Once trilled a somewhat overrated American humorist, wisely left out of Kingsley Amis’s Oxford English Book of Light Verse:
There is something about a martini,
A tingle remarkably pleasant;
A yellow, a mellow martini;
I wish I had one at present.
There is something about a martini,
Ere the dining and dancing begin,
And to tell you the truth,
It’s not the vermouth —
I think that perhaps it’s the gin.
It is the gin. Robert Messinger in The Weekly Standard, paraphrasing David Embury’s Fine Art of Mixing Drinks:
* Fifth: A cocktail “must have sufficient alcoholic flavor.” Even the simplest of cocktails like a vermouth cassis must taste of alcohol. If you don’t like the taste of the stuff, drink soda water. There’s nothing else to say. Drinks that don’t taste of alcohol were developed for coeds and the saps who try to get them drunk. There are cocktails for every palate, and every cocktail is adjustable. If you don’t like bitter herbs, make a Negroni with simple syrup substituted for a quarter of the Campari. A cocktail tailored to your palate will still taste wonderfully of the alcohol. A cocktail that does not taste of its alcohol is likely something disreputable.
Rules one through four are more self-evident, but why is it in these artifically sweetened times that the taste of hooch is the first casualty in social lubrication? A bloody mary with bad vodka is a V-8 that tastes like it’s past its expiration date, which is why, as Messinger points out, your best best in these mixologically mixed up times, is to keep it simple, dipso–or go to one of the finer cocktail lounges in major metropolitan areas that make it a point of nobly trying to resurrect a dead culture.
Pegu Club in Manhattan is an excellent choice, not least because it’s on West Houston (on my way home from work) and hidden in the upper storey of a nondescript building. The ornate dragon emblem on the door makes you feel like you’re in the opening credit sequence of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and so do the anything-goes outfits on the waitstaff. Mercifully, though, for a locale modeled on the speakeasy, the bachelor parties that occasionally infiltrate hover around the bar area in the back–not by the banquettes in the front, which allow you to sit with your date side by side. Brandy Library in TriBeCa is another good snort spot, albeit very expensive, and with the kind of detailed menu that makes you think you’re uncovering the cabalistic secrets of the Illuminati, not a 16 year-old bottle of Hirsch Reserve bourbon (whose secrets are a mite more mysterious). What else? Oh, yes: Verlaine on the Lower East Side. Faute de mieux, they do a not-bad lychee martini, but these go down very easily, especially at happy hour, and if you have so much as a gin and tonic later in the evening you discover that a migraine is the chief daylight yield of East meeting West.