WITH A TWIST
LOOKING FOR THE MOST LUXURIOUS WAY TO ENTERTAIN THIS HOLIDAY SEASON? MARTINIS ARE BACK, SAYS ELLE’S ALICE WIGNALL
CAN YOU DEFINE AN ERA BY ITS DRINKS? THE NINETIES LADETTES had pints. The such-a-Carries of the Noughties sipped on Cosmos. Chardonnay, merlot and rosé have all had their moment. But in the anxiety-riddled early Twenties, we need something a bit stronger.
A friend recently back from New York reported the return of the grubby decadence that once defined the city: ‘Everyone’s smoking again,’ she said, ‘and everyone is drinking martinis.’
The martini – essentially a glass of neat gin, slightly diluted with vermouth and finished with lemon, olives or pickled onion (and definitely stirred, not shaken, whatever James Bond thinks) – is an adult drink for an adult moment: bracingly direct and reassuringly effective, it will knock the edges off your worries while doing away with superfluous frippery. It’s also delicious and adaptable: equally at home in a hipster joint as a velvet-rope establishment. Not on the menu? Order it anyway, because every bartender should be able to make a martini (and if they can’t, leave, because none of the rest of what they offer will be any good).
You can see the ‘just give it to me straight’ spirit everywhere. Just as proper, knock-your-head-off cocktails are roaring back, so is the fashion to match. Look at the rise of straightforwardly sexy clothes as popularised by Nensi Dojaka, 16Arlington and Christopher Esber, and tell me you can’t imagine a martini glass in the models’ hands as they lounge bar-side.
And the spiritual home of the martini is the bar: this is not a drink for domestic consumption. At Dukes in London, you can have a maximum of two, but you get a side order of fashionheyday gossip from head bartender Alessandro Palazzi. At the Connaught, a martini is a performance: a special trolley arrives at your table, with a range of intriguing bitters (such as tonka or lavender) to choose from, before the drink is prepared in front of you and poured from an unfeasible height into your glass. Even the gin is extra-special – distilled on-site to the specifications of Agostino Perrone, the director of mixology.
But that’s the meaning of a martini: it reveals how essential ritual, display and fun are to our evenings out, because without them, well, it’s just a big glass of strong booze. With them, though, you’ve cast a spell, where conversation mellows, lights twinkle, hours dissolve and anything can happen. Until the morning, at least…