Many old-time cocktails are gone from bartender mental menus
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- April 6, 2018
- 1701
“Martini, please."
With just those two words, a waitperson would be off, returning a few minutes later with just that: gin, dry vermouth, an olive or two on a toothpick, in a stemmed, funnel-shaped glass, no ice.
It is the simplest of cocktails and the thing I normally ask for when going out somewhere to have while reading the menu and deciding what to eat. It is one of the originals, along with the Manhattan, which also is nice, dating from Prohibition when most cocktails were created.
Speakeasies had to do something to hide the lousy quality of the hooch they were forced to serve the regulars, so all sorts of concoctions came into being around that time.
The martini is the thing FDR served every afternoon to a few select guests at the White House, the president himself doing the mixing in a special silver art deco set embossed with a bamboo design. The set is now housed at the FDR Library at Hyde Park.
That there are so many martini-making sets from that time with tall pitchers and long spoons backs up the notion that they should be stirred. James Bond of the novels and Nick Charles of the "Thin Man" series asked for them to be shaken as a way to make their characters something different, super sophisticated. The general rule of thumb these days, in any case, is that fruit drinks are shaken, the rest are stirred.
Around here the long-gone Leonard’s restaurant in Dover automatically served a martini with a tall glass of ice water, which was a nice, classic touch.
“Martini, please,” often doesn’t get you anything but a blank, confused stare now. Restaurants all seem to have martini menus with dozens of choices, from chocolatini, to appletini, to espressotini. I recently saw a “black raspberry margarita martini” on a menu.
In such a climate I have to be very, very specific: “gin martini, up, olive, not dirty.” I’ve actually been charged double for this because it was a “special order.” Sigh. Kids today.
Even with such specificity and even if the waitperson understands what I’m asking for, there are invariably questions. Do I have a gin preference? What kind of stuffing in the olive?
I’ll probably have to just expand the ordering phrase to “whatever kind of gin you use normally martini, up, meaning no ice, with an unstuffed or pimento stuffed olive, and for heaven’s sake don’t dump olive juice in it like a frat boy at his first wedding reception.”
In other words, “martini.”
At this point if the waitperson is asking me to show them this drink among their menu selections, I change my mind and ask for iced tea — unsweet!
Many of the old-time cocktails are gone from bartender mental menus. I gave up ordering Manhattans after explaining how to make them one too many times. I’ve never even tried to order a sidecar or old-fashioned.
In fairness if you yanked a bartender from a swanky joint in Chicago in 1930 and asked him or her to make a pometini (a pomegranate mixture), he would be clueless. Fashions change, and we’re in the midst of an enormous boom in both creativity and consumption with shortages of bourbon plaguing eateries from Charleston to Seattle.
Here’s a prohibition sip one rarely sees but should certainly see a comeback.
SIDECAR
2 ounces cognac (cheaper: simple brandy)
1 ounce Cointreau (cheaper: triple sec)
1/2 ounce lemon juice
Shake with ice. Strain into cocktail glass.