At Apricity, a restaurant in Mayfair in central London, they serve a fig-leaf martini, using gin infused with leaves from a tree near the home of the chef, Chantelle Nicholson. It’s smoother than a classic martini, evocative of the fruit, but not at all sweet. It’s also delicious. I am drinking one on a rainy Wednesday just before the restaurant opens and seriously thinking about ordering another.
Nicholson came up with the drink three years ago. “When I first rediscovered fig leaves, I found they infuse the gin in a really lovely way. I’m a big martini fan, so I was like: let’s make it into a martini.”
Garden of Earthly delights … Apricity’s fig-leaf martini is infused with leaves from a tree near the chef’s home.
In a few months’ time, it will be replaced on the menu by a brussels “sproutini”, then an asparagus martini come spring. This rotation may sound offbeat, but these are subtle refinements compared with some of the martini mutations on offer elsewhere. In addition to familiar ones – the appletini, say, or the espresso martini – you can find bars serving salt-and-vinegar martinis, beetroot martinis or Thai spice martinis. In the US, mixologists are turning out squid-ink martinis, tequila martinis and pickle martinis. You may think that experimentation is taking the martini places it has never been. You might just as easily argue that the martini has lost its way.
“The original martini has three ingredients: vermouth, gin and a twist of lemon,” says Alessandro Palazzi, the head bartender at Dukes in Mayfair. “The only variations when I was at catering school were olives, or Gibson [pickled onion] or gimlet [lime]. We are in an era where they become like a fruit salad or minestrone.” As we will see, he is not exaggerating.
The chicken-soup martini
In my kitchen, I saute onions, carrots and celery, following an Instagram demonstration by Jazzton Rodriguez, an Oklahoma bartender and the founder of the consultancy Very Good Drinks. It’s just like making soup, up to the point where I put the vegetables in a jar with some gin and leave it in the freezer for a couple of days. The idea is that this “mirepoix gin” will emerge infused with the essence of chicken soup.
Next comes a bouillon brine – chicken stock with added salt and MSG. This and the mirepoix gin are stirred with ice and manzanilla sherry. The result is strained into a martini glass and garnished with carrot peel and a few drops of olive oil.
Ryan Chetiyawardana, who operates a number of award-winning venues under the name Mr Lyan, is sceptical, but reluctant to dismiss the chicken-soup martini outright. “I have to say, it doesn’t sound that delicious to me,” he says. “But in the right hands, maybe it’s going to be magnificent.”
Mine are not the right hands. The drink doesn’t smell strongly of anything – it’s far too cold – but with the first sip I get a sharp hit of salty chicken stock. The mirepoix gin, if it ever had anything to impart, is overwhelmed. The drink is not actively unpleasant, but I can’t finish it.
Making a splash … Tim tries his hand at martini mixology. Photographs: David Levene/The Guardian
“Some of these martinis are not martinis,” Palazzi says. “People do it in order to put something on social media to get more followers.”
The origins of the martini are shrouded in fable. Some believe its true ancestor is a California cocktail called the martinez – equal measures of gin and sweet vermouth laced with maraschino liqueur and orange bitters – that was first mentioned in print in 1884. But it’s just as likely that the drink was named after the Italian brand Martini & Rossi, founded in Piedmont in 1863, which produced vermouth.
One story contends that the dry martini was conceived at the Knickerbocker hotel in New York in 1906, by a bartender called Martini di Arma di Taggia, but there are earlier written references to the dry martini. An 1899 article in a Wisconsin newspaper, the Racine Daily Journal, headlined “New thing in cocktails” described the latest fashion for using olives as a garnish instead of cherries: “Some say it improves the quality of cocktails, especially that of the dry martini.”
Two things are certain: the martini is American in origin and the classic dry martini wasn’t so much invented as arrived at. Early 20th-century recipes call for equal parts gin and vermouth, but, over time, the dry martini got dryer; the proportion of vermouth dwindled, until it reached almost homeopathic levels of dilution. In the 1958 film Teacher’s Pet, Clark Gable prepares a martini by running the damp cork from a vermouth bottle around the rim of the glass.
The International Bartenders Association’s official cocktail reference guide gives the proportions of the dry martini as six parts gin to one dry vermouth. You can have less, of course, according to your preference, but not none. “Sometimes customers don’t want vermouth,” says Palazzi. “Can you call that a martini?”
Shaken, not stirred … martini enthusiast James Bond (Daniel Craig) in Casino Royale.
At Dukes, a trolley with the cocktail’s constituent parts is pushed to your table. The martini is neither shaken nor stirred, because there is no ice involved – both gin and glass are frozen.
The bartender adds to the glass a few drops of an English vermouth – the result of a collaboration between Palazzi and Sacred distillery – then swirls it three times and chucks it away. “I discharge it on the carpet,” Palazzi says. The vermouth-stained glass is then filled with gin (or vodka) and garnished with a twist of Amalfi lemon.
In some ways, the moment – the setting, the theatre, the vermouth on the carpet – is as important as the ingredients, or lack thereof.
“I think a Dukes martini is really a beautiful thing,” says Chetiyawardana. “Alessandro and the team are masters of bringing that ceremony to life. If you served that in your house, it would be like a bulldozer – it just wouldn’t work. If you poured somebody 125ml of neat gin, they would think you were ludicrous.”
