And a Bottle of Rum

RumShack at 3204 Seawall Blvd. serves up happy rum drinks seven days a week

There’s something about rum and sea locales. The Endeavour, British Captain James Cook’s ship that sailed multiple voyages across the South Pacific and changed the face of the earth forever, sailed with nearly 1,600 gallons of the stuff and allocated sailors a pint a day. It figured prominently in the infamous “Triangle Trade” that linked the East Coast with Africa and the West Indies. And any Jimmy Buffett fan knows how the narrator of the song “Changes in Latitudes” “…ran into a chum with a bottle of rum…”

Rum is made from fermented sugarcane juice. After the juice is extracted from the cane, it’s boiled and reduced to syrup, then clarified and batched out into crystallized sugar and molasses. The molasses that gets blended with yeast and water, before being fermented and then distilled. Rum is generally aged anywhere from a year to a decade, and can be light- or medium-bodied, dark or spiced.

Just the word “rum” conjures up images of Caribbean bays, azure in the sunshine, the faint strain of steel drums wafted across the waters. Think tiki drinks, colorful concoctions served in coconut shells and topped with umbrellas. Imagine the hot, sticky swell of a Havana night, a Mojito sweating in your hand, the refreshing cool of the mint the perfect quaff for the hazy heat.

Rum is your passport to an endless world of travel – and if you’re in Galveston, you don’t even need a passport. Wander down to The Spot complex, Dennis Byrd’s marvelous mash of restaurants and bars overlooking the Seawall. Here, you’ll find RumShack, a thatched roof tree house of an edifice, complete with open-air windows and canvas screens. The latest in Byrd’s ever-evolving food and party Mecca, RumShack opened on Cinco de Mayo this year – and has been a hotspot ever since.

“We specialize in Mojitos,” says Byrd of his bar, and the frozen mango is a favorite. I order up a Mai Tai, because it’s my favorite cocktail on earth. RumShack’s is made with a float of Amaretto – not Myers’s – on top, and it’s a slightly sweet, pink-and-orange passion of a drink that instantly makes my inner tiki drink goddess happy. The Rum Punch offers a slightly deeper flavor, more warming and rich, with plenty of tropical fruit.

“The drinks are all fruity, fun and easy to drink,” enthuses Byrd, who works the room like a combination between a circus barker and a gracious host who’s happy you came to his party. It’s clear he loves to see people having a good time, and is gladder still to provide the vehicle to do it. He offers up suggestions for drinks, asks a table of regulars how their private party last week was, and smiles over the mid-week din.

After purchasing this prime real estate in 2002, Byrd first opened The Spot, a restaurant with a family-friendly vibe, then expanded five-fold, adding Tiki Bar in 2005, then Drip, a rocking piano bar in 2009, before tacking on Squeeze, specializing in tequila and margaritas in 2010. RumShack, this year’s addition to the Spot family, came about after Byrd took a much-deserved break and headed off to the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas, where he fell in love with the seaside vibe and the endless ways rum found its way into cocktails there. He tapped one of his bartenders, MJ Aceituno, to create the drink list and the result is a staggering array of happy boat drinks.

“We wanted one signature drink that everyone would talk about,” says Byrd.

Thus was born the Melon Punch, a blend of Bacardi Melon, Captain Morgan Spiced Rum, Amaretto and fruit juices, topped with a splash of soda, and served in a hollowed out melon.

“It’s a domino effect, man,” laughs Byrd. “One table orders it and everyone goes, ‘What’s that?’”

To find out for yourself, make RumShack your next night out.

By Holly Beretto

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