The Martini is not a warm-weather cocktail. Famously, it demands subzero temperatures and fast consumption, lest it turn into a puddle of warm gin. It is not built for alfresco drinking. But throw a little tropical fruit in the mix and suddenly it’s not beholden to the same laws. The drink becomes less austere, but no less intriguing. While the Venn diagram of Martinis and tropical drinks would have looked like two separate circles for much of the last century, today, bartenders across the country are finding some overlap.
“Tropical flavors pair well with Martinis more than people realize,” says Jordan Valls, bar manager at Palomar in Portland, Oregon, and an alum of Punch’s own Best New Bartenders. He serves a take on the Turf Club made with pineapple-infused gin. “The pineapple obviously has the tropical flavor going on, but it truly mellows out the maraschino,” he says.
Valls isn’t the only one putting a warm-weather spin on the template. At Superbueno in New York, the Green Mango Martini calls on a small measure of mango eau de vie paired with a mango-infused tequila base. In Atlanta, mango and yuzu dress up the Tropical Alaska at Kimball House. And in London, at A Bar with Shapes for a Name, the Habanero cocktail upgrades the vodka Martini template with a distillate of yellow habaneros stripped of their capsaicin (the compound responsible for their spiciness), revealing the pepper’s tropical, fruit-forward flavor.
Perhaps the the most at-home friendly foray into the tropical Martini realm, however, comes from Kitty Bernardo, beverage director at New York’s Paradise Lost and another Best New Bartenders alum, whose three-ingredient Tiny Sparrow Martini builds on Vietnamese gin complemented by fino sherry and calamansi liqueur. The latter ingredient “really takes the citrusy botanicals that one expects in a classic gin Martini in a new direction,” they say. (Paradise Lost also serves the Lesser Key Martini, made with coconut and pistachio fat-washed rum alongside matcha-infused gin and plantain eau de vie.) For Bernardo, the tropical trend is just one exciting way that bartenders are reimagining the classic, in the same way that the dirty Martini has become an elevated endeavor. “It’s a Martini renaissance on all fronts and I am so here for it.”
