It is the most argued-about drink in the world and almost every rule you have been told about it is somebody’s preference
Dirty Martini at Monument holds a 4.4 from twelve hundred and twenty-five people, and it is named after the single most argued-about drink on earth.
What dirty means
Olive brine. That is all. You add a measure of the liquid from the olive jar, and the drink goes cloudy, and it becomes salty and savoury and considerably less austere.
That is the entire innovation and it is not complicated.
What is complicated is everything else about the martini, because there is no drink in the world that people are more confidently wrong about.
Shaken, not stirred
Which is the most famous instruction in drinking and which is, on the merits, wrong.
Shaking a spirits-only drink does three things. It chills it faster. It dilutes it more. And it aerates it – producing tiny bubbles and small chips of ice, which make the drink cloudy and give it a texture that is thinner and, to most people who make drinks for a living, worse.
Stirring chills it more gently, dilutes it less, and produces a drink that is clear, viscous and cold.
Essentially every serious bartender in the world stirs a martini. And essentially every customer has been taught, by a fictional spy, to ask for it shaken.
The Prat’s cocktail desk regards this as the most successful piece of misinformation in the history of the drinks trade and notes that Fleming’s character also drinks it with vodka, which is a further argument, and one we are not going to start.
The vermouth wars
Which are genuinely ridiculous.
The martini has, over a century, become progressively drier – which means less vermouth – and the competitive minimalism reached a point of self-parody.
Churchill is supposed to have said that he simply bowed in the direction of France. One authority suggested waving the vermouth bottle at the glass. Another recommended filling the shaker with gin and whispering the word.
All of which is a joke about a drink that is, at that point, a glass of cold gin.
And the correction has now come. Serious bars are putting the vermouth back – because vermouth is a wine, it is aromatised, it is doing actual work, and a martini without it is not a martini, it is a measure.
What is actually true
Cold. That is the whole thing. Everything else is preference.
The glass must be frozen. The gin must be cold. The stirring must be long enough and no longer. A martini at the wrong temperature is a bad drink no matter what is in it, and a martini at the right one is very difficult to ruin.
Verdict
Good bar, honest rating, twenty to fifty pounds.
Order it stirred. Order it with vermouth in it. And drink it fast, because the entire drink is temperature and it is dying from the moment it is poured.
The olive, the twist, and the onion
Three garnishes, three drinks, and they are not interchangeable.
An olive brings salt and a savoury note, and it changes the drink materially – which is the whole basis of the dirty version.
A lemon twist brings oil. You express the peel over the surface and the citrus oil sits on top and you smell it before you taste anything, and it makes the same drink lighter and brighter.
And a cocktail onion makes it a Gibson, which is a different drink with a different name, and which almost nobody orders and which is superb.
One base spirit. Three garnishes. Three genuinely distinct experiences, and the trade has been arguing about them for a hundred years.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
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