Even Palazzi is not averse to innovation. “You don’t have to wear blinkers,” he says. “For instance, I do a white-truffle martini, with truffles I infuse.” His menu also includes the vesper, a martini variant made according to instructions issued by James Bond in Ian Fleming’s first book, Casino Royale.
“Three measures of Gordon’s [gin], one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet,” Bond says. “Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large, thin slice of lemon peel.” Bond never ordered a vesper again, because Fleming subsequently tasted one and didn’t like it, but Daniel Craig issued the same instructions in the 2006 film – even though the liqueur Kina Lillet hasn’t been produced since 1986.
Today, the vesper is one of Palazzi’s most popular martinis. “When I was a young bartender, you would never mix gin and vodka,” he says. “If I did that in 1975, my head bartender would kick me in my ass.”
The caprese martini
This one, served at Jac’s on Bond in New York, is another infusion: tomato and basil, steeped in vodka, designed to result in a martini reminiscent of a caprese salad. After 24 hours, the vodka is strained, shaken with olive oil and frozen again for another 12 hours, after which the oil, separated and hardened, is easily removed. The vodka is then combined with vermouth, a dash of balsamic vinegar and a cherry tomato garnish.
Recreating it at home, not a hint of basil survived this process. Also, I am now of the opinion that olive oil does not belong in a martini. The caprese was surprisingly inoffensive, but that is not much of an endorsement for a cocktail that takes 36 hours to make.
Chetiyawardana says the beauty of the martini lies in the variations possible within the simple parameters – “the fact that it can be so endlessly tweaked just by looking at different vermouths, gins or vodkas and the ratios in between. It’s an infinite drink, which is one of the reasons why it’s the ultimate cocktail.”
‘It’s an infinite drink’ … Ryan Chetiyawardana, AKA Mr Lyan. Photograph: Jennifer Chase
He does not, however, wish to be doctrinaire. A martini made with tequila, he says, can still be a martini. “If you’re helping people explore a spirit category, perhaps it’s useful being flexible with that language and letting it be called a martini,” he says. “But does it always work?”
He has produced his fair share of variants. “We’ve pushed the definition, ” he says. “We’ve used bone in a martini to look at a literal bone-dry effect.” He also once concocted a cereal martini, with grain vodka, seeded vermouth and a yeast culture he calls golden levain: “It was sake lees [residual yeast deposits from sake production]. And it was bloomed yeasts. And then it was, I think, a butter ferment.” The result was a syrup that recreated the toasty flavour of yeast.
He has also had a few noble failures, among them a martini made with ambergris, the precious whale “vomit” byproduct prized by perfumers. It did not make for a very good martini. “You had this rich, meaty, very much end-of-evening bruiser of a drink,” he says. “The flavours worked. It just didn’t feel appropriate for what we would ever think a martini should be. So that one got swept off the drawing board.”
The pickle martini
This is not quite as weird as it sounds: after all, the dirty martini is a venerable, cloudy variation that includes a bit of brine from the olive jar, so using dill pickle brine instead is not a giant leap. It is, however, precisely as bad as it sounds, the chief constituent of pickle brine being vinegar. Also, the pickles I used were too sweet; I am sure a higher-pedigree jar would have helped, but these were the best I could find. A waste of gin.
The seaweed martini
There are so many martini variations out there that it’s sometimes easier to search for one based on ingredients you already have. This is how I found the seaweed martini – I wanted to use up sheets of dried kombu bought in a giddy moment six months ago.
This one is quick. By way of preparation, a square inch of kombu and a few celery slices are left to steep in sake for a few minutes. The drink is equal parts seaweed sake and London dry gin, plus two drops of celery bitters (didn’t have, didn’t bother).
My expectations were low, but the kombu martini turned out to be very appealing: salty and a little sour – almost fishy – with umami notes from the seaweed. I would be tempted to let the seaweed and celery soak for longer next time, but there is plenty of room for experimentation. I have enough kombu for at least 500 martinis.
Master of ceremony … Alessandro Palazzi (left) and the team at Dukes bar, Mayfair. Photograph: Mark Weeks
It’s probably pointless to try to pin a definition on the martini that accommodates all permutations. For some, it’s any drink that comes in a conical martini glass (although the glass didn’t appear on the world stage until 1925, as a modernist version of the champagne coupe).
But the martini is first and foremost an aperitif, Chetiyawardana insists. “It’s not just the cleanness of the profile,” he says. “It’s the manner in which you share it and the places you enjoy it. If you start to add in too much sweetness or even too much acidity, it starts to stray from that bubble.” There is nothing wrong with a guacamole martini, he adds, “but as soon as it starts to stray into a new emotion, it probably needs a new name”.
Palazzi, whose Bond-inspired martinis include the tiger tanaka (ginger-infused vodka, Grand Marnier, vermouth, ginger liqueur and orange zest), says the definition is more straightforward. “For me, a martini has to be served in a martini glass, where the main spirit is the main character,” he says. The name martini creates certain expectations, just as a Tom Cruise movie does. “If I go and see some film where Tom Cruise is a priest and he blesses everybody, it’s not a Tom Cruise movie any more.”
