If reporters at the New York Times and other New York hipsters spent a little more time in St. Louis, they wouldn't be so out of touch. The Times — the paper of record, the old gray lady, all the news that's fit to print — recently saw fit to print a breathless story about the emergence of the wet martini.
Suddenly, a hot new New York trend is at hand. Please. In St.
Louis, wet martinis are old news. According to the Times story, the owner of a trendy new restaurant on the trendy Lower East Side invented a brand new drink that is All The Rage. What he does is he mixes equal parts of dry vermouth and gin and adds a few drops of orange bitters.
The story by former restaurant critic Pete Wells says "it doesn’t seem like much at first, but after a few minutes you realize you’ve wanted something like it for a long time." Not in St. Louis.
In St. Louis, we've already had something like it for a long time. Of course, in St.
Louis we also have the incomparable Natasha Bahrami , owner of the Gin Room in the South Grand Business District. Bahrami — the only American in the Gin Hall of Fame — and her Gin Room have been serving martinis made from equal parts of gin and vermouth for a full decade. And she will be the first to tell you that she did not invent the drink.
She merely revived it because she is and always has been so fond of it. The martini was invented in the 1880s, and Bahrami will tell you that the original versions used an equal mixture of gin and vermouth. If y.