Episode 123: Martini Meditations With Robert Simonson

In order to understand what the Martini is, it’s important to know what the Martini was. Imbibe contributing editor Robert Simonson (publisher of The Mix newsletter and author of The Martini Cocktail) joins us for this episode to explore the Martini’s evolution since its inception, and to consider the Martini’s role in modern cocktail culture.

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Read the Transcript

Paul Clarke

Hey everybody, welcome back to Radio Imbibe from Imbibe Magazine. I’m Paul Clark, Imbibe’s editor-in-chief, and we are in full-on Martini mode at the moment. Our May/June issue has been out for a couple of weeks now, and hopefully you’ve had a chance to take a look at our cover story on the return of the Martini to the cocktail mainstream and to prominence in today’s cocktail culture. We’ve got several really cool recipes on that issue for Martinis and Martini-adjacent cocktails, so be sure to stick a glass in your freezer before you start reading so you’ll be all set to mix a cocktail when you’re fired up with a Martini inspiration.

If you like Martinis or you’re just starting to explore them and you missed our most recent episode of the podcast, then I highly recommend you click back over to that one once you’ve finished this episode, because for that previous episode we invited several bartenders from across the country to share some of their perspectives and best practices when it comes to mixing a Martini.

But the Martini is more than a recipe or a set of techniques. The Martini is a huge and indelible piece of cocktail culture, and woven into our history and our culture at large. It’s been a shape-shifting and influential cocktail for more than a century now. And at this point in its history, as we’re reappraising the Martini and restoring it to its natural place in the bar world, it’s worth considering some of that history and how the Martini has evolved from its beginnings up to the present day.

Robert Simonson is a contributing editor to Imbibe and the author of many books, including The Martini Cocktail, in which he explores pretty much exactly this topic. Robert also regularly writes about his Martini experiences on his Substack newsletter, The Mix, documenting the good, the bad, and the downright weird among the Martinis he encounters in airports and hotel bars, as well as cocktail bars across the country. So for this episode, I ask Robert to join us to share some of his Martini wisdom and some of the insights he’s picked up over the years as a Martini devotee. 

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Paul Clarke

Robert, welcome back to Radio Imbibe. 

Robert Simonson

Glad to be here again. 

Paul Clarke

Thanks for coming back. It’s always good to talk to you and I wanted to have you back on the podcast for a particular reason, and that is our May-June issue is now out and available and in subscribers’ hands. And for that issue, we delve into the details surrounding a cocktail that I know is very near and dear to your heart as it is to mine, and that is the Martini. In addition to being a regular drinker of Martinis, as anyone who subscribes to your Substack newsletter, The Mix, would know, you’re a big fan of Martinis out there in the wild. You also have a book that came out several years ago called The Martini Cocktail.

So I wanted to have you on to trace some of the Martini’s trajectory over time and also to check in on the current state of the Martini affairs today. So to get us started and to position the Martini in a little bit, I should ask, is the Martini merely a great cocktail or is it the greatest of all cocktails? 

Robert Simonson

I think it’s safe to say it’s the greatest of all cocktails. 

Paul Clarke 

Ooh.

Robert Simonson

I mean, cert-

Paul Clarke 

Staking the claim. 

Robert Simonson

I would say that even if I didn’t like Martinis. And I do like Martinis. But you can’t ignore the evidence that we’ve been wrestling with this drink for 150 years and we keep talking about it. As you say, we write books about it. We’re obsessed with it. And other drinks, like the Old Fashioned or the Daiquiri or the Manhattan, they are just as good a drink as the Martini, but they don’t have that resume. 

Paul Clarke

And when you think of how embedded is the Martini in our culture …. For many decades now, just think of the icons. Think of the neon sign outside of an old school cocktail lounge. What do they show? 

Robert Simonson

That’s right.

Paul Clarke 

Think of the, if you’re typing “cocktail” on your phone and the little emoji comes up. What? 

Robert Simonson 

You’re going to get …

Paul Clarke

It’s …

Robert Simonson 

a …

Paul Clarke 

a …

Robert Simonson 

Martini. 

