Dirty with a twist
An edited version of this essay was published at Polyester under the title The Martini is Back: How the Cocktail is Reflective of the Quiet Luxury Trend.
Ten years ago, I did not always experience ease when ordering a dirty martini. One of the first times I attempted to order one at a bar in Fort Greene, Brooklyn I was told by my server that they had olives but no olive juice so would I be okay with a glass of vodka and a skewer of olives? I mistakenly thought I would be because the snack within the drink was the whole novelty anyway, and this was before I understood the superiority of a gin martini to its vodka-based bastard (though one could also argue the “dirty” martini of my choice is also an adulteration of the original).
My timing in turning twenty-one and moving to New York City had been most inconvenient as I had missed the classic cocktail’s then most recent comeback, likely related to the popularity of Mad Men which premiered in 2007.The sixties nostalgia of the late aughts and early 2010s brought Jon Hamm and John Slattery in slick suits in fictionalized but oh-so-historically-accurate offices on Madison Avenue as mini skirts and T-shirts with peace signs filled clothing displays at malls.
The difficulty I found in ordering was not always a menu issue or a bar lacking ingredients. Did I, insecure in my desires, imagine the exasperation of busy bartenders when ordering? Perhaps cocktail drinkers are generally a more high maintenance bunch. What kind of person drinks martinis? The ad men depicted by Hamm and Slattery, sophisticated and charming with business always at the forefront? Their powerful predecessors of the eighties and nineties who pioneered the three-martini lunch? Snarky writers and artists whose confidence only seems to emerge under liquid encouragement? James Bond? 1920s gangsters bootlegging in pinch front fedoras? Nihilistic rich housewives in slinky night gowns and fabulous robes?
Animation by John Irving
The unifying traits of all these archetypes being wealth or the appearance of it, power and the quest for it, and masculinity or the woeful lack of it, all wrapped in a chilling sophistication. I can’t hold claim to any of these distinctions now and certainly couldn’t in my early twenties. But still, I’ve coveted the dirty martini in all its briny glory. While working at a restaurant in Cobble Hill six years ago, whose patronage had slowed so much that we sometimes closed early on weekends, my coworkers and I compensated ourselves with drinks, turning up music loudly and dancing while we cleaned. On my train rides home, I sipped dirty martinis to go in paper coffee cups. It was then I learned of my perfect recipe: wet (equal or more vermouth to gin), dirty, and with a twist.
Really, more olive juice than alcohol is fine, I not-so-jokingly once told a server in a Colorado bar that was serving $5 happy hour martinis. When my friend, whose family we were visiting, echoed my order he told us, lecherously, I think you mean filthy martinis. Instead of repulsion we chose to be amused because he was cute and gave us what we wanted—not just drinks, but attention, which felt like a sort of power.
My friends’ logo for their college punk band was a broken martini glass that I figured symbolized the smashing of the rich elite. The history of the martini as a distinction of wealth is long documented. Its origin is unknown and greatly debated. One story, tracing its roots to the California Gold Rush as a celebratory drink for one miner who became rich by the lucky swing of a pick.
As one of the oldest American cocktails, what may have once stood for the emergence of newfound money and its class members, is now also entwined with the image of old money. Maybe this is why the martini’s most recent comeback that we are currently experiencing—allowing me to buy the drink in most bars be it in a hotel or a div—has coincided with trends that focus on affluence and opulence.
Quiet luxury is often touted as a counter to hyper consumerism, which urges us to spend wantonly on trendy clothing with a short life cycle, by teaching people to buy more expensive high-quality pieces that will last for years. While this is true, its popularity has been powered by people’s aspirations to look rich—even or especially, stealthily so—instead of gauche. Offshoot trends of quiet luxury such as yacht girl summer and old money aesthetic (think the Kennedys and Ralph Lauren) further reveal this goal.
I’m not immune to the guise of sophistication felt when ordering a martini and then holding the glass stem. Oh a martini, a friend might say impressed. And when the bartender asks how I like it, I tell them, full of conviction, dirty with gin and not to skip the vermouth as dry martinis have become more popular in recent years.
At a work event, a man repeatedly tells me to stay complicated after ordering at the bar despite my assertions that this is a really popular drink. A martini is perfect because it is both a sociable cocktail and a solitary one. But I’ve been long interested in reclaiming the dirty martini as one for the people, mixing it for my friends when they come over and urging them to take sips from my glass at bars. In college I argued that it was actually more economical than beers as it got you drunker faster.
It’s no coincidence that interest in luxury and decadence comes on the heel of global isolation as COVID-19 emerged in 2020. We were all drinking more. While searching for toilet paper amidst winding lines at grocery stores that March, I also stocked up on olives, gin, and vermouth. And did being inside make many of us crueler? After being inside for a year or so—for those who had the fortitude to not be deemed essential in their work—it seems many of us got tired of caring about our peers and sick of reckoning with the past and present. We just wanted to live outside—feeling good, looking good, drinking, and carefree.
Which is not to say we should all forego our martinis or other pockets of joy and small fancies but we may be better served to not be must not be overtaken by their seductiveness of aspirational wealth.
I’m haunted by the parallels between the eras of Wall Street execs and Mad Men-esque business men, whose tax-deducted three-martini lunches occurred with the backdrop of the AIDS and crack epidemic that ravaged queer and communities of color in the eighties of nineties, and the upheaval that occurred in the sixties as Black people in the United States sought liberation and basic equal rights. Maybe for some, especially the already rich, social unrest is an inconvenience to be ignored with splendor and drinks like the crisp martini, wash away the distastefulness of their complicity.
