It wasn’t that long ago that one could easily make better drinks at home than one could get in a cocktail bar. And not just better than a dive joint or an Embassy Suites lobby bar. Places that hoover every last scrap of legal tender out of your wallet have for most of my life served lousy drinks.
One of the worst martinis I ever brought to my lips was at the Rainbow Room about 20 years ago. For that, I had paid the obligatory tip to the elevator man, the tip to the senior busboy, the tip to the junior busboy, the tip to the maitre d’, the tip to the assistant junior busboy, and the tip to the waiter. And, most odious, I had paid a gratuity for the ham-fisted barman whose personal martini recipe, though not advertised, was clearly a combination of cheap vodka with cheaper vodka for a nugatory couple of seconds and served medium tepid, garnished with a battered olive.
Don’t worry. I didn’t forget to tip the man whose job was to keep the olives warm.
If you can’t do better than that at home, you might want to rethink your participation in this whole drinking thing. Here’s all there is to making a first-rate martini at home: 1) Fill a small cocktail glass with ice water to chill it down. 2) Combine two ounces of a traditional London dry gin such as Boodles with one-half an ounce of good dry vermouth — I prefer Dolin. 3) Stir with ice for at least two minutes. 4) Empty the ice water from your glass and strain into it the slam-bang tang of gin and vermouth. 5) Garnish with a cold, pitted olive.
It’s hard to think of a simpler drink to make, which does rather put a busy bartender at a disadvantage. Taking five minutes at home to concoct a cocktail is a relaxing ritual that prepares one for the enjoyment of the drink. The professional bartender is under pressure to crank out the cheer. Two minutes stirring a single drink is a glacial pace.
So, what is a high-end bar to do? There are two main strategies: Use rare and bizarre ingredients, or create bouquets of impossibly complicated garnish. Consider the first of these two. The last several years have been big on “smoking” spirits. For example, Death & Co.’s Alex Day makes a drink called a “campfire flip,” the leading ingredient of which is hickory-smoked cognac. Whereas making a proper martini requires nothing but disgorging quality liquids from their bottles and combining them patiently, a campfire flip entails a bottle of cognac, some “finely ground hickory chips,” and a PolyScience Smoking Gun. There have been Death & Co. drinks that call for graham cracker-infused bourbon, madras curry-infused gin, and honeydew-infused pisco.
The second strategy the professionals employ against the DIY crowd is the application of impossible garnishes. Modern folderol on and in cocktails requires skills you and I are unlikely to master or ingredients we are unlikely to have on hand. Among the difficult salads created by Chicago’s Aviary bar is one that combines fennel (both fronds and horseshoes), mandolin, ginger, lemon peel, bee pollen, saffron threads, white peppercorns, and calendula petals. As for skills civilians are unlikely to have, there are the garnishes that are beyond the limits of our amateur dexterity, such as the many variations on the theme of citrus peel origami.
There are some drinks professionals make without either odd alcohols or complicated drapery — the old-fashioned, as we discussed last week, is one such classic. And as with the martini and the Manhattan, a homemade old-fashioned is a drink that you and I can make just as well as the man behind the stick, which suggests that if you want an essential classic, make it at home. Let someone else invest in a PolyScience Smoking Gun.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
