When you heard somebody request a Martini on the rocks, you would possibly infer from the order alone that they have been north of 60—sufficiently old to recall that it was Frank Sinatra’s most popular 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 Occasions even famous the evolving pattern: “As for Martinis, the 2 most important latest developments are the traits 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 combined drinks, the notion of a Martini served in something aside from a stemmed glass turned sacrilegious. Throughout these years, too, the Martini turned way more than a drink with a set recipe—it turned an thought, a metonym for sophistication, opulence, purity. To take such a symbolically loaded cocktail and throw it over a number of ice cubes would dilute the picture of the drink as a lot because the drink itself.
Towards this backdrop, in 2017, we posed the query: Can the Martini on the rocks make a comeback? Again then, the query was nearly rhetorical. Seven years on, I’m completely happy to report that the Martini on the rocks has made small, however vital inroads into the mainstream. Throughout the final 12 months, Bar Bludorn in Houston, 4 Partitions in Nashville and Stokes Adobe in Monterey, California, to call a number of, 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 take pleasure in the identical ice-cold traditional we all know and love in a format that’s somewhat softer across the edges—that’s its personal form of opulence.
