Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

Last night I ate dinner, only because it was convenient, at one of those restaurants. Those restaurants. The kind where most of the waitstaff is comprised of blond girls named “Kellye.” The kind that try to conjure up an atmosphere of eclectically homespun Americana - even though they have locations in the United Arab Emirates, China and Saudi Arabia, and are thus, in a corporate sense, at odds with the very idea of America - by decking the walls with carefully aged random shit ranging from farm tools to turn