a Havana Classic
The Hotel Nacional Special — rum, pineapple, lime, and apricot liqueur — is one of the enduring pre-tiki sours out of Cuba, and it's the template Natoli started from at Patterson House. Rather than leave it alone, she pulled the apricot and dropped in banana liqueur, then leaned harder into pineapple by splitting the rum between a standard white rum and Plantation's pineapple-infused Stiggins' Fancy. Chloe Frechette's Easy Tiki picked up the recipe in 2020, which is where most bars now source it.
The cinnamon syrup is the detail worth paying attention to. It's a quiet homage to Don the Beachcomber, who famously buried baking spices in his own sours so the drink read complex without anyone being able to name why. Here it does the same job — the cinnamon rarely announces itself, but pull it out and the drink goes flat.
The Spec
Everything goes into the shaker together and gets strained cold into a coupe — there's no building or layering step, just a fast tropical sour with an unusually rich, spiced middle.
Two rums, one job
The pineapple-infused rum and the plain white rum aren't there for contrast — they're both pushing the same direction, just from different angles. The infused rum carries pineapple all the way through the finish; the plain rum keeps the drink from turning into straight juice. A single rum at double the amount would work in a pinch, but the split gives more texture for the same proof.
Banana instead of apricot
Swapping apricot liqueur for banana liqueur is the whole hinge of this recipe — it's what separates the Elusive Dreams from just being a Hotel Nacional with extra pineapple. Banana liqueur brings more weight and a rounder sweetness than apricot ever would, which is why the drink needs the full 3/4 oz of lime to keep it from reading as dessert.
Don't skip the cinnamon
Cinnamon syrup is easy to treat as an optional garnish-adjacent flourish. It isn't. At 3/4 oz it's doing as much volume work as the lime juice, and it's the ingredient that keeps the banana liqueur from tasting one-note sweet.
Bottom Line
A well-documented, well-credited modern tiki build — real bartender, real bar, real book citation — that earns its spot by making one smart substitution (banana for apricot) and one quiet one (cinnamon syrup) instead of piling on ingredients for novelty's sake.