At the bar in Dukes hotel in Mayfair there’s an unwritten
rule on the number of drinks you are allowed to order. The
policy is that guests are cut off after two martinis. No excep-
tions. It’s not because the staff want more bums on the bar’s
blue velvet seats. The martinis here, recognised as some of
the finest in the world, are famously hefty. A knock-out six
fluid ounces of gin or vodka with a dash of vermouth. This is
the kind of drink that jump-starts a night with just one round.
“After two martinis at Dukes, you know you’re in for a good
night,” one friend gushed recently. “They’re delicious.”
Last month New York Magazine declared that we are in the
midst of a martini boom, and Manhattan’s twentysomething
party girls are ordering them by the round or pouring them
from a pitcher. Over here the enthusiasm for hard, heady fun
is just as large. I’m talking about sinking martinis with buffalo
wings at the American Bar at the Stafford hotel in St James’s,
where the cocktails are so strong I’m told staff offer to refresh
your frozen glass halfway through. “We should go to Sophie’s
steakhouse and try all the martinis,” said a friend recently, as
though working through the restaurant’s 11 versions were as
lightweight as going for brunch. It’s not just happening in
fancy bars and with expensive cocktails. I have another friend
who, until this point, was a G&T girl in the pub. Now she has
ditched the tonic and just drinks it neat.
“Hard drinks like martinis represent and celebrate Big
Living,” says the restaurateur Joey Ghazal, a self-titled “Ketel
One guy” and founder of the Maine in Mayfair, a New
England-inspired brasserie where steaks, lobster and martinis
are served in between burlesque shows and jazz bands. The
bar here stocks more than 40 varieties of gin and tequila. On a
busy weekend it serves close to 200 martinis, and Ghazal
expects this number to soar now that the terrace has opened:
“The Maine is all about living larger than life,” he says.
It’s the opposite of the wellness wave that crashed over the
country this past year, when nights out were fuelled by
low-cal, low-ABV drinks, and if we did get drunk it was done
mindfully. People who before the pandemic spent their
evenings at natural wine bars clutching a glass of pét nat, then
spent the lockdown drinking wine alone at home. “Everyone
was doing that a lot during lockdown — we’re now looking
for something bigger when we go out,” says Missy Flynn,
co-founder of the restaurant Rita’s in Soho.
Unlocked and unrestricted, we are now entering an era of
full-fat fun. And it’s not just among the young London crowd.
From Cornwall to Edinburgh, martini fever is sweeping the
nation. At the Double Red Duke near Bampton, deep in the
Cotswolds heartlands, the popularity of the cocktail among
the country set is “massive”, says the hotel’s general manager,
Sion Hamilton. “We’re having to replenish the back spirits
bar like never before.” Further afield in Cornwall, where
luxury long lunches of fruits de mer and oysters are tradition-
ally eaten with magnums of rosé, drinkers are reaching for
GO HARD
OR GO HOME
Forget the rosé – according to bar
owners, the party crowd are ordering
something a little stronger this summer.
Make mine a martini, says Hannah Evans
Photograph Grant Cornett
22 • The Sunday Times Style