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 you look at it one way, the decades-long trend of dry martinis (more gin than vermouth) or vodka martinis is merely a corruption of the original idea.
The Times story says that Americans suffered from decades of vermouth phobia, which may very well be true, and that vermouth "never really recovered from Prohibition." The story also credits the reintroduction of vermouth to an Audrey Saunders, who opened a now-closed Manhattan bar called the Pegu Club. Saunders used to work at the bar in the famed Carlyle Hotel and was intrigued when her European customers asked for a Martini on the rocks.
They meant a glass of Martini & Rossi vermouth, and she eventually tried it for herself and decided she liked it. According to the Times, a stunning new idea was born. But according to a somewhat older text (and my ninth-grade history teacher, who often quoted it), there is nothing new under the sun.
Saunders has her own Wikipedia page, which is how I know she is old enough to remember those Martini & Rossi on the rocks commercials ("Say yes") that flooded the airwaves throughout the 1970s. So, drinking vermouth isn't exactly new, and drinking equal amounts of vermouth and gin in a martini is considerably older. If "wet" martinis are a hot new trend, they're a hot new trend from nearly 150 years ago.
Just ask St. Louisans. We've known it all along.
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