The Sad Ruination of a Grand Old Drink

If my Twitter feed is anything to go by, the gin-martini traditionalists have just had it with the vodka crowd. “If it has #vodka in it, it ain't a #martini. It's just a frat boy drink masquerading in a martini glass,” is how one hashtag-happy correspondent summarized the general view. Speaking as a former frat boy, that strikes me as harsh, but the fellow has a point. Once upon a time, if you walked into a bar and ordered yourself a martini, you could expect with confidence that the drink you’d receive would consist of some combination of gin, vermouth, and a garnish. No longer. Nowadays, to get a gin martini you essentially have to recite the recipe line-by-line, sometimes slowly, to ensure that you and the barman are on the same page: “Gin martini up, with just a splash of vermouth and a twist, please.” Anything less specific, and there’s no telling what will arrive--except you can be sure the drink will contain vodka rather than gin, and who knows what else. Restaurants around here have lately begun to feature cocktail menus on their bars—even Uncle Joe’s has one, if you can believe it—and I never fail to be amazed at the concoctions being passed off as martinis. There’s the “appletini,” of course, which has apple schnapps and Cointreau along with the vodka (that damn vodka!) And the espresso martini. (Hazelnut liqueur and Irish cream, among other things. Repulsive.) When I got to the pomegranate juice martini, I had to put the menu down and order myself a shot of bourbon.

So I see why the old-schoolers are upset. Alternatively, if martinis are so wonderful, how did the gin people let the drink get hijacked in the first place? Take, by way of instructive comparison, the martini’s mirror image, the Manhattan. Now there’s a drink that’s impossible to bastardize: it’s whiskey, sweet vermouth, and bitters, that’s it! The notion of adding something like hazelnut liqueur or pomegranate anything to a Manhattan—let alone highlighting the combination on your cocktail menu and charging $18 for it—is so preposterous one has to be sitting down to even consider it, lest one run the risk of becoming woozy. We Manhattan drinkers have stayed vigilant, so it’s hard to feel sorry for martini-ites’ having let their drink go all to hell.

Which is not to say Manhattans are impossible to botch. They’re not. At a brunch in Darien last Sunday following a Saturday night of strenuous socializing, I ordered a Manhattan as a next-morning balm. Manhattans can work wonders at that, believe me. So you can imagine my disappointment when, after I ordered my drink, I looked up to see the bartender shaking it in his cocktail glass as if he were whipping up something out of Trader Vic. Sure enough, the drink arrived cloudy, watered down, and riddled with bubbles. It provided its needed restorative therapy, but failed to add that extra spiritual uplift that can be so helpful at times like that. Whatever happened to bartender school?

Then again, maybe it isn’t so much better-trained bartenders that the country needs as it is better-trained drinkers. Years ago, a parent could mix his 19-year-old child a pre-dinner cocktail and not have to face the nagging worry that by the time the meal was over his house might be surrounded by the police. (“Put down the Chardonnay bottle and come out with your hands up!”) In those days, the kids drank what you handed them, and darn well learned to like it and be sociable. I assume improved public health benefits justify this more recent harder line. But the downside seems to be that the youngsters are having to make things up on their own as they go. The result of this do-it-yourself mentality is a generation of drinkers whose libationary tastes tend toward concoctions like appletinis and pomegranate surprises, while the standard no-frills martini slowly fades away.  That’s progress, I suppose. If you say so.

Follow @banksconrad.