Martinis

In my early twenties, nothing felt more sophisticated than drinking a French 75 at the bar. No matter that it went down like a piece of sour candy: ordering it made me feel like a real lady, a grown-up woman who knew what life was about. It was a cocktail with history, two kinds of alcohol and – most importantly – I felt it imbued me with the aura of a dame in a film noir. It was fun but classic; stylish without being too obviously trendy. Not try-hard like Carrie Bradshaw’s worldly Cosmopolitan. Certainly not like ordering a Martini. Even I knew that ordering a Martini at age 21 would have been an affectation. No, a French 75 was the perfect cocktail for me. I knew my place. Not much has changed since then.

Try making up your own cocktail. It's hard. Really hard. Cocktails are balanced chemical concoctions, delicious flavors and fun textures that result from a trick of various dancing ingredients, and usually, when you come up with a cocktail idea and try to make it — even if you’ve read great theory books — it is either too sweet or too nothing, too flat. The best way to come up with one, then, is to play on existing templates. It’s not difficult to make your own sour or spritz, but the best of the best, perhaps the most fun cocktail ever, is the espresso martini. And no cocktail is easier to play with. Many of today’s classic cocktails trace their heritage to the Prohibition Era, but the espresso martini comes from the swinging nightlife of 1980s London.

I had never given Brooklyn much thought beyond the odd walk over the bridge and down into Dumbo, outmaneuvering the hordes of Instagrammers trying to get that perfect shot of themselves on the cobblestone streets with Manhattan Bridge in the background, perfectly framing the Empire State Building between its nervous legs. What with the tourists and the hipsters it never quite felt like my sort of place, so I happily stayed on the wrong side of the bridge, ignorant of the treasures that were hiding from me.  That all changed on a chilly November evening a couple of years ago when my friend Zack invited me to meet up for drinks at his local, The Long Island Bar, nestled neatly between Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill.

What’s the best suit? To an American, it’s something from Brooks Brothers. Classical, democratic and made with high quality. To a Brit, it might be something from Henry Herbert or Gieves & Hawkes, a tailor-made garment from Saville Row, cut from perfect navy. But a suit can be just as good when rendered in draped, colorful cloth by the late Edward Sexton, or a hot corset-blazer blend by H&M and Mugler. There is no universal best suit. There’s just the best suit for the man or woman who wears it. And so, I come around to the refined blazer of beverages: the martini. In the pages of our July magazine, Chilton Williamson, Jr. wrote about his effort to “search of the perfect martini.