Extra dry
THE GIBSON MARTINI IS STILL THE BEST DRINK AROUND.
When the novelist, literary critic and spirits connoisseur Kingsley Amis proclaimed, in his exemplary booze treatise, Every Day Drinking, that “the Dry Martini is the most famous and the best cocktail in the world,” he was thinking not of the commonplace tipple one endures at the pub or the hotel bar — that briney lukewarm afterthought sadly barnacled with its single olive — but of a particular class of this illustrious libation.
“The best Dry Martini known to man,” Amis wrote, “is the one I make myself for myself. In the cold part of the refrigerator I have a bottle of gin and a small wineglass half full of water that has been allowed to freeze. When the hour strikes I half fill the remaining space with gin, flick in a few drops of vermouth and add a couple of cocktail onions, the small, white, hard kind. Now that is a drink.”
It is a drink known to the world today as the Gibson — a revered, if sometimes frustratingly obscure, variation on the classic martini, and the finest iteration of the form. The Gibson is rather easily distinguished from the Dry Martini proper: its cocktail-onion garnish, a simple change from the stuffed manzanilla olive or twist of lemon called for by bar custom, tends in itself to prove singular enough to differentiate it from the norm. Substitute the onion for your preferred martini garnish, in other words, and you’ve at once transformed your boring old Dry Martini into the legendary Gibson.
But expert bartenders know there is more to a true Gibson than this mere flourish of ornamentation. Indeed, to order a Gibson at a proper bar — the kind of bar where those making the drinks take their liquor very seriously — is to signal to the bartender that you care about your martinis a great deal.
The martini, as most serious drinkers are aware, was conceived in New York in the early 20th century. The recipe, since the drink’s earliest days, has called for gin and dry vermouth. But over the course of its 100-year history, the martini has evolved to suit changing tastes, to the extent that the crisp crys- talline cocktail we enjoy today bears little resemblance to the martini as it was originally concocted.
Most obviously, our martinis are now drier — radically, wildly drier. The prototypical martini, in the beginning, consisted of one part dry vermouth to two parts gin: an unimaginably vermouth- forward beverage, to a modern palette. But as time went on the ratio plummeted. It became more and more fashionable to order martinis drier and drier, and gradually the amount of vermouth called for in the conventional martini recipe was heavily reduced. Today one expects only the faintest trace of vermouth in the drink.
Gibsons were devised in part to thwart the tyranny of vermouth before the fashion changed. It was the connoisseur’s martini of choice: bonedry, booze-forward, and ice-cold. Those who favoured the Gibson believed that it was incumbent on bartenders to ensure that martinis be chilled nearly to the point of frozen, the better to relish a fine gin’s taste. They insisted that it was gin, not vermouth, that one could savour in taste, that indeed a gin martini ought to taste of almost nothing but.
They felt, in short, that the usual martini was part way to splendour but could nevertheless be improved. The cocktail onion, the story goes, was added as a means to mark the distinction — to make clear at a glance which was the purest martini, the martini in its ideal form. That the cocktail onion seemed to interfere less with the flavour of the base ingredients only added to its natural appeal.
Of course once popular tastes caught up with the fancies of the adepts, the gulf that once separated the Gibson from the martini proper narrowed considerably. One no longer needed the cocktail onion to signal a preference for cold and dry because cold and dry were how a martini widely tended to be made. Which may be why it has become so inexplicably difficult to find a Gibson.
Most bars simply refuse to keep cocktail onions behind the counter. The number of times I’ve requested this best of all martinis and been refused — even at some of Toronto’s very finest restaurants and bars, places that ought to know the history and significance — has become something of a running joke among my Gibson- loving friends. We’ve even gone so far as to consider the etiquette of bringing our own jars of onions.
The modern rarity of the Gibson has made its name a kind of private language, a code word for cocktail know- how. I have found that at bars and restaurants where the Gibson remains available, it is offered with the enthusiasm of a shared secret — a little ritual shared by those in the know.
At Grey Gardens, the marvellous new Kensington Market eatery by Jen Agg, the Gibson is listed on their deftly curated cocktail menu as an alternative to the traditional sort, and it feels like a virtuoso choice. At Alo — which houses perhaps the best bar in the city — bar manager John Bunner keeps a bottle of No. 3 Dry Gin in the freezer, poised to whisk the perfect Gibson into existence should the need arise. And nowhere will you find a finer martini in Canada than the one served proudly there.
A few generous ounces of icecold gin with just a drop of vermouth, topped off with a cocktail onion. Now that is a drink.
OUR MARTINIS ARE NOW DRIER — RADICALLY, WILDLY DRIER.