Mai Dutch Tai

The Mai Dutch Tai takes the Trader Vic template — a base spirit, orange curaçao, citrus, a sweetener — and runs it through a Dutch genever instead of aged rum. Oude genever's bready, malty character does double duty here, standing in for both the rum's backbone and the almond sweetness orgeat usually supplies, while pineapple juice and a rinse of absinthe round out the tropical profile. It was created by Simon Difford himself in February 2018 at The Cabinet Room, his own home bar in London, and built as a genever showcase rather than a straight restoration of any older recipe.

A Home-Bar Genever Experiment

The Cabinet Room wasn't a commercial bar — it was Simon Difford's own home setup, built around a stainless steel bar station where guest bartenders including Dick Bradsell, Dale DeGroff, and Agostino Perrone have worked. The Mai Dutch Tai was made there in February 2018 as a deliberate genever riff on the Mai Tai, at a time when Dutch genever was seeing a small revival among bartenders looking past gin and rum for base spirits with more malt character.

Be clear about the sourcing here: this drink's only documentation is Difford's Guide's own recipe page. That's not surprising, since Difford created it in his own bar and published it on his own site, but there's no independent third-party account of the drink beyond that — no other cocktail book, bar menu, or historian's write-up corroborates it. Treat the creator, bar, and 2018 date as accurate (they come from the person who made the drink), but don't mistake this for an old or widely-adopted recipe.

The Spec

This follows Difford's own build: oude genever as the base, Ferrand Dry Curaçao for the orange note, pineapple and lime for the fruit-and-acid backbone, and two dashes of absinthe standing in for the anise rinse tiki bars have used since the Doctor Funk era. It's shaken, strained over ice, then crowned with crushed ice in classic Mai Tai style.

Why genever, not rum

Oude genever is aged in a way that gives it a bready, malty weight closer to a light whiskey than to gin, despite the shared juniper lineage. That maltiness fills the gap orgeat's almond note usually leaves in a Mai Tai, which is why this build skips orgeat entirely — adding it on top of genever would make the drink read as over-sweet and muddy rather than layered.

The absinthe rinse

Two dashes is a rinse, not a pour — enough anise to echo the herbal side of genever's botanical bill without turning the drink into a licorice bomb. It plays the same structural role Pernod plays in a Doctor Funk: a small, deliberate note of strangeness.

Bottom Line

The Mai Dutch Tai is an honestly recent, honestly one-bar invention — but it's a genuinely clever one. Swapping genever for rum changes more about a Mai Tai than most single-ingredient substitutions manage, and the result stands on its own rather than reading as a novelty.

The Mai Tai Family