The Truth About the Martini
The worst martini I’ve ever had was at the Sunset Tower in West Hollywood. It must have been an off night for the place, which is an otherwise good spot to eat and drink (get the filet), because they committed the cardinal sin of martini-making: it was warm. I should have sent it back, but I was dining with Esquire advertisers and I didn’t want to seem … difficult.
I should clarify: that was the worst martini I have had in America.
With respect to my Italian friends—who do many, many things very, very well—I’ve had worse martinis in Italy. Some of them truly awful. Frequently, they shake it. Must be the influence of James Bond; never shake a martini. Other times the Italians make it lousy with vermouth. Worst of all: they have squeezed a lemon into it when I asked for a twist. I’ve even had one in which the bartender seemed to have poured lime juice into my drink.
The French are better at martinis. I spend about two weeks a year at the Hotel Regina in Paris, which serves an excellent one. Recently, I spent one night at the iconic Hôtel De Paris in Monte Carlo. The bar in the lobby is exactly what I want from an old-school hotel: wood-paneling, a band performing Billy Ocean, a bow-tied bartender who knows how to make a proper martini. It was excellent.
You’ve probably noticed that the martini is having a moment. This summer, The Washington Post reported that TikTok users anointed the combination of a martini, French fries, and a Caesar salad as the perfect meal. For once, at least, the TikTokers aren’t wrong. According to data from NielsenQ, the martini is the second-most popular cocktail in America, behind the margarita. All of this fascination has led to spinoffs: a couple years ago, everyone was drinking espresso martinis; now the porn star martini is experiencing a renaissance. But the popularity of the classic version has been surging for years. In 2016, Esquire’s Jeff Gordinier wrote about its sudden ascendance: “Eventually you come back to the martini. And like the martini itself, the return arrives with a shimmer of clarity.” Last December, we ranked the 50 best martinis in America. They mix the best one, we said, at the Chandelier Bar in New Orleans.
The best martinis are served ice cold, straight up, with one of three garnishes: a lemon peel, olives, or an onion. Esquire has extolled the virtues of recent innovations in garnishments—from MSG to Old Bay—which are all worth trying, but they will ultimately distract from the main event. Whether you prefer gin or vodka, martinis should have the feel of medicine. A martini is not delicious; it is necessary. When it arrives, you should be thirsty for the taste and for what it’s about to do you: make everything okay.
What does it mean that this cocktail is enjoying a prolonged resurgence? The most superficial explanation is that it photographs well for Instagram. It’s also coded with two of the year’s most popular memes: “brat” (nothing gets you loaded like a couple martinis) and “very demure, very mindful” (nothing says classy like a stemmed cocktail). I was at an event a few weeks ago where Jude Law was standing near the bar drinking a martini. I'd be lying if I said it didn't make him look even more like a movie star than he does already.
Here's what is undeniable: The martini is the perfect antidote to modern life—which was as true in 1924 as it is in 2024. Esquire has been celebrating its powers since the magazine’s early days, even when the drink had a bad reputation. And for a couple decades, the martini was very much out of fashion.
Since our first issue in 1933, there have been more recipes, photos, homages, and defenses of the drink than I care to count. Once we even published “172 ways to make the perfect martini.” We’ve offered hard-and-fast rules for what constitutes a martini and explained why you shouldn’t drink one while eating a steak (they cancel each other out) but should imbibe before digging in. “If the steak is Christ, the martini is its John the Baptist, preparing a suffering and hopeless humanity for the good news that is to come,” Esquire’s former drinks columnist, David Wondrich, wrote in 2008.
Wondrich is a true expert on the cocktail. In 2002, he organized the Great Esquire Martini Contest, in which he gathered three judges and six bartenders. “The idea was to make it an invitational, like golf,” he said.