Paul Clarke 

Martini. So exactly. So the Martini is there. And the Martini is a great unifier cocktail in some ways. You know, people who love good Martinis tend to bond with other people who love good Martinis. It’s that kind of, you know, conversational kind of thing. But it can also be an incredibly divisive cocktail. And this has been true for generations. 

Robert Simonson 

I think that’s part of the fun. 

Paul Clarke 

Yeah. Part of it. You know, exactly. It gives you something to talk about. Something to argue about in a way that, you know, if can bicker over the Martini the way you might sports teams. 

Robert Simonson

Yeah, but sports, that’s a good comparison because you can argue about these things and not really be mad at the other person. 

Paul Clarke 

Yeah. Yeah. There’s not, there’s not really any, you know, you don’t really have any skin in the game in some ways. It’s just your opinion. And, you know, depending on how heated you want to get about it, which shouldn’t be very much about the Martini. But, you know, in your book, you trace some of the Martini’s earliest incarnations as it emerged from the primordial soup of the cocktail bar. So before we get into the question of what is a Martini, let’s ask what was a Martini back in its earliest days?

Robert Simonson 

Well, what was a Martini is not anything that anybody would recognize as a Martini today. It was a sweet drink, it was made with Old Tom gin and sweet vermouth. It still had that same blueprint, that structure. You had gin, you had vermouth. But the kinds you were using made it a very different drink. It was still thought of as an aperitif, as I think it still is today to a certain extent, something you drink before a meal. But, you know, a very different kind of before dinner drink.

And then slowly but surely over the next 50 years, it became drier and drier. They switched out the Old Tom and they brought in the London dry. They switched out the sweet and they brought in the dry vermouth. But even for a while, there were many different kinds of Martinis out in the field. And people had their favorites. It didn’t really settle into what we know as the gin or vodka dry Martini until the mid-20th century. 

Paul Clarke 

Yeah, right. And, you know, as we go through the Martini story, there are a couple of things I’d like to flag that are worth watching over the course of the drinks evolution. The first, of course, is the proportions of the Martini, whether it’s 50-50 or 2-to-1 or 5-to-1 or 7-to-1 or what have you. But also the presence of modifying ingredients beyond simply vermouth. 

Robert Simonson

Mm-hmm. 

Paul Clarke

So I’d like to start with that first point, if we could, the ratio of the two main ingredients in the Martini. And how that ratio has changed over time. How did we get from those extremely wet versions once we started migrating from sweet vermouth to dry vermouth? Still, there was a good chunk of dry vermouth in that formulation. How did we get to those versions we saw later in the 20th century where it was super dry, the incredibly arid Martinis? How did that path unfold? 

Robert Simonson 

Yes, in the beginning, I mean, the proportions were more of an even match. You know, it would be 2-to-1 or 1-to-1 even. I mean, vermouth played a very big role in that drink. I mean, there is a theory that, you know, the Martini cocktail got its name from a brand of vermouth, Martini. But then, over the course of the time, it got drier and drier. But even as you were approaching Prohibition and you were using London dry gin and dry vermouth, it could still be 2-to-1. And if you look in the old cocktail books and you find a cocktail that’s described as a dry Martini, that could still be 2-to-1. It’s only after Prohibition that it became dry, dry, dry. And I think there are various reasons for that.

I think vermouth was mishandled. Bartenders forgot to put it in the fridge, so vermouth got a very bad rap. It became this thing that if you put it in your drink, it spoiled your drink. It made it taste bad. And also, I just think after World War II, the American businessman wanted a stronger drink. A stronger drink means more gin. And also, I think sometimes some people began to think that if you were putting more vermouth in the Martini, you were kind of getting cheated by your bartender. You weren’t getting as much for your money. So bit by bit, step by step, vermouth just started being pushed off the bar. 

Paul Clarke 

You touched upon a couple of really important points. And I think part of it was that idea that you’re being cheated in some way, that I paid you 50 cents for a Martini, as you would back in the day. 

Robert Simonson

Yeah. 

