What’s black, white and studded with three (allegedly lucky) choking hazards? I’ll give you a clue: it’s the post-university equivalent of a double vodka Red Bull but with one key difference… despite the sticky palms, often questionable aftertaste and inevitable staring competitions with the ceiling at 3am, somehow we’re still sipping them.
The marker of an evening set to go awry, the espresso martini is a confounding cocktail. Confounding because nobody ever begins a night on the tiles thinking, “What I’d really like right now is an espresso martini…” And yet stats compiled by Dr Google say it’s the fourth most popular concoction in Britain.
Branded as cheugy by the entirety of Gen Z and either too sweet or just plain tacky by the rest of us, it’s the quaffable equivalent of an unremarkable but convenient situationship. The sort where you tell your friends, “they, er, don’t have social media”, yet keep crawling back to the comfort of their embrace for more. So why, in a time when 10 per cent of the World’s 50 Best Bars churn out innovation after innovation right here in our city, are Londoners still reaching for a taste of the espresso martini?
To understand part of the cocktail’s appeal, a glance back at its conception is key, because apparently once upon a time it wasn’t considered unremarkable or gauche at all. The espresso martini’s history is tainted with a thousand whispers, but the most compelling and recurring story happily begins right here in London with a man named Dick Bradsell and an encounter with an anonymous supermodel.
Bradsell, who sadly died aged 54 of a brain tumour in 2016, told Kasia Olszko in a television interview: “I invented this at Fred’s Bar in the late Eighties when a young model who’s now famous came in and said, ‘Can you make me a drink that will wake me up and f*** me up?’”
As it’s rumoured to have been either Naomi Campbell or Kate Moss on the other side of the bar, the allure of the luxuriously viscous mix of vodka, espresso and sugar syrup is evident: a beautiful, stylish person drinking a beautiful, stylish thing. And who, deep down, doesn’t want to embody just that?
Soon the drink was sloshing about in the hand of every hedonist in town. Legendary mixologist Salvatore Calabrese, AKA “The Maestro”, now at Velvet by Salvatore Calabrese and the Donovan Bar, remembers it well. “After the wonderful Dick created it in the late Eighties, in the Nineties the martini had a huge wave of popularity, and that’s when we saw it being requested more and more. However, it made its mark with a true vengeance in the early 2000s, so much so that the only after-dinner drink we saw being requested was the espresso martini.”
This coincided with a major change in drinking culture, says Calabrese. “It was an interesting moment, around that time bars were starting to be able to get later licences. It was the beginning of the new cocktail era, where classics were being reinvented into new, updated versions of themselves. People wanted to have fun and the espresso martini really embodied that. It’s quite an iconic symbol of joie de vivre and the playful side of the bar industry.”
Twenty years on, perhaps the residual glamour of the frothy cocktail still trickles through. After all, it is the go-to when a group decides it’s time to take a gathering from zero to one hundred.
Plus, a beautifully crafted coupe can make just about anything look glamorous (well, almost. I’m looking at you, prawn cocktail). No, the espresso martini doesn’t have the clean, crisp clarity, or the sophistication of the original martini, but it does have the allure of caffeine. And caffeine we like. A timeless superpower glittering with possibility, promising to lift those imbibing from a post-dinner slump and increase their chances of stamping out any opponent in a political showdown, developing the sex appeal of ’Yonce, and making even the stuffiest room roar with laughter.
And I don’t know about you, but in all of my, ahem, professional experience testing cocktails, I’m fairly certain there’s still no significant challenger on the horizon. Both the nitro martini created by Mr Lyan and Hawksmoor’s Clearwater version are delicious, but not widely available; the usual coffee shop substitutions — decaf, matcha, tea — will hardly do the trick; and the disappearance of the only close contender, Cafe Patron (RIP), sent the country into national mourning. Meanwhile, yes, the Irish coffee at Swift is the best, but nobody wants a warm summer cocktail. And have you ever tried a coffee old fashioned? Don’t even think about it.
Thankfully, somewhere amidst the Kahlua knockoffs and premixed tinnies of the OG, there is the odd saving grace to enjoy while we wait, and wait, for the next glamorous, invigorating and widely available big thing. Made with great fresh coffee, the frothy, decadent delights at Calabrese’s, Bar Termini, The Berkeley and Satan’s Whiskers are as good as the espresso martini gets.
So if a defibrillator or a disco nap is out of the question, go ahead, take a seat at the bar and embrace the buzz. Who knows, you may even get mistaken for Naomi Campbell.
