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. At present’s Martini zeitgeist, nonetheless, 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 strategy has been slowly gathering traction in cocktail circles since at the least the early 2000s, however it’s solely prior to now few years that the follow has hit its peak, popping up on numerous new bar menus in every single place 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 isn’t, 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 have been launched a few decade later as an enchancment to the icebox (insulated wood 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 reasonably frequent perversion within the ’50s and ’60s,” says cocktail historian and writer David Wondrich. “People have been very engineering-conscious, and on the time they have been additionally sensible sufficient to understand that vermouth is barely one of many issues watering down your Martini—there’s additionally dilution, so what are you going to do about that? The answer is, in fact, retaining the undiluted Martini within the freezer, as an alternative of stirring with ice.”
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This early, dry tackle the freezer Martini had its fair proportion of followers, together with author and movie director Garson Kanin, based on Wondrich, in addition to detractors, like essayist Bernard DeVoto, who quipped in The Hour: A Cocktail Manifesto, “You’ll be able to no extra hold a Martini within the fridge than you possibly can hold a kiss there.” Regardless, the cocktail’s notoriety grew to the purpose the place mentions of freezer Martinis could possibly be present in magazines together with Cosmopolitan and books like Charles H. Baker’s The South American Gentleman’s Companion, by 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 finest.”
The freezer Martini’s preliminary heyday was comparatively short-lived in america. By the late Sixties, the Martini fell out of trend 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, nonetheless, extra-cold, pre-batched Martinis seemingly by no means went out of fashion, a undeniable fact that performs a key function within the phenomenon’s latest revival at American bars.
Cocktail historians and bartenders alike are likely to agree on two pivotal, enduring examples of the freezer Martini that seemingly 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 just a few 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 right now 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 sincere, I believed [the Dukes Martini] was manner too robust, however it was eye-opening for me. I had two of them and walked out sloshed,” he remembers. “I liked the concept, however I wished water and vermouth in it as properly, so I began messing round with that at dwelling.”
Waugh wasn’t the one one captivated by the promise of a numbingly chilly Martini that could possibly be pulled from the depths of the freezer on a whim. On the other 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 plenty of arguments that you just have been doing this mystical factor of including texture when stirring a drink, however I ran checks and realized that, no, stirring was solely chilling and dilution.” This realization led him to bottle and chill Martinis for occasions, a method he refined over time and finally carried via to the opening of his groundbreaking bar Booker and Dax in 2012.
“We have been strictly making an attempt to imitate what you’d get with the perfect particular person stirring on the perfect day in a fully constant trend, 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 observe.
Although the freezer Martini remained a preferred subject of debate in sure cocktail circles, it wasn’t till 2017 that it started to seep into the general public consciousness, thanks partially to a New York Instances overview 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 apart from Waugh himself was serving Martini variations “premixed and stored in one in all 4 freezers behind the bar.”
Thought-about linearly, there’s an argument to be made that Waugh, or maybe Arnold, is to thank for the freezer Martini’s fashionable rise to ubiquity. However simply because the Martini claims greater than a dozen conflicting origin tales, it’s troublesome to pin the freezer Martini revival on a single particular person. “Lots of people who have been doing attention-grabbing 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.”
