The Martini is Dead, Long Live the Martini
Is ordering a mezcal negroni in a sports bar uncouth?
I was recently mocked for not appropriately matching my drink orders to my environment:
I like mezcal negronis. They taste really good and are easy to make! It’s 1:1:1 mezcal:campari:vermouth, give or take. I don’t see why a bartender at a sports bar wouldn’t want to charge me $16 for that.
If I’d ordered a standard negroni with gin at a sports bar, would I have gotten that text? A margarita, which is harder to make but more of a standard? Perhaps, perhaps not.
Looking at data from the NYT Food Section, where there are often articles & recipes mentioning cocktails, we can see that although both mezcal and negronis have largely caught up to the margarita, the combination still has a ways to go, having only been mentioned a few times (beginning with this article about mezcal’s rise in 2018). Perhaps I deserve the ridicule.
I seem to remember that in 2021 as we were coming out of the depths of the pandemic that mezcal and craft cocktails generally were cool and I was at least marginally cool for drinking them. But now it feels like the prevailing aesthetics surrounding alcohol have moved to the following:
“Cruela de Vil smoking a cigarette and drinking a martini” (see below; I guess she doesn’t actually drink martinis on camera). This is how I imagine people at Balthazar, probably based on this 3 year old tweet which somehow stuck in my brain:
Guy drinking Miller Lite from a bottle, ideally in Ridgewood, wearing a very large, dirty t-shirt because he is post-craft, and needn’t concern himself with flavor nor appearance
Person wearing an Oura Ring who doesn’t really drink at all anymore, but perhaps dabbles in psychedelics
I poked around the data to see how my perceptions match the NYT Food Section’s coverage. Looking at old articles is a really fun time capsule. Take, for example, this article from 2009, from which you can calculate the inflation rate on fancy cocktails in the East Village to be about 3% per year1:
With Mayahuel, the cocktail lounge he opened in the East Village in May, Philip Ward painstakingly makes his case that tequila and its cousin, mezcal, are not occasions for sunburned debauchery, but rather opportunities for contemplative drinking…(Mr. Ward) is acutely interested in the savory, vegetal flavors of agave, wrapping spirits distilled from it in layers of smoke, spice and bitterness. The tequila in a great drink named Git Ur Lapsang Souchong (all cocktails are $13) is infused with smoked tea and topped off with tamarind soda.
Or this one, An Inspired Lunch Puts Brunch to Shame, from the halcyon days of 2014 when millennials were just seizing power and brunch was among our country’s biggest cultural fault lines:
I don’t do brunch, or not if I can help it. Does that make me a traitor, or simply a curmudgeon?
It’s not breakfast, it’s not lunch — it’s a misbegotten relic. What’s to like? Another run-of-the-mill Bloody Mary or all-you-can-drink mimosa? More leaden eggs Benedict? Factory French toast? A guilt-free egg white frittata? Really?
The Return of the Martini
We can see in the data that martinis are, indeed, back. There was a dip in the mid-2010s when they fell out of fashion (anyone have an idea as to why?), but people have rediscovered the joy of drinking 5 ounces of cold gin with some olive juice:
Among the articles about martinis is this recent gem by Ella Quitner, subtitled Why is every server wearing a chore coat? One certainly wonders about the chore coat. Perhaps something to investigate…
“The chore coat is saying to the diner, ‘We’ve considered what we’re wearing, and style is important, but this is also a place where we’re not so buttoned up that you can’t have a few martinis and make it a fun night,’” said Brooks Reitz, who put the staff of Melfi’s, his restaurant in Charleston, S.C., in chore coats when it opened in 2018
These are a few other trends I found interesting:
The decline of bourbon, below. This is, unfortunately, a good thing. I grew up in Cincinnati, a very bourbon-heavy place, and I want to like it. But it’s too syrupy and sweet. It is good and right for it to be usurped by tastier things like mezcal or scotch.
An increase in vermouth mentions makes sense to me — vermouth and soda with an organge slice tastes so nice and is refreshing and low-abv.
That leads into the next one, which is probably obvious to people going to restaurants and bars lately — non-alcoholic drinks are becoming pervasive, as people wearing Oura Rings look for things to drink. I have started drinking an Athletic NA beer on many weeknights, something I would have found surprising 5 years ago.
Finally, this one I didn’t understand at all until I looked it up and saw that absinthe was legalized in the US in 2007, having been banned for a long time due to its high alcohol content and association with cool artists and writers in Paris.
Thanks for reading! Let me know if you wanna meet up at a Buffalo Wild Wings for a couple of mezcal negronis and some bruschetta, I’m always down.
$13 x 1.0315 = ~$20, which sounds about right in 2024
Always a fun read!