The Martini is a chameleon-like cocktail. Since its invention within the late 1800s, bartenders have served it up and on the rocks, in V-shaped glasses and coupes and slender Nick & Noras, garnished with an fragrant lemon twist, a plump olive, or, in additional singular situations, a pickled onion or sakura blossom. Right this moment’s Martini zeitgeist, nevertheless, facilities on the savagely chilly “freezer Martini”—that’s, a Martini pre-mixed to optimum dilution, then bottled and plunged into subzero temps for a lush, velvety texture.
The method has been slowly gathering traction in cocktail circles since no less than the early 2000s, but it surely’s solely previously few years that the follow has hit its peak, popping up on numerous new bar menus in all places from New York Metropolis’s Le Rock, which boasts three variations on the freezer Martini, to The Butterscotch Den in Sacramento, California, the place you possibly can complement your order with a $3 caviar bump.
Regardless of the fervor with which it’s been adopted by top-tier bars throughout the nation, the freezer Martini shouldn’t be, the truth is, a up to date invention. Its roots hint again to a painfully apparent place: the invention of electrical refrigeration.
Although the fridge got here first, within the Nineteen Thirties, freezers had been launched a few decade later as an enchancment to the icebox (insulated picket cupboards lined with tin, zinc, iron or enamel, designed to maintain ice and meals chilly). By the postwar years, this novel “deep freeze” system went into mass manufacturing, a second that aligned with a rising nationwide thirst for ultradry Martinis. “The freezer Martini was a fairly widespread perversion within the ’50s and ’60s,” says cocktail historian and creator David Wondrich. “Individuals had been very engineering-conscious, and on the time they had been additionally sensible sufficient to comprehend that vermouth is just one of many issues watering down your Martini—there’s additionally dilution, so what are you going to do about that? The answer is, after all, holding the undiluted Martini within the freezer, as a substitute of stirring with ice.”
Hack Your Martini
The way to flip the traditional savory, velvety or sharable with seven straightforward methods.
This early, dry tackle the freezer Martini had its fair proportion of followers, together with author and movie director Garson Kanin, in keeping with Wondrich, in addition to detractors, like essayist Bernard DeVoto, who quipped in The Hour: A Cocktail Manifesto, “You possibly can no extra maintain a Martini within the fridge than you possibly can maintain a kiss there.” Regardless, the cocktail’s notoriety grew to the purpose the place mentions of freezer Martinis may very well be present in magazines together with Cosmopolitan and books like Charles H. Baker’s The South American Gentleman’s Companion, during which Baker cites a dry Martini recipe that’s “pre-mixed, stirred with ice for slightly below 1 minute flat; then strained into glass jars with tops and stored actually chilly in fridge or deep freeze—the latter is greatest.”
The freezer Martini’s preliminary heyday was comparatively short-lived in the US. By the late Nineteen Sixties, the Martini fell out of vogue altogether, and it wasn’t till the cocktail renaissance of the early aughts that the stately mixed-to-order model got here again into prominence, with its frozen counterpart following swimsuit. In Europe, nevertheless, extra-cold, pre-batched Martinis seemingly by no means went out of fashion, a indisputable fact that performs a key position within the phenomenon’s current revival at American bars.
Cocktail historians and bartenders alike are likely to agree on two pivotal, enduring examples of the freezer Martini that doubtless spurred its stateside return: the Nineteen Thirties-era Martini at Harry’s Bar in Venice, and Salvatore Calabrese’s “direct” Martini, which he developed on the Dukes Lodge in London in 1985. On the former, the ten:1 Montgomery Martini is ready with chilled gin and little or no vermouth, stirred with ice, then funneled into diminutive glasses and subsequently saved within the freezer earlier than service. For the Dukes iteration, Calabrese pours ice-cold gin straight into a calming glass adopted by a number of dancing dashes of vermouth excessive. “Initially, these appeared to be the 2 methods of doing it,” Wondrich says. “The Dukes model with out dilution, and Harry’s model with dilution—although Harry’s bar immediately does it with out dilution, too.”
American bartender Thomas Waugh first encountered the Dukes Martini in 2004 whereas on a visit “muling some tequila to London” with contemporaries Julio Bermejo, Marco Dionysos and Jacques Bezuidenhout. On the time, Waugh had solely just lately been promoted from barback to bartender at Enrico’s Sidewalk Café in San Francisco. “To be trustworthy, I believed [the Dukes Martini] was manner too sturdy, but it surely was eye-opening for me. I had two of them and walked out sloshed,” he recollects. “I cherished the concept, however I wished water and vermouth in it as effectively, so I began messing round with that at house.”
Waugh wasn’t the one one captivated by the promise of a numbingly chilly Martini that may very well be pulled from the depths of the freezer on a whim. On the alternative coast, Dave Arnold, then working on the French Culinary Institute in New York, started experimenting with pre-diluted cocktails someplace between 2005 and 2010, he says. “Within the early 2000s there have been loads of arguments that you just had been doing this mystical factor of including texture when stirring a drink, however I ran exams and realized that, no, stirring was solely chilling and dilution.” This realization led him to bottle and chill Martinis for occasions, a way he refined over time and finally carried via to the opening of his groundbreaking bar Booker and Dax in 2012.
“We had been strictly making an attempt to imitate what you’d get with the perfect particular person stirring on the perfect day in a completely constant vogue, and giving it to you 2 to 4 levels colder than you’d be capable of get via stirring,” he says. “On the time it was novel, and blindingly quick.” In 2014, Arnold printed his technique in Liquid Intelligence, which has influenced numerous bartenders to comply with.
Although the freezer Martini remained a well-liked matter of dialogue in sure cocktail circles, it wasn’t till 2017 that it started to seep into the general public consciousness, thanks partly to a New York Occasions assessment by Robert Simonson of the then-new bar within the former 4 Seasons area. “Getting a drink quick and chilly is not going to be an issue,” wrote Simonson, as a result of none aside from Waugh himself was serving Martini variations “premixed and stored in one among 4 freezers behind the bar.”
Thought of linearly, there’s an argument to be made that Waugh, or maybe Arnold, is to thank for the freezer Martini’s trendy rise to ubiquity. However simply because the Martini claims greater than a dozen conflicting origin tales, it’s tough to pin the freezer Martini revival on a single particular person. “Lots of people who had been doing fascinating issues again then weren’t getting press for it,” notes Arnold. “So many occasions, this particular person was doing a cool factor as a result of they discovered it from that particular person, and that stuff doesn’t get written down.”
