In case you heard somebody request a Martini on the rocks, you may infer from the order alone that they have been north of 60—sufficiently old to recall that it was Frank Sinatra’s most well-liked approach of taking the traditional cocktail. In truth, for many individuals who got here of age within the post-WWII period, a Martini on the rocks was merely de rigueur. In 1961, The New York Instances even famous the evolving pattern: “As for Martinis, the 2 most important current developments are the developments to the vodka Martini and to the Martini on the rocks.”
Within the intervening years, as tastes modified and the trendy cocktail revival fought to revive propriety to the realm of blended drinks, the notion of a Martini served in something aside from a stemmed glass grew to become sacrilegious. Throughout these years, too, the Martini grew to become rather more than a drink with a set recipe—it grew to become an concept, a metonym for sophistication, opulence, purity. To take such a symbolically loaded cocktail and throw it over just a few ice cubes would dilute the picture of the drink as a lot because the drink itself.
In opposition to this backdrop, in 2017, we posed the query: Can the Martini on the rocks make a comeback? Again then, the query was virtually rhetorical. Seven years on, I’m completely satisfied to report that the Martini on the rocks has made small, however important inroads into the mainstream. Throughout the final yr, Bar Bludorn in Houston, 4 Partitions in Nashville and Stokes Adobe in Monterey, California, to call just a few, have all served some model of a Martini over a big rock. It could by no means dethrone the Martini in a V-shaped glass, however to get pleasure from the identical ice-cold traditional we all know and love in a format that’s slightly softer across the edges—that’s its personal sort of opulence.
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