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There are few better places in the world one might begin to self-identify as a martini drinker than at Musso & Frank Grill, the 106-year-old Hollywood statehouse for martini consumption.
My conversion happened at the cusp of the restaurant’s 100th birthday, in early 2019, a couple of months after I moved to Los Angeles. Before that baptism, I would have considered myself a cocktail generalist, ordering whatever stuck out as catchiest on any given menu. Nothing too sweet, open to anything as long as the ingredients make sense together.
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I came alone to the bar for my first time at Musso’s. A friend had urged me to sit in front of Ruben Rueda, the famed bartender who’d worked there since 1967 and could spill stories about Charles Bukowski and Gore Vidal. Rounding the corner from the entrance toward the counter, I caught his gaze. He smiled and calmly waved his hand toward the nearest open burgundy-colored stool, where I settled in.
“A martini, please,” I said to Rueda, the words initiating me into a legion of thousands.
“Gin?” he asked to be certain. I nodded.
Customers occupied every table. Facing the mirrored bar, the sounds of voices and clattering dinnerware pelted my back like raindrops. The air smelled of sizzling meat.
Rueda stirred to an even rhythm, the ice clinking and swirling in his mixing pitcher. He poured the drink first into a modest 2 ½-ounce-size version of the classic V-shaped glass, over two pimento-stuffed olives impaled on a wooden toothpick. The remaining contents he strained into the sidecar, a small carafe nestled on ice in a hammered metal bucket.
The first sip was more sensation than flavor: cold, stinging. Pine and citrus rolled across the palate as icy vapors. My senses went on high alert but also started to decompress; the tension was narcotic. I chewed the first olive with slow relish after emptying the glass, saving the second one for round two still chilling in the sidecar.
It wasn’t as if I’d never had a martini before. Maybe it was the age I’d reached, or the shift in disposition that had come from finally making a home in the city I’d fallen for on extended visits. But something clicked. This? This was now my drink.
Rueda died several months later at 67. I’m sorry I never got to be one of his regulars, prodding him to tell me again about the time he kicked a very drunk Steve McQueen out of Musso’s, but one drink was enough for me to grasp the citywide respect for him and his respect for the martini.
If a martini’s jolt snared me at the right instant six years ago, it’s the drink’s simple-but-not elusiveness, as much as the sting, that keeps me enthralled. I’m hardly alone: Its place in society transcends class, politics and trends. You can fiddle with techniques and stretch the word like spandex to mean things it was never intended to mean.
But devotees know you cannot chip away or erode its essential greatness. Martinis are diamonds among cocktails, and I’m only interested in the purest expressions.
Its history is far murkier than its appearance. To paraphrase Robert Simonson’s “The Martini Cocktail, A Meditation on the World’s Greatest Cocktail, With Recipes”: The martini, as a mixture of gin and vermouth with garnishes, was conceived roughly 150 years ago, with many claiming its invention but no one origin agreed upon. It started sweet, with more vermouth in the ratio, but moved drier as tastes changed over the 20th century.
More than the sum of its fluid parts, a martini is a symbol — it lives in our heads, in pop culture and as a subject of dogma rife in contradiction.
What is the perfect martini? No such thing exists, because perfection is inert and a martini is anything but. Like a pizza, the martini dies a quick death. The first sip is everything, and then the temperature rises. And the proportions, measured by human hands, will be different every time, however microscopically. Its existence hinges on variability.
But it’s the reach for perfection that helps give this jumble of complex flavors (most gins contain between six and 12 botanicals, with hundreds of variations; every vermouth is a botany lesson) its lasting mystique.
Austin Hennelly, bar manager at Kato and my vote for the city’s finest cocktail maestro, told me a great story. He began his career at Booker and Dax, a now-closed game-changer in New York that impelled modernist cocktail techniques. Its general manager, a bartender’s bartender named Maura McGuigan, was training Hennelly on the absolute basics: how to hold a jigger, how to pour, how to shake.
“This was a bar’s financial nightmare,” he said, “but early on, she had me make a stirred dry martini over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, and gave me nuanced and detailed feedback about exactly why each one was wrong. It wasn’t until the 47th try where she finally said, ‘That’s close. Taste that. Remember that.’”
McGuigan left the profession, Hennelly told me, but I would have loved to sample her idea of perfection. Because it differs for each of us, and that’s the big fun of being a martini drinker: the opinions.
Mine can evolve infinitesimally, though they’re pretty locked in.
London Dry-style gin only, the juniper and citrus flavors frontward and searing. (Restaurants that stock only upmarket floral gins drive me crazy; everyone should have a basic like Beefeater on their shelves.) I only learned later that the martini at Musso’s, made with a brand called Gilbey’s founded in 1857, contains no vermouth. The long-standing joke, attributed to Winston Churchill, about only waving a vermouth bottle over a glass of cold gin and calling it a martini never subsides, but the presence of vermouth adds subtle intrigue. I prefer seven parts gin to one part vermouth.
