In Defense of the Dirty Martini

Dirty? Filthy? Nah. It’s just a Salted Olive Martini.

Last week, after the Friday newsletter went out, I went live on Substack to talk about The Riddler and The Joker and demonstrate how to make them. The turnout (tune-in? log-in? log-on?) was surprisingly good, and I had a lot of fun. So we’re going to do it again tonight. I think we’ll make a shaken drink.

I’ll start around 7 p.m. ET and go for at least a few minutes, depending on how many people show up and how long it takes me to make and explain a drink. I’ll try to take some questions, and if things go long enough, maybe I’ll make a Martini too.

Links About Drinks

• Tanqueray Ten, the upmarket offering from gin stalwart Tanqueray, claims to be translating brainwaves into cocktails. “Using EEG headsets, three ‘dreamers’ were exposed to different scents, such as vanilla, mint, spices, and herbal tones, as well as sounds, in a conscious, relaxed state while their brainwaves were analysed into data by MyndPlay’s technology.” Uh, sure. This sounds like the premise of a Philip K. Dick story, or perhaps a little bit of funny business in an Iain M. Banks Culture novel.

• Is English whisky—which is not Scotch!—struggling in the U.S.?

• “Pretty much everybody in the American wine world stands to lose something. It’s not clear who gains.” Rough times for the international wine trade, which, given the prominence of vermouth (and similar fortified wines like Cocchi Americano), will probably impact cocktails too.

• I stopped in at Service Bar last night and had “Daddy Issues” (the drink, not the…nevermind) with black cardamom infused Michter's American whiskey, Averna, crème de cacao, fig balsamic, and Bogart's bitters. Rich, dark, an excellent after dinner/dessert drink. If I had to guess, it’s based on a Black Manhattan. Tasted like a chocolatey, bittersweet Fig Newton.

Dirty Work

This week I want to defend the Dirty Martini and argue for a superior way to make it.

You might ask: Does the Dirty Martini—which, for better or worse, is incredibly popular—really need defending? It’s just a Martini with olive brine. You either like it or you don’t.

To answer that question, let’s look at what David Wondrich, arguably the preeminent cocktail authority of our time, told Punch all the way back in 2017: “The classic Martini is so beautifully balanced,” he said. “It’s focused like a laser beam—cold, refreshing, incisive—and once you put olive brine in it, it kind of spoils all of that stuff.” This is fair, in my view. A lot of Dirty Martinis are in fact pretty bad.

As it happens, however, this week I saw Wondrich, along with co-editor Noah Rothbaum, speak at The Smithsonian on the making of the Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, their massive, as-close-as-you-can-get-to-definitive guide to spirits and cocktail history.

The entire evening was a delight. Multiple cocktails were served, and Wondrich’s rum punch, mixed with Smith & Cross rum and a homemade oleo saccharum, was a particular treat.

At the end, Wondrich took a question about garnishes in cocktails. His overall argument was similar to the one I’ve made in this newsletter: The best garnishes are both functional and decorative, marking a drink while also altering its flavor or smell somehow. As an aside, he also noted—and this is not a direct quote, but it’s pretty close—that olives are delicious in Martinis.

That’s not a reversal or a contradiction. An olive garnish for a Martini is not the same as a pour of olive brine.

But it does establish a basic foundation for my pro-Dirty Martini argument: Olives go well with Martinis. And if you enjoy an olive in a Martini, I think you can find your way to enjoying a Dirty Martini.

You Only (O)live Twice

Martinis themselves, of course, are not for everyone. For a long time, they weren’t even for me.

I have written before about overcoming my initial resistance to Martinis of all kinds. For a time, my dislike of Martinis was intense and particular enough that during the early planning stages for my home bar, I briefly considered ordering a sign that said “No Martinis.”

It took some time and effort on my part to understand the appeal of a well-made Martini, and today I drink Martinis more often than almost any other cocktail, at least at home. Part of the effort was conceptual: I had to understand and appreciate what a Martini was for, its reason for being, its place in the world. I had to understand its character, its construction, how it worked and why. Cocktails, like people, need meaning and purpose.

And even then, I still didn’t like Dirty Martinis. The crispness, the zip, the chilly, judgmental bite of a barebones gin Martini—well, I basically came down where Wondrich did in that 2017 quote. A big dose of olive brine just muddied the drink’s appeal. It worked against it.

I still think that’s true for a lot of Dirty Martinis, especially the sort served at pricey but not particularly good hotel bars and their ilk.¹ Too many Dirty Martinis are made carelessly, with lazy pours of gin, no vermouth or bad vermouth, and absurdly oversized portions of olive brine—sometimes an ounce or more—that totally overtakes the rest of the drink. A lot of Dirty Martinis do not deserve to be defended.

If that sort of careless, olive-brine-drenched preparation is your only experience with Dirty Martinis, I can understand why you might be skeptical.

But as is so often the case with drinks that have a bad reputation, the underlying idea is a good one, at least when executed well. That’s not only because olives go well with Martinis, though they do. It’s also because there’s something else that goes well with Martinis.

That something is salt.

When I make a big batch of freezer-bottle Martinis, I include several drops of saline solution—basically salt water—that lifts the flavors and emphasizes the drink’s zip and bite. In other words, it works a lot like salt in food.

And olive brine—well, one way to think about it is that it’s just olive-flavored saline. That’s obviously a simplification; olive brine may have other elements like vinegar, lemon juice, or spices.

But conceptually, this simplified framework helps us think about what the Dirty Martini is supposed to do, what its purpose is, what it’s for.

The Dirty Martini is a Salted Olive Martini.

Do You Feel Lucky?

Now, if you just called it a Salted Olive Martini, you wouldn’t have the mildly salacious branding that is so critical to its appeal.