Over the years, the martini has become a totem of simple, effortless cool. A clear spirit, some vermouth, shaken over ice and poured. It’s pure. It’s sophisticated. It’s a way to get incredibly drunk, incredibly fast. This year, though, a new trend has swaggered into view: the vegetable martini. A martini that tastes of vegetables might sound disgusting, but last month the news site Bloomberg called it “London’s latest drinking craze”, so who am I to argue?
Veggie martinis are on the rise: in central London, Eve Bar has a tomatoey Brusketta martini and Science + Industry in Manchester offers a Mushroomtini. In Dalston, east London, Three Sheets makes a beetroot-infused Earth martini, while Tom Kerridge’s Michelin-starred pub the Hand and Flowers, in Marlow, recently introduced a martini made with the chef’s own small-batch vegetable gin. Frankly, I wanted in.
How did I achieve that? By visiting fancy bars and making sexy small talk with glamorous strangers? No, I made veggie martinis at home on a Tuesday afternoon while my seven-year-old had a nosebleed in the next room. Here’s how I got on.
Green spice martini
The most complicated drink on my tasting menu, the green spice martini is based on a cocktail on the menu at Benares, London. The base is vodka, but to that is added lemon juice, ginger juice, elderflower cordial and “cumin and coriander syrup” – which includes toasted cumin seeds and a fistful of fresh coriander. I’m not sure how it’s meant to taste, but there is a chance that I over-toasted the cumin because it was bitter, like very boozy coffee. However, after a little experimentation (chucking in loads more elderflower cordial), it suddenly became delicious. I drank the whole thing – in retrospect, quite foolish. Potentially the drink of the summer.
Verdict: potentially the drink of the summer.
Britney asparagus martini
This was based on the Portobello Road Distillery recipe, which uses special asparagus-flavoured vodka. But I didn’t have any, so I bunged a load of chopped-up asparagus spears into some regular vodka and left it overnight. The flavoured spirit is mixed with sherry and two dashes of saline solution. In a nice bar, prepared by an expert, this is probably lovely and complex. In my bodged-together test kitchen, with no understanding of what constitutes a dash, the results were hideous. The martini tasted exactly like asparagus and salt, so it was a bit like drinking the sea where someone has just urinated.
Verdict: not the drink of the summer.
Pickletini
There is a lovely simplicity to this one, based on the Pickletini recipe by Dima’s Ukrainian vodka. It’s a classic James Bond-style martini – vodka, vermouth, shaken with ice – except it also contains pickle juice, a real drink you can buy that tastes like gherkins. Which means, inevitably, the whole drink tastes like gherkins, not traditionally a desirable flavour on a night out. There is a reason that 007 never sidled up to a bar and growled: “Martini. Shaken, not stirred. And can you make it taste like the worst bit of a Big Mac, please?”
Verdict: not the drink of the summer.
Horiatiki martini
Now for a drink that literally nobody wanted to try. This is largely down to the recipe – Horiatiki is Greek salad. The night before drinking, you take some gin and add cucumber, tomato, oregano and – wait for it – feta cheese. You are not so much making a cocktail as pickling a salad. However, after a night of steeping, it smells delicious. Really delicious, like a pizza. The oregano is fresh and fragrant, and the feta adds just the right level of saltiness. The cocktail – based on a drink at the Firebird restaurant in London – was easy to down, and all the notes I made as I drank were extremely positive. Then again, I was incredibly drunk at this point, so who knows?
Verdict: the drink of the summer!
Celery martini
A small admission. This wasn’t a proper recipe. What happened was: I went shopping for this experiment before I knew what I would be making, and wrongly assumed that celery would feature in most vegetable cocktails. None did, which left me with more celery than I would usually eat in a decade. So I made my own drink by extracting the juice from half a bunch of celery (by grating it and then squeezing out the juice through a muslin, as you do with potatoes when making hash browns), then mixing it 50/50 with vodka. Is it a martini in any recognisable sense? No. But is it delicious? It is. It’s by far the veggiest cocktail of the lot, to the extent that it tastes as if it’s good for you. It’s basically a health drink! Drink of the summer?
Verdict: drink of the year! Good God, I’m drunk …
