What We’re Drinking
Words Michael Karam
Tomorrow’s Cocktail Back to the past to uncover the drink of the future
it wrong. There’s nothing worse than a martini bore. Do you shake it or stir it? Do you make it with gin or vodka? (By the way, a martini is always made with gin. If you want vodka you have to ask for a vodka martini, which apparently was invented in Tehran in the 1930s by Americans who needed to tame the rough Russian vodka on sale at the time.) Do you serve it with a lemon twist, olives or even an onion? But then you’d have a Gibson. And how dirty – essentially how much brine from the olives you use – is too dirty? Do you like it wet – more vermouth – or dry – less vermouth? It’s a minefield.
Two things about the martini: first off, and most importantly, it can do immense damage to the uninitiated. Four years ago, I attended a dinner in Beirut at which my host promised me “the finest gin martinis in Christendom.” He had prepared by freezing his cocktail shaker and ensured that the vermouth, the additive that makes the martini – the greatest drink in the history of Western civilization and not just a glass of neat spirit – was calibrated to make his martinis take dryness (more of that later) to new heights.
But he didn’t heed Dorothy Parker, who famously declared “I like to have a martini; two at the very most. After three I’m under the table, after four I’m under my host.” Well my host only had two and he was under his table before we’d even sat down to dinner. Another guest, who is now a prominent political activist in Beirut, also had a couple and tried to cycle home, crashing into a Sukleen bin and ending up in the hospital. I was ok… just. And while I have grown to love and – more importantly – respect the drink, I have subsequently, and on more than one occasion, seen one drink prematurely curtail the evening of those who are unprepared. You’ve been warned. The second thing about the martini is how it is made. In her book Ten Cocktails: The Art of Convivial Drinking, Alice Lascelles says that if ever you crash land on a desert island and need to summon help, simply start making a martini, because sooner or later someone will turn up and tell you you’re doing
The best vodka martini I’ve had was served by a barman at Soho House in Berlin, but the best place to drink martinis must surely be New York. You go to a bar, any bar, and they’ll as sooner make you a martini than serve you a beer. In fact Ilili, Philippe Massoud’s fabulous Lebanese restaurant on Fifth Avenue, serves a “Not So Bloody Vodka Martini,” and if ever I become extremely wealthy, I will employ somebody whose sole purpose for existing would be to keep me supplied with this remarkable concoction. So what of the future? There are, as always, variations on a theme. They include a lychee martini made with vodka, peach schnapps, cranberry juice and lychee juice; a ginger martini, which pundits have touted rather bizarrely as being good for colds, and lastly the espresso martini made with vodka, espresso coffee, coffee liqueur and sugar syrup. Quite what Buñuel would make of those is anyone’s guess, but to each their own I suppose.
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Attempts to explain how dry a martini should be have been elevated to the poetic, if not the surreal. Alfred Hitchcock liked his so dry he said all one needed to do was simply glance at the vermouth bottle. But it was the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel who offered up the finest paean to the dry martini by declaring that all that is needed is a ray of sunlight to shine through the vermouth bottle before it hits the gin, as the Holy Ghost pierced the virgin’s hymen “like a ray of sunlight through a window – leaving it unbroken.”
