Boozehound (6 page)

Now, I love many of the bartenders who work in faux speakeasies across the country. Many are my friends, and speakeasy bartenders such as Jim Meehan at PDT, Todd Thrasher at PX, Derek Brown at the Columbia Room in D.C., and the guys at Bourbon and Branch in San Francisco make some of the best cocktails you can find. Their obsession with the pre-Prohibition era is genuine and logical. The cocktails of that era are revered for a reason. Prohibition basically destroyed the craft of bartending, making the profession illegal and forcing bartenders into other lines of work. And make no mistake: bartenders prior to Prohibition were viewed as craftsmen, akin to pastry chefs or cheese makers or chocolatiers. Whether the puritans among us like it or not, cocktails are traditional American foodways. But Prohibition irrevocably broke the cultural chain of bartending knowledge. Everything horrible about contemporary drinking could reasonably, if indirectly, be blamed on that broken chain. Day-Glo premade mixes: Blame it on Prohibition. Bartenders forgetting bitters in your Manhattan: Prohibition. The rise of those flavored vodkas: Yes, blame that on Prohibition, too.

Still, at a certain point, I have to roll my eyes. Faux speakeasies can very much resemble real, historic speakeasies, except for one thing: real speakeasies, operating from 1919 to 1933, were totally illegal and run by gangsters like Al Capone. That disreputable nature—the inherent seediness—of the operation was part of its allure. With the faux speakeasy, no one is worried about the Feds busting up the place; they’re merely concerned with keeping out the, you know, riffraff—that “uncool” crowd who might order Coors Light. The faux speakeasy clearly grows out of a nostalgia for the glamorous seediness of Prohibition. “Seediness has a very deep appeal,” Graham Greene famously wrote. “It seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for something lost; it seems to represent a stage further back.” So if seediness itself is a form of nostalgia, then is the faux speakeasy an example of nostalgia for … nostalgia? This is the kind of thinking that leads one to drink way too many cocktails.

I believe something snapped for me during the run-up to Repeal Day in the fall of 2008. In the classic cocktail world, there is no day more feted than December 5, the anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition—it has become a sort of pseudoholiday. To help celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of Repeal Day, I received a press release from the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States with “tips for hosting a Repeal Day party at home.” Here were the tips:

1. Ask guests to dress in 1930s attire.
   
2. Make sure your guests “speak easy” in order to gain admittance to the event. Suggest a password for admittance to the event.
   
3. Hire a band or singer that specializes in music from the “Roaring 20s” or download period-specific jazz.
   
4. Provide a Great Gatsby dining experience by recreating specialized dishes from archived menus of the Waldorf-Astoria and the 21 Club in New York City.
   
5. Offer cocktails of the era.
   

Was it any surprise that the speakeasy trend quickly became so overdone that journalists and bloggers started referring to any new “top-secret” bar that evoked the Prohibition era as a “speakcheesy”?

Right around the time the term
speakcheesy
was coined, Washington, D.C., got its first faux speakeasy project, called Hummingbird to Mars. The name comes from a statement by Senator Morris Sheppard, an infamous Dry from Texas whose proudest accomplishment was that he helped write the Eighteenth Amendment, which ushered in Prohibition. Sheppard famously boasted, “There is as much chance of repealing the Eighteenth Amendment as there is for a hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail.”

Hummingbird to Mars operated “clandestinely” on Sunday and Monday nights above a popular bar called Bourbon in the popular Adams Morgan nightlife district. As with any super-hush-hush speakeasy, media were tipped off to its opening well in advance. I arrived at Bourbon, rang a bell, and was let upstairs to a smaller private room. After the doorman dutifully made certain I was on the list, I received a delicious glass of classic Fisherman’s Punch (rum, cognac, lemon and lime juices, honey syrup, and grated nutmeg). The bartenders were gussied up in vests and sleeve garters, mixing superb classics such as the Corpse Reviver #2 (gin, Cointreau, Lillet Blanc, and absinthe) and the Blood and Sand (blended Scotch, Cherry Heering, orange juice, and sweet vermouth), and variations on the classic Sling (applejack, sloe gin, lemon juice, bitters, and simple syrup).

And then I was given this note, in an envelope:

Welcome to Hummingbird to Mars and thank you for finding us. By accepting a reservation you must agree to certain terms and any infraction will cause you to be unwelcome at our establishment.

1. If you are a member of the press/blogger/other media type person you are not permitted to write about our location or our operation in any way, shape, or form.
   
2. You are not allowed to disclose our address to anyone.
   
3. You may not take any photographs of the inside or outside of our bars.
   
4. Cell phone use will not be permitted within the establishment.
   

I sipped my drink for a moment. It was very tasty. But then I thought about this note, these rules. I looked around the bar, which was about half full with twenty or so people—all of whom obviously knew someone who knew someone. It was great that the bartenders wanted to expose people to new spirits and cocktails they’d never find in typical bars, but this whole faux speakeasy thing began to feel way too exclusionary to me. This suddenly felt like the wrong way to reclaim some golden pre-Prohibition era of drinking. And so I just stopped wanting to play along. Here’s what I did: I sent a text message to a friend (along with a photo of the bar) that read, “You should come over to [Popular Bar Named After a Whiskey Made in Kentucky], in Adams Morgan. We’re upstairs.” Then, the following week, I published this episode in my column in the
Washington Post
, essentially “outing” Hummingbird to Mars.

