About TikiBarn

I started TikiBarn because the tiki shirts I wanted to buy didn't exist. Most of what was out there looked like an 8th-generation photocopy slapped on cotton. So I went backwards — to the source material, the menus, the matchbooks, the bamboo palaces and pre-tiki rooms that built the escape machine before anyone called it "tiki."

The first tiki bar I remember was Atlanta's Trader Vic's, sometime in the 1970s, with my grandmother — "Diamond Lil." She worked at Georgia Tech where I grew up, and she knew everyone. When she retired to Florida she took us to the Mai-Kai too. Lil understood that the best places are the ones you share. That part stuck.

Diamond Lil

I studied architecture at Georgia Tech and English at GSU, which set me up to spend my career hunting down real-world locations for film and TV. Same instinct, different decade. Track down the good stuff before it disappears.

TikiBarn is the wearable version of that hunt. Every shirt starts with primary sources — a matchbook, a postcard, a newspaper clipping, the address of a long-gone room — and gets carefully resurrected, not photocopied. The catalog isn't just tiki, either. Lost diners. Forgotten TV. Mid-century pop. Mythical roadside Americana. Anything worth remembering.

The deeper research lives at Tiki Barn Field Notes, where I write about the rooms, the owners, the drinks, the disappearances — including the pre-tiki chapter that usually gets flattened in the telling. Free to read. Read everything or just the shirt you're curious about.

Lost rooms, loud stories. Tiki history, found the hard way.

— Dodd