Clean Martini Winter
Photo Illustration by Michael Sugarman
Let’s be realistic: most bars make awful dirty martinis. While the classic martini is a reliable order at any bar that carries the gin you like and employs a bartender who is half awake, the “dirtification” of the martini is a shitshow of a process that makes it impossible to tell, from across the bar, if you’re going to get an appropriate accent of olive brine or a repugnant morass of a drink that looks and tastes like Shrek’s own swamp.
The honest dirty martini is fundamentally a beverage for degenerate drunks whose home bars or locals are too shambolic to reliably keep fresh lemons around to pare zest off of. Better your bartender dip their hairy knuckles into the olive jar and slosh whatever comes up together with the booze. Otherwise you might be able to taste it too clearly and remember you only sprang for Gordon’s or Smirnoff, having spent the last of your good-booze money on alimony or lottery tickets.
Somewhere along the path to making the dirty martini taste good, the drink has lost its soul. The Good Dirty, once a reasonable aim, has reached heights of performativity approaching the Bloody Mary garnish towers of 2010s Instagram. This drink is now, improbably, something high-end bartenders show off with, incorporating a Balkan deli’s worth of pickled vegetables and animal products via fat-washing and God knows what other arcane process. This is not the dirty martini’s place in the world; it is not a drink to be fussed over in this way. The dirty-martini is not meant to be the item you advertise by describing it on the sandwich board outside your bar, then posting a photo of that sandwich board.
The associated tinned fish trend was dumb, too. Don’t get me wrong. I love a good tin of fish, but come on, they’re for eating at home unless you live in some charming Spanish village where the local market serves them at a table made out of a barrel. Paying $20-30 for sardines at a gastro pub in New York or London is collective psychosis. The high-ticket umami of the tinned fish / dirty martini pairing is not aesthetic; it’s excess.
I suggest this course-correction: the clean martini. Take a break from martinis that make your breath stink and come with me to a world where the martini is once again a fresh, bracing beverage, the way Heaven intended. The clean martini, the pure ideal of this classic drink, should swing back into the zeitgeist as we enter 2025.
Last year was a rollercoaster in every sense of the word, with bad, stale energy that we could only attempt to fat-wash away. May I suggest the crystal clear flavors of gin and citrus for your soul’s annual mid-winter purification. Clean martinis, cold as ice, are the cleanse we need.
The classic, clean martini shifts power back to the people. No one on earth could be bothered to replicate the rococo “dirty,” whether at home or at a low-key bar without an armory full of specialized equipment. As delicious as it might turn out to be, I am tired of hearing about Trendy McBartender fat-washing craft gin in the butter a lobster was poached with. The post-pandemic revenge spending era is over and the Trump tariffs are about to wreck the economy too badly to continue justifying all these nights out at fancy bars.
My advice? Buy the good gin, and the good vermouth. Mix your martini at home, like an adult. Instagram, if you must. Take in the first sip, then let out the fresh, cold “ahhh” of the martini’s Platonic ideal.
The author’s #cleanmartiniwinter
I am putting good gin in my drink. I am going to be able to taste that gin because my ratio is two parts gin, 1 part vermouth. Nothing else is going in it besides orange bitters and the expressed oils of one sliver of lemon peel. That’s it, basta: the antidote to the dirty martini trend’s baroque excess. It’s what the world needs now.