Had it been 1928, of course, I might have been shot by Al Capone’s henchmen with tommy guns. But since it was 2008, I was simply called a jerk and a dick and a douchebag in various comment sections on the Internet and told to “enjoy [my] mudslides at T.G.I. Friday’s.” I was slightly surprised by this in-crowd’s defensiveness and virulence. My big outing had been done as a joke—I mean, how serious could Hummingbird to Mars have been about the secrecy if they’d emailed the media? Anyway, it was still reservation only; it’s not as if hordes were going to crash the gate and demand bad drinks. But soon enough, Hummingbird to Mars closed down. Rather than deal with a wider audience, the cocktail geeks just decided to take their ball and go home. Which, I hate to say it, basically proved my thesis.

As silly as the faux speakeasy can be, we must credit the classic cocktail movement with numerous major advancements. A prime example: creating a backlash against the Very Dry Martini. Is there any cocktail that invites more bloviation than the Very Dry Martini? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know how you take your martini, gramps: no vermouth. I should just whisper the word
vermouth
while I mix it, right? I should simply wave a capped bottle of vermouth over the shaker? Never heard that one before! You’d rather just drink this tumbler of gin and bow in the direction of France? Yes, sir! You are correct, sir! Ugh. The joke’s on you, because you’re not really drinking a martini anyway. You’re just drinking a cold glass of gin.

There was a lot of talk early in the Obama administration that the era of American Exceptionalism was coming to a close. If that ends up being the case, I sincerely hope the post–World War II era dry martini goes away with it. The Greatest Generation may have been great for many reasons. But can we finally, at long last, be honest about one crucial thing? Their taste in martinis is awful.

I’ve had a number of discussions about the martini with cocktail historian David Wondrich, the amazingly bearded drinks columnist for
Esquire
and the high priest of the classic cocktail movement. Wondrich’s bearing in the world is that of a benevolent wizard, and few know more about the social history of drinking. His history of early American cocktails,
Imbibe!
, published in 2008, is perhaps the best book on drinks ever written. I count him as a guru, and I sometimes consult him on issues like this. He, unsurprisingly, takes a dim view on the midcentury Very Dry Martini. “That generation was really aggressive at working the macho angle,” he says. “People were afraid to say that they liked vermouth in their drink.” Thus, the rise of martinis with a gin-to-vermouth ratio ranging from 7:1 all the way up to 15:1.

Of course, if you look at mid-twentieth-century luminaries who championed a nearly vermouthless martini—such as Hemingway, Churchill, and Bogart—a certain truth emerges. Robert Hess, another classic cocktail apostle who blogs at the popular
DrinkBoy.com
, has called it like it is: “The authors of many of these convoluted methodologies were borderline, if not full-blown alcoholics … They knew exactly how to best increase the amount of personal alcohol consumption.” Hess published this revelation in a scholarly journal called
Mixologist:
The Journal of the American Cocktail
. (Yes, this is a real publication. I told you we’ve entered hard-core geekdom here!)

Bernard De Voto (the crotchety midcentury
Harper’s
columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner) declared a dry martini the “supreme American gift to world culture.” But De Voto also made a lot of other silly declarations, including the idea that there “are only two cocktails”—a dry martini and “a slug of whiskey”—and that the Manhattan was “an offense against piety” and that any man who drinks one has “no spiritual dignity.” Well, at least no one reads De Voto anymore.

Come to think of it, in nearly every other realm of arts and culture, the grumpy old white male has been excised from the canon, except when it comes to the Very Dry Martini. I still get emails from readers who suggest that vermouth is the handiwork of the devil. Well, I say we’ve been bullied far too long by conservative martini drinkers into believing there’s only one way to make a martini, and that way is Very Dry. “It’s pretty much undrinkable,” Wondrich says. “It’s not a pleasant drink. It’s no wonder people turned to vodka.”

Which brings me to this animal called a vodka martini, which was introduced by the baby boomers and then wholeheartedly embraced by my own generation. There simply is no such thing as a vodka
martini
. The martini is certainly more of a broad concept than a specific recipe, but the one constant must be gin and vermouth. Beyond correctness, vodka and vermouth is just a terrible match. So call this drink whatever you’d like, but it is not a martini.

We can pretty much blame the vodka martini on Ian Fleming, who introduced it in the first James Bond novel,
Casino Royale
—along with the ridiculous concept of shaking and not stirring a martini. Look, I don’t care how good Daniel Craig looks in his square-cut Speedo, or how much you love Sean Connery’s rakish suavity: a martini should always be stirred. That’s the only way you can achieve that silky smooth texture and dry martini clearness. In his classic 1948 bar guide,
The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks
, David Embury has a terse footnote: “If you shake the Martini, it becomes a Bradford.” For those attempting to work the macho angle, by the way, a shaken martini is a weaker drink.

Because change is in the air, here’s an idea: Let’s put to rest both the mid-twentieth-century Very Dry Martini and the vodka martini. Let’s pass a resolution that stipulates every dry martini should consist of a gin-to-vermouth ratio of at least 4:1 (okay, 5:1 in some cases) and offer incentives for those that move toward 2:1 or equal parts. (Even De Voto advocated a 3.7:1 ratio.) And while we’re at it, let’s sign an executive order banning the torturous use of jokes about vermouth.

“The martini evolves,” Wondrich says. “It has evolved since it was born.” Since it’s now so stunted and mutated, perhaps it’s best to go back to the beginning and start the evolution all over again. That’s what Wondrich and other classic cocktail people have done.

Let’s revisit what the martini was like before Prohibition. At the beginning there was actually a lot of vermouth in a martini. In fact, it was sweet vermouth from Italy. The Martini brand of sweet vermouth (for decades sold in the States under the name Martini & Rossi) was available since at least the early 1860s. There’s a lot of debate and a lot of crazy theories in cocktail geek circles about the mysterious origins of the name
martini
. Here’s my two cents: it probably came about because people called for a specific brand of vermouth—um, say,
Martini
—to mix with their gin. It’s probably no different than dudes who call for a Ketel One martini or Maker’s Manhattan at a bar today.