Paul Clarke 

And you’re expecting a lot of gin and what’s that other stuff you’re putting in there? It’s not gin. That’s all I know. But also, let’s be frank. For a long time, this is still true today, a lot of people don’t really know what they want. You go into a bar, maybe you don’t go to cocktail bars, but you’re going after work for drinks with some of your co-workers. You don’t really know what to order. And you’ve heard a dry Martini. Well, I’ll look classy if I do that. And the drier, the better.

At least that’s the way that the lore goes. It’s almost an urban myth at that point, where you put out this image of what the cocktail should be to people who don’t really know anything about the cocktail. And they just latch onto it saying, well, if I put my flag in the ground for the dry Martini, as little vermouth as possible, then I’m going to sound like I know what I’m talking about. And then you get the drink, of course, and it’s strong enough to take the top of your head off, and that’s the reason why some people don’t like Martinis. 

Robert Simonson 

Yeah, no, it’s the ultimate tough-guy order. And also, in a way, it’s a classy order. It was so much of culture by the time we get to the mid-20th century. So many novelists had written about it, like Hemingway, and poets like Ogden Nash, and possibly Dorothy Parker. You were informed with the idea that if you’re going to order a Martini, this puts you in the pantheon with all these writers and all these cultural celebrities. And also, you know, it is a strong drink. And strong men and women can drink strong drinks.

Paul Clarke 

Right, right. And, you know, so we wound up at a point with Martini fundamentalists, in a way. You know, you think of the Violet Hour and the 3.7-to-1 Martini. I mean, that’s not even a ratio any normal person can measure out, unless you’re really breaking out, like, digital scales and that kind of thing. And with these kinds of Martini ideologues, with no vermouth or only drops of vermouth or it’s ruined, that kind of thing, did that approach do the Martini any favors in the long run in terms of, you know, kind of ensuring its long-term viability? 

Robert Simonson 

I think perhaps it hurt its reputation with certain younger generations, the generations that came of age in the ’60s and ’70s. They just looked at their parents drinking these Martinis that were just buckets of gin or buckets of vodka. And they say, well, they’re just alcoholics, I’m going to try something else. And it did not seem like a great cocktail or a great idea at that point. Because I think at that point, you know, there was still a certain mythology surrounding the cocktail.

But a lot of it had been lost. A lot of the poetry had been lost. It was just a big, boozy drink. It was a relic from another age. And then we got into the ‘tini age of the ’80s and ’90s, where everything that you put into a Martini glass was a Martini. Then it really lost its soul. And there was a good case to be made that nobody knew what a Martini was, and maybe it wasn’t anything. 

Paul Clarke 

The Martini went from being a very specific thing to becoming everything to becoming nothing. That’s like the most existential path that a cocktail could take, you know. I remember, you know, in my own path for thinking I should cultivate a taste for Martinis. As, you know, when I was in my late 20s, this is something I need to know how to make. So I would get my bottle of gin. I would get my bottle of terrible vermouth that I paid very little money for because I thought, well, you only use a little bit of it, so why spend money on anything decent? Leave it, you know, out on the kitchen counter week after week. And then every time I would try to make a Martini, shaking it really hard, pouring it into my glass, and it would be terrible. I hated it.

And of course, the thing I always thought was, well, I must have used too much vermouth because that was just what the assumption was that he’d screwed it up. It wasn’t until many years later where I got, you know, into my cocktail nerd kind of era and realized, oh, let’s try this, you know, 2-to-1 Martini that they have in the Savoy cocktail guide. And you realize that, first off, this one doesn’t hurt me. It actually tastes good. It actually tastes pretty decent when you think about it and really kind of approach the proportions differently. 

Robert Simonson 

Yeah, that’s sort of the story with every cocktail that we tried to rescue and bring back. I mean, No. 1, use quality and ingredients. And No. 2, just … yeah, concentrate on the technique. Put a little more care into it. 

Paul Clarke 

Yeah. 

Robert Simonson

And you’re actually going to probably end up with the good cocktail that people were talking about back in the day. 

Paul Clarke 

Right, right. And, you know, before we get too far, I also want to talk about modifiers beyond vermouth. And this is a sticky point for some people. Orange bitters have been given a pass to some degree by a lot of people.

Robert Simonson

Yes. 

