Make It None for My Baby

I was in Long Beach one night chasing a column when I stopped by a place called Club 49 for dinner. Prior to eating, I ordered a vodka martini straight up with an olive.

The waitress, a pleasant woman with a permanent smile, said “What kind?” I thought she was asking me to name my vodka so I replied, “Ketel-One,” which is a form of liquid silk made in Holland.

She said, “No, I mean what kind, a Cosmopolitan, a Cossack, an Aqueduct, a Mudslide, a Melonball or an Orange Crusher?”

For a moment I wondered whether the intensity of her smile had impaired the poor dear’s ability to understand, so I repeated myself, speaking very slowly: “I do not want a milkshake or a pink daiquiri, I would like a vodka martini straight up with an olive.”

It is etched in my memory that she did not blink, frown or even shrug, but simply went over once more that disturbing menu of fun-named, fruit-flavored, liqueur-doused abominations which, God help me, were their martinis.

I thought for a moment I had wandered into another dimension. A martini made with cognac and bar sugar? With orange juice and a melon liqueur? With apricot brandy and cranberry juice? Where am I? What is this place?

It was my first experience with the New Age Martini. I said, “Never mind, just bring me some scotch on the rocks and hold the melon balls.”

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Do not for a minute feel that I oppose change. I accept with good grace the destruction of language, the sound of rap, the sight of boys in their father’s clothing and the transition of the margarita from its simple form to flavored blasphemy.

But the martini, until now, has seemed inviolate, a presence as staunch and unchanging as the Catholic Church, never to be tampered with and always to be taken very seriously.

I will admit that the addition of vodka did rile the gin-oriented martini world for awhile but was eventually accepted by all but the hard-liners at the bar. For instance, the late Dial Torgerson, one of our premier foreign correspondents and a drinking traditionalist, said to me one day as he observed my vodka martini, “That may be a very nice drink but it is not a martini.”

Had he not died in the line of duty while covering the fighting in Nicaragua, awareness of the Mudslide Martini (vodka, coffee liqueur and Irish Cream) would have surely killed him.

Since my introduction to the New Martini, I have come to realize it is almost everywhere. Even at a proper martini house like Beverly Hill’s Grill on the Alley they offer concoctions laced with cranberry juice and, I kid you not, gin mixed with cognac. They call them Contemporary Martinis.

I don’t know whether they’ve polluted the martini at Musso and Frank or at Harry’s Bar and Grill, where the combination of gin and vermouth is as sacred as holy water, because I’m afraid to ask. I do know that my favorite restaurant, the Mirabelle, has begun offering “fruit infusion” martinis. The owner urged me to try one one but I enthusiastically declined, and then made the sign of the cross to indicate that I felt there was something essentially unholy in the request, like Eve pushing the iniquitous apple.

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I understand the draw of the past, the good old days of mythology that are luring young adults to martinis and cigars, believing them to be magical elements of the time before stress and the Internet.

That the good old days were not all that good is beside the point. Everything in retrospect seems better than it actually was, which is why martinis and cigars are making a comeback, and their comeback is centered, as all comebacks are, in L.A.

Only the cigar has maintained its original form, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see Havanas offered someday in a multiplicity of flavors to please those whose taste buds have been irreparably damaged by peppermint martinis.

I began drinking martinis at a newspaper bar in Oakland called the Hollow Leg, where Nels mixed them with meticulous allegiance to tradition. It was Nels who first informed me that the martini was named after a man named Martinez, who invented the mixture at a bar on the San Francisco waterfront.

I’ve never been interested in verifying the claim, although I do know that the family coat of arms is adorned with a tree and a crown and not, alas, a glass in triangular form.

That’s just as well, because that noblest of all alcoholic mixtures is no longer what it used to be, thanks in part to the young who, not content with their longing for the good old days, are trying to reshape the past by ruining its drinks. When banana-flavored scotch makes the scene, I’m dry forever.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com