Over the years and for other publications, Wondrich has taken on the thankless task of trying to establish the drink’s origin. I won’t bother with taking up that challenge here because there’s no definitive answer, no matter how many bars claim to be its ancestral home. (This year, Chef Charlie Palmer opened a new place in New York’s Knickerbocker Hotel, which claims to have been the birthplace of the cocktail in the early twentieth century. You can dispute that assertion, but you can’t argue with the excellence of their martini service now.)
“As things stand, the martini is another American legend, like Billy the Kid: a larger-than-life invention of the nation’s collective will; an intoxicant so sharp, clean and deadly that it cuts the head off while the legs keep walking,” Wondrich wrote for Liquor.com in 2011. “As much as I want to discover the true origins of the king of mixed drinks, I think I ultimately like it better this way. Who doesn’t enjoy a mystery?”
Esquire had the martini’s back when it was unpopular in the ‘70s and ‘80s. “Not much fuss is made over a martini these days,” we wrote in the June 1986 issue. “That’s a pity. Maybe if more people knew how to make one right, the martini would reclaim its historical role as symbol of urbane sophistication and cool elegance.”
In our April 1973 issue, James Villas, who was the longtime food and wine editor at Town & Country, painted an even direr portrait of the drink’s place in culture:
No symbol of middle-class corruption stands out so blatantly or provokes more wrath in our junior citizens than the all-American Martini … Generally, the Martini signifies absolute decadence. Specifically, it means a bitter, medicinal-tasting beverage. It stands for everything from phony bourgeois values and social snobbery to jaded alcoholism and latent masochism. No matter where you inquire throughout the country, the response, with no exaggeration, is one-hundred percent the same: young people do not like Martinis and they’re not drinking them. Ever! Anywhere! Not in bars, not in restaurants, not on airplanes, and certainly not at home. Many have never even tasted one and quite possibly never will.
With the help of a couple New York bartenders, Villas then launched a full-throated defense, which includes a vivid snapshot of the drinking habits of middle-age Americans in the ‘70s. “Face it,” one bartender insisted, “with today’s frantic pace of life and frustrations, people—women as well as men—are not only drinking more but they want the fastest pickup possible, and nothing solves the problem better than a few Martinis. Customers here average between two and three before lunch, and they all order them extra dry. Why? Generally to get loaded!”
This reminds me of a story a longtime Esquire staffer told me about a former top editor of the magazine. Every day, without fail, the sound of martini preparation would emanate from the EIC’s office—starting around 11 a.m.
My general rule is no more than two in an evening—and zero before lunch. After two, I start describing them as a “bowl of loud-mouthed soup.” (The writer James Thurber once said, allegedly: “One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.”) I take mine with vodka. Previous generations of Esquire editors would scream at this preference, but gin makes me a little crazy. Plus, vodka tastes more medicinal. I also prefer mine with a twist, but I will occasionally get one dirty with olives. The best one in New York is the Duke’s Martini served at the Lobby Bar at the Hotel Chelsea. But they also mix a pretty mean martini at Parkside Social in Verona, New Jersey. Most importantly, it’s ice cold.
Over the weekend, I went to a fundraising gala in New York, and I sat next to a top executive at a major corporation. He is foreign and, I would guess, in his sixties. Conversation didn’t come easy until, and I’m not sure how, we started talking cocktails: he is a martini man. We take our martinis the same way. At home after a long day, he enjoys making one for himself. He smiled as he told me this story.
This was Saturday night.
The unofficial cocktail of Sunday mornings is a Bloody Mary, maybe a mimosa. Both drinks mask their alcohol with a veneer of something healthy: tomato and orange juice, respectively. A martini doesn’t hide its alcohol. In fact, the cold, bracing alcohol—the gin, the vodka—is exactly why we drink it. You enjoy a martini after a long day. The drink is a reward, but it’s also a way to put your mind at ease, to process everything that’s happened to you, to fortify you for everything that is to come. For this reason, the martini—the fashionable cocktail of the moment—will always be drunk by serious men and women. Whether you’re working, raising kids, or simply alive in the 21st century, the martini will be there for you.
You Might Also Like