Paul Clarke 

And once we start looking at the broader Martini family, where we’re not just looking at the according to Hoyle dry Martini, but we start including things like the Turf cocktail or the Vesper, things of that nature. do these modifiers come into play? And how do they continue to keep something Martini-ish and within that recognizable Martini family without pulling it in a totally different direction? 

Robert Simonson 

Yeah, the Martini is a tricky thing. I mean, you really have to have a sophisticated mind to think about the Martini because you have to be able to hold multiple ideas, which are all true in your head at the same time.

So, Martini is one thing. It’s gin and vermouth and maybe orange bitters. But then you look at something like a Gibson, you know, and it’s got an onion instead of an olive. Is that a Martini? Well, maybe not, but it’s not not a Martini because that would be silly to say it’s not a Martini. It’s so close. And it’s the same with things like the Turf Club and other Martini variations. The Martini family is very large.

And so I do believe you can believe that the Martini should hew close to a certain recipe and also believe that it’s one big happy family and there are a lot of drinks in it. And these days that’s even more true because we’ve got all these skilled bartenders out there and they’re being made to put Martinis on their menus because Martinis are so popular. They don’t just want to put a regular Martini on there because that’s boring and that does not show their creativity. And so they’re playing around with blanc vermouth, and they’re playing around with sake and sherry, little bits into the Martini. And it would be stupid to argue that these are not also Martinis. They’re just fooling around with it a little bit. 

Paul Clarke 

Yeah. I mean, as you said at the outset, the Martini’s origin story has sweet vermouth in it. The Martini’s origin story has Old Tom gin in it. When we look at the range of things, the range of products that are available to bartenders and drinkers today, we have excellent vermouths, blanc vermouths, different types of vermouths, specialty vermouths out there. We have quinquinas out there. Beautiful, aromatized, fortified wines, great dry sherries out there. These all fulfill similar functions. And if we’re mixing and matching those in a Martini, it’s still making something that is very much within that realm of the Martini universe without being that kind of like late 20th century ideologue vision of Martini. 

Robert Simonson 

Yes. I mean, I think the part where bartenders have become a lot more flexible in the last 10 years is in the vermouth area. They’ve all decided that you know, okay, we’re going to have some kind of wine component in this drink it doesn’t have to be vermouth or it doesn’t have to be dry vermouth anything that is derived from wine or grapes it could work.

Paul Clarke 

Right, right. And you know when you look at the modern cocktail renaissance of the past 20 years or so, we’ve seen one classic cocktail after another be rediscovered or re-embraced or reimagined by bartenders and drinkers. You know, we went gaga for the Manhattan early on with everybody putting Carpano Antica Formula into everything. We went through our Old Fashioned era, which you wrote another book during that point where everybody’s reading Old Fashioneds. Then we went into Negronis. And, man, everybody went crazy for everything like a Boulevardier or anything Negroni-ish. Why did it take the Martini so long to recapture its point in the spotlight? I mean, the 20th century Martini was king. What took it so long to reach point again where it’s now once again visible on menus everywhere?

Robert Simonson 

Well, I have a two-part answer to that question. The first part is my own personal theory. I sort of feel like the mixologists of the cocktail renaissance felt that they did not have to rescue the Martini. The Martini did not need rescuing. It was the one cocktail that even if you knew nothing about cocktails, you knew that name, you knew Martinis. And also I think that that that point, uh, the reputation of the Martini was garbage in the ’90s with the Appletinis and the Chocolatinis and every espresso Martinis. Even modern mixologists did not want to mess around with that stuff, you know. That’s what they were running away from. They wanted to bring back the classic cocktails, you know, that were pristine and excellent and elegant.

So that’s the first part but that didn’t really still rescue the Martini. I noticed the Martinis starting to come back in the late 2010s at certain places like the Grill here in Manhattan. But it was really the pandemic, I think, that brought the Martini back in full force. Everybody was at home. Everyone had to make their own drinks. What are they going to make? They’re going to make simple drinks because they’re not bartenders. Martini is a simple drink. It’s also a bold drink and a strong drink and we all needed a strong drink then. So by the time we were all released from our homes after a year everybody had a thirst for Martinis and the bars had to answer that.