Reading Simonson’s opus — and studying the book of cocktails published last year from the Connaught Bar in London, renowned globally for its extravagant tableside martini theatrics — awakened me to the idea of orange bitters in martinis. It’s been a potential element in the drink, nearly since its inception, that falls in and out of favor. Just a couple of dashes contributes a pheromone-level roundness that doesn’t interfere with the initial, crucial sting. I love it.
A shaken martini often has stray ice chips floating around or a texture that’s more watery than silky. Stirred only, please.
Asking for either a twist of lemon or olives depends on my mood, or maybe what I’m eating alongside. (My obsession threshold is high but my alcohol tolerance is low; I rarely drink on an empty stomach.) Truth is, I like both at once.
You will have another idea of the perfect martini. I respect that. Perhaps you favor vodka, which to me makes for a separate drink entirely. I will imbibe a dirty vodka martini now and then, the same as I might a Sazerac or margarita or milk punch, purely for the sake of variety. The Vesper (basic recipe: gin, vodka, Lillet blanc) is a pleasant variation to me, as is its brooding gin-only cousin, the Gibson, vinegared with cocktail onions.
Soon enough, I return to my ideal of a martini.
Is it the variations inherent between gin and vermouth — wet, dry, 50-50, martini on the rocks — and the range of flavors imaginable in its spareness that make this cocktail so attractive for hijacking by human restlessness? Or the geometric appeal of the iconic glass? Or the name’s particularly satisfying sequence of vowels and consonants? “Martini” does mean something specific. Yet somehow it can also be synonymous with espresso, apple, lychee, passion fruit (i.e., the “porn star”), MSG, tomato, sherry, seaweed, smoked salmon … in due course, anything.
The cocktail du jour that no bar menu is without? It’s the espresso martini, and it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
And it’s beyond any dedicated martini drinker’s control at this point. What’s important is that when a bartender or restaurant server asks me for a drink order and I say “dry martini,” the principal definition remains intact. No one returns with a stirred, cold glass of gin infused with candied bacon.
In “Martini: A Memoir,” published in 2005, decorated Australian writer Frank Moorhouse begins by exploring the notion of the “martini city,” places that have “a luster of which only martini drinkers are aware.” He recounts having this discussion with a friend in New York, its qualification implicit.
They make no mention of Los Angeles either way.
Plenty of us instantly picture Palm Springs, our desert retreat ambered in Midcentury Modern glamour, with Sinatra or Cary Grant gripping martinis poolside. But can L.A. be considered a martini town? My answer is yes, absolutely, in ways shaped to our particular realities.
For openers, our driving and drinking cultures entwine around one another. We tend to stick to one destination for the evening. We sip while we eat. Martinis vibe innately with our universe of foods rich in umami: uni risotto with charred octopus at Camélia; rib-eye tabletop barbecue and kimchi fried rice at Daedo Sikdang; twisty busiate with pesto Trapanese, tomatoes and extra pecorino at Funke; surf clam ceviche wading in culantro leche de tigre at Si! Mon; standout burgers at Here’s Looking at You, Father’s Office and the Benjamin; on and on.
Hennelly made a crucial point in our conversation. “You have two broad camps with martinis,” he said. “The ritual faction that prioritizes the sprezzatura of the presentation and the other side where all that matters is the results in the glass.”
Los Angeles isn’t about the ritual. I don’t know of one choreographed tableside performance of the martini in our vast region. We concentrate on the results rather than the ceremony, and we focus on the aesthetics around us: retro sophistication, set-piece dive bars, leafy indoor-outdoor hangouts with Mediterranean airs.
The Hollywood factor can’t be overstated. The entertainment industry has been insinuating images and ideas of martinis into the world’s consciousness for the last century.
Sloping-sided coupes, the alternative choice for martini stemware, are also known as Nick and Nora glasses, named for the married characters in the 1930s-era “Thin Man” movies who are constantly guzzling martinis. In the first film, Nora shows up at a bar and orders seven martinis to catch up with Nick. It’s comic excess, but I’d argue the fictional pair effectively degendered the martini for generations of Americans.
What has bled off the screen directly into Los Angeles life is a fluency, an informality, with the martini. Absent codified rules, I can have a conversation about exactly how I like my dry martini, bitters and all. No one balks at my requests in this town, ever, and I usually receive a drink I can savor.
The exception: Musso’s. I revisited recently, more confident and articulate than ever about how I prefer my martini. What arrived, interpreted from my instructions, was something vaguely pink, with a collision of flavors that can only be described as medicinal. I knew it wasn’t malicious. There are certain laws of nature one can’t bend to one’s own whims.
I looked up at the server and asked if he could instead bring me the cocktail as it’s always made at Musso’s. He returned with a replacement, and the first sip gave me the martini shivers, as familiar and wonderful as ever.
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