In praise of a ‘most chinnable’ cocktail

Spend any time on a barstool in London and you will observe the steady procession of frothy cocoa-coloured libations conveyed from behind the counter to the crowd with the regularity of an assembly line. It looks like chocolate pudding in a cocktail glass, crowned with a thick layer of pale beige cream — like a pint of Guinness wedged into an upside-down cone.

Now, I have imbibed far and wide, and fancy myself capable of identifying popular tipples by sight. But I could not fathom what the English seemed to be consuming to the exclusion of virtually every other drink. I asked a bartender, who looked at me as if I’d asked the name of the transparent liquid that came out of faucets. “That’s an espresso martini, mate,” he explained. “It’s what everybody drinks.”

An espresso martini: few combinations of words could sound to the serious drinker less appetizing, and straight away my respect for the cocktail culture of the United Kingdom plummeted to geologic depths. This struck me as the kind of mixological abomination that emerges strictly among people who wish to get drunk without tasting anything that might resemble an actual drink — one of those gaudy, saccharine compromises to libation discrimination, like the cosmopolitan or the apple-tini, reserved for college undergraduates newly of drinking age or binge-party montages in raunchy female comedies. In other words: I imagined something to be avoided by anyone of sound mind and a modicum of taste.

A martini, for one thing, ought to be served cold and dry; even a vodka martini is a bastardization I only grudgingly accept. When you start festooning it with coffee beans you might as well just give up. But not wanting to dismiss the central libational enthusiasm of all of London out of hand, I spoke to Alex Lawrence, head bartender at the South Bank’s Dandelyan, probably the finest cocktail bar in the city and among the best in the world, for some insight into this inexplicable phenomenon. He was, to my surprise, in favour of the drink. “The espresso martini is a great cocktail,” he told me. “It’s extremely chinnable.” By this, I understood, he meant it is so pleasant and easy to drink that it can be pretty much swallowed in a single gulp, chin and glass raised skyward.

It is prepared with two ounces of vodka, a bit of coffee liqueur (such as Kahlúa), sugar syrup and a fresh shot of real espresso, all topped with a couple of espresso beans. It goes down smooth — or as they say in London, it can be chinned.

According to Lawrence, the espresso martini owes its stratospheric popularity to a number of interlocking factors. The first is an ardent coffee culture among ordinary Britons: the U.K. takes its daily caffeination very seriously, and every café, bar and restaurant around is obliged to house its own high-quality espresso machine. The second is the national ritual of the happy hour. While the premise of bars advertising drink specials during a set period has a sketchy history of legality in different regions of Canada, it is a universal custom among English bars for there to be discount drinks between about 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. Nearly everyone in the country heads to their local after work for a round or two before dinner. As Lawrence explains, “they’re knackered after a long day, but it’s too late for a proper coffee.” The espresso martini is therefore the ideal pick-me-up to fill the happy hour void.

So, too, are its restorative powers evidently appreciated throughout the night to come: round after round of espresso martinis are whisked from bar to table as the evening rolls on, invigorating a weary populace for another hearty bout of barroom conviviality. The espresso martini is a perfect palatecleanser between orders of heavy lager; the easy-drinking cocktail, so smooth (and so ‘chinnable’), may be readily tucked away for a tonic boost, crisp and (it seems at the time) salubrious.

So universal is the reliance on this effect that the espresso martini transcends context to become as common as beer. All over the United Kingdom, you will find them chinned with relish: at rollicking pubs and sophisticated speakeasies, at Michelin-star restaurants and rustic cafes. The most traditional English tavern in the country will be as accustomed to serving up espresso martinis as Lawrence is at the world-class Dandelyon.

Of course at this point I had to sample an espresso martini for myself. What I found — once again to my surprise — was a cocktail of considerable balance and subtlety. As promised, it was chinnable (alarmingly so, I think mine lasted about 15 seconds). It was not the too-sweet concoction I feared by association with other flavoured martinis. As Lawrence reassured me, it wasn’t really a martini at all, and was done a disservice by its unappealing name. On the whole it seemed to me no more a compromise of the integrity of a proper martini than, say, a gimlet, with its lime juice and soda diluting the purity of the gin. Most of all, though, I was impressed by what the espresso martini gave me: a new lease on the evening.

Having chinned it in a few seconds, I was duly stimulated, freshened and rejuvenated. I had all the energy in the world — and all the motivation, needless to say, to order another espresso martini.