The BackSide of Water Bar started as a little basement project during the pandemic. I figured if I couldn’t get to my favorite tiki bars, I’d build my own.
I’m intentionally hard to find, but I’m on Instagram.
So it’s a tiki bar?
More or less. I’d prefer to consider the theme an “Adventure”, but no one knows what that means. If you say “tiki”, people have some idea.
Where is it?
Somewhere along the Nile river near the legendary Schweitzer Falls. Just follow the river for niles and niles and niles. If you still can’t find it, well I guess you’re in denial.
So I can’t visit?
No, probably not.
I’m not those guys
A couple years ago there was a Back Side of Water Bar featured on Tiki with Ray.
That isn’t me, those guys are on the west coast. We just happened to use the same dumb Jungle Cruise reference as a name for a home bar.
Tiki is cringey appropriation
Historically? Yeah, definitely. These days there’s a lot of us nerds trying to do better.
The boomer chuds over on Tiki Central certainly don’t help with their reactionary denials, but I just try to be cool about how I represent stuff, and stick to a more intentional fantasy aesthetic based on tropical islands rather than claiming to actually represent anything real.
More importantly, I’m one dude with a basement bar. I’m not profiting off a whitewashed vision of island life. If I’m doing wrong, fine, but I’m pretty sure my impact is minimal.
The name is a lame Disney Joke
Yeah. I’m over giving Disney more money, since they’ve got over offering any value for that money. But I’m hard into that Jungle Cruise/S.E.A./Indiana Jones/Johnny Quest adventure aesthetic.
I also think the phrase “Back Side of Water” makes a fantastic euphemism for booze.
Why bother with a website?
I’m not selling anything, so weird, right?
There was a time when people just made websites for little things they were interested in. The internet used to be fun. That’s all this is.
Anyway, I had an itch about getting to know modern HTML and CSS. I wanted to avoid big heavy frameworks like wordpress, or using invasive shitty corporate tools like Google, which eventually lead to discovering Neocities for hosting and Hugo, which was a perfect combination for what I want to do with this.