Paul Clarke 

I think the Martini was also perfectly well suited for times like the pandemic or times like we’ve seen in the last decade or so. Because when you think about it, the Martini was the cocktail of choice purportedly of people like Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, both of whom dealt with some pretty heavy stuff uh during the Martini …

Robert Simonson

Yes.

Paul Clarke 

… drinking eras. The Martini’s that stiff-upper-lip kind of cocktail where it’s, you know, it’s not fruity fun. It can be fun, but it’s not frilly. It’s something that’s very serious in a way. It’s very meditative and sometimes that is what the times call for.

Robert Simonson

Yes that’s true. And I also think, well, I mean, the Martini goes through cycles. We go through these periods where Martinis are insanely popular and then they disappear for a while. I think this has happened like four times at this point, and we always follow a pattern. And now I think we’re kind of in a muddled area. We brought the Martini back. Everyone respects and appreciates and love this drink again. But then of course I mentioned the bartenders are going to play around with it and so we have many Martini variations in most bars that you go into these days.

Modern cocktail bars, you ask for their house Martini. It’s not going to be a Martini, it’s going to be a Martini variation, and it’s been pre-batched and bottled. And that’s what you get if you just want your little your gin and vermouth. You’re going to have to ask for that specially. And so we’ve got those. Also people have started to experiment with the ‘tinis that were banished once upon a time. Now we have classy Appletinis. And, of course, the espresso Martini has never gone away. So is that a Martini? Is that not a Martini? We don’t know. And eclipsing all of these quite frankly, the dirty Martini is the most popular kind of Martini in the world by far and there are many variations of that now.

Paul Clarke 

Yeah, and I think that’s worth noting. You know, as much as we think these classic cocktails, these classy classic cocktails, like the Martinis, are enjoying a comeback, you know when you go out there in the real world, you see what people are actually drinking. Sometimes it’s very sobering, but, like, whatever the opposite of that is. And, you know, and you touched upon two things and I want to follow each of these paths separately if we could.

The modern-day Martini in your book and in your other writing, you track a couple of distinct directions for the Martini. And the first is the approach that you were just mentioning, the approach to the cocktail by contemporary bartenders in cocktail bars and restaurants who have, you know, people who have a true respect for and understanding of the cocktail and wish to present the Martini or something very much like the Martini in all of its glory. What are some of the more interesting variations or approaches or directions that you’ve come across to the Martini from going to these bars over the years?

Robert Simonson 

I mentioned some of this previously. The modifying agent is all over the place. It is actually rare to see dry vermouth in a Martini these days. You see blanc vermouth quite a bit, which has a nice softening effect on the drink. I think sherry is like a lovely addition to a Martini. It marries with the vermouth so well, and so I never have any objection to a Martini with a little bit of sherry in it, especially if it’s fino sherry. You see shochu a lot. You see sake. Sometimes you’ll see as many or five to six ingredients in a Martini. I think then they’re going a little overboard there and getting a little lost. So those are some of the things that I have been seeing.

People are also playing around with techniques. It’s not just shaken and stirred. You can throw your Martini, and that’s a process where you just you pour the Martini from a great height from the mixing glass into the glass, and it’s supposed to aerate the Martini. I see that more and more. A lot of Martinis are pre-batched and bottled, so that’s a kind of genre as well, and you can argue the pros and cons of that. It’s really a myriad things. And I guess you have to take it on a case-by-case basis, like you just try the house Martini. Is this good? Is this not? What if it’s good? Who cares how they made it? But sometimes it does feel like we’re kind of lost in this forest of Martinis. 

Paul Clarke 

Yeah, and on that note, the other approach that you take that I was coming across was this is especially for readers of your newsletter, The Mix, where you have a habit or a tendency to throw yourself on the grenade, as it were, of Martinis out there in the wild where talking about things like airport Martinis, hotel Martinis, Martinis that you encounter in places that you might not think of for getting a Martini. What are the range of experiences that you’ve come across in doing this? Have you had some great Martinis out there that are really surprising? Have there been some memorable failures in that? 

Robert Simonson 

Yeah, I have a lot of fun going to airports and ordering Martinis. As we know, you never know what you’re going to get in an airport. And I don’t know why I started doing that. I guess just ordering beer or a Bloody Mary, which is most what most people do in an airport was just kind of boring to me. And so I just thought, well, let’s give this a try. And it was all over the place, obviously. They came in regular glasses, they came in plastic glasses, they came out the rocks, they came straight up.

Airports really have a hard time with lemon twists. They don’t know how to do that. So you’ll get a lemon wedge or lemon rind or sometimes a lime. Sometimes they’ll get olives and lemon at the same time. But more and more, I’m getting better and better Martinis at airports. And if you travel as much as I do, or as you do, you become a better judge as to which bar in an airport you can have your best chance at, and you can look at the bottles on the back bar, and you can choose. And then you just keep going back to those places. 

Paul Clarke 

And it’s been I know, like for me, my own kind of personal Martini journey I mentioned earlier, making the horrible, horrible Martinis when I was in my 20s and deciding I didn’t like them, then coming back around to them and understanding a little bit better. Really, for myself, it’s only been in the last within the past decade and probably close to the last eight years or so, that I’ve really fully found myself describing myself as a Martini drinker. Because it always been I was a cocktail drinker. I love Manhattans, I love Negronis, I love Daiquiris; I do love daiquiris. I love everything I just mentioned. But I find that, like, my default cocktail more and more over the years is going to a Martini or something very much like a Martini, something very much in that family. 

Robert Simonson 

Maybe it is a drink that you just mature into, not just as a cocktail writer, but also as a cocktail bartender. You probably remember when we got into this, the people who drank Martinis were the older bartenders. People like Dale DeGroff. They like a good, strong Martini. And that’s probably because they had knowledge that we didn’t know yet, and we had to develop. And now we’re at this stage in our life, and, of course, you want a Martini. Why wouldn’t you? Why would you want anything else? That is the adult sophisticated drink. 

Paul Clarke 

Right. Exactly. And it’s, you know, it is the most grown-up of cocktails in a way. In the world of adult beverages, this is the most mature thing, really, that you can come across. It’s loosening all of the things that we’ve approached over the years.

You know, like Negroni was bitter, but it was also sweet. So it had that thing we could latch onto. The Manhattan had that sweet aspect to it. So there was something you could latch onto. The Martini is, you know, kind of cocktail without a parachute. You have to be fully embracing this and fully part of the experience to really, to really appreciate it and really to make it kind of part of what you do. As we head toward the exit, are there any final thoughts on the Martini or its evolution over time or where it is today that you’d like to share? 

Robert Simonson 

Yeah. I think about this a lot as I write a lot about Martinis. I’m a freelance writer, and the articles that I write that get the best reaction are Martini articles right now. That’s what people want to read about. And so I continue to write them, and I continue to look at what’s going out there in the world. I don’t know where we’re headed.

As I said earlier, I think we’re in a confused, muddled area, and we could be headed towards some kind of Martini crash. It would be like in the ’90s again, like, is everything a Martini? And if everything’s a Martini, nothing’s a Martini. What is a Martini? But this is the argument we keep having over and over again. But I find I keep going back to the places who know how to make the classic ones. And if you like that kind of Martini, I’m sorry to say you are in the minority. If you like a gin vermouth Martini, but you will always be there. You will always have a presence in this world and a voice, and they always come back to the original eventually. 

Paul Clarke 

Fantastic. Robert, thanks so much for coming back on the podcast and sharing all of this Martini insight with us. 

Robert Simonson

My pleasure. 

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Paul Clarke

Robert Simonson is a contributing editor to Imbibe Magazine and the voice behind the Substack newsletter, The Mix. You can find him on Instagram @robertosimonson. We’ve got those links for you in this episode’s notes. And that’s it for this episode. Subscribe to Radio Imbibe to keep up with all our future episodes. Head to imbibemagazine.com for all kinds of stories and recipes. Follow us on Instagram, Pinterest, Threads, and Facebook for all our day-to-day coverage. And if you’re not already a subscriber to the print and or digital issues of Imbibe, then let’s change that right now. Just follow the link in this episode’s notes, and we’ll be happy to help you out. I’m Paul Clark. This is Radio Imbibe.