0710 August 2010.pdf - Pacific San Diego Magazine

e crazy
{taste} dining out cocktail
drink crazy
What’s Shaken
I THOUGHT IT WAS THE MARTINI, BUT IT MAY HAVE BEEN ME
By dave good / photo by brevin blach
I
was sitting in a bar downtown a few years ago, and my date ordered one of those black martinis. They
were all the rage back then. It was a pretty thing to look at: pearlescent, not quite black but close
enough, and served in traditional martini stemware, frosted and sophisticated.
“I’ve never had a martini,” she said, taking a delicate sip.
“You still haven’t,” I said. Maybe I spoke too soon.
Shaken or stirred, the classic martini is a simple, no-frills cocktail: a measure of good gin and a
dash of vermouth mixed in a shaker full of cracked ice, then strained and served in a martini glass
with either an olive or a lemon peel garnish. Created in the ‘30s, it eventually grew to include a vodka
variation with a pearl onion garnish, but little else.
Richard Nixon hated marijuana, but he loved his martinis as much as the fictional James Bond does
and the very real Dorothy Parker did. Parker, the witty New Yorker writer who died in 1967, was such a
fan that she even wrote a little poem in celebration of her favorite quaff:
I like to have a martini,
Two at the most.
After three I’m under the table,
After four I’m under the host.
Imported from the French Riviera
available on
LionsWinesCellar.com
This was the stuff of the fabled three-martini-lunches. Soon enough, the drink became the
quintessential sophisticate drink, and having one in hand was a mark of cultural distinction. When a new
crop of “specialty” and “fruity” martinis came along years later, they were disdained by purists, of which I
thought I was one—until now.
This evening, Wellington Steak and Martini lounge bartender Colin Killroy has made me a Cucumber
Goose martini: muddled lime, cucumber, eucalyptus infused syrup and cracked ice with Grey Goose vodka.
“I call it a spa treatment in a glass,” says Wellington manager Javier Rios.
He isn’t kidding. Opened two days before last Christmas by Red Door owner Rick Liberan, Wellington
offers 18 martini variations, all just $7.50 during the 5 to 6 p.m. daily happy hour. As I take another sip from
my Cucumber Goose, I begin to realize that it’s me, not the martini, that has been shackled by tradition.
Now if I could just find the woman with the black martini and tell her I had it all wrong…
The Wellington Steak and Martini Lounge
729 W. Washington Street, Hillcrest
thewellingtonsd.com