Clinging to a cocktail glass, while holding onto SpongeBob’s pineapple for dear life, is how I want to sink during a storm. My drink of choice in this situation? A hurricane. SpongeBob’s pineapple? A delicious, squashed memory, sloshing about. The place to shelter during the storm? Calypso in Edmonds, Washington. The barkeep does not mess around. The hurricanes are killer—just the right amount of rum and tropical fruit juices to enable you to free Neptune’s golden spatula from the hardened grease in the Bikini Bottom Fry Cook Museum exhibit.

My advice for recreating this drink at home? Memorize the menu at Calypso (the ingredients for the drink are listed) and play around with the measurements, always remembering SpongeBob’s most treasured advice: “perfect Patties (hurricanes) are made with love, not magic.” With that advice in mind, Nate, my husband, messed around in the kitchen, while I sampled various versions and lost track of the ingredients, amounts, time, etc. Fortunately, Nate wrote the recipe down, and I found it on the patio table, next to Sandy Cheek’s underwater tree dome:

1 ¼ oz pineapple juice

1 ¼ oz orange juice

1 oz rum

1 oz amaretto

1 tbsp bar sugar

Place everything in a shaker with ice. Shake and pour over more crushed ice in a tumbler-type glass. Top the drink with a paper umbrella you brought home from a vacation in Hawaii once, a long time ago.

Pair this drink with a Crabby Patty, eaten while joy-riding past Mrs. Puff’s Boating School and waving your well-earned golden spatula in the air.  

Cecilia Kennedy once taught Spanish and English courses in Ohio for many years. She now lives in the Greater Seattle area, and writes horror stories. Her blog (Fixin’ Leaks and Leeks: https://fixinleaksnleeksdiy.blog/) chronicles her humorous (and perhaps scary?) attempts at cooking and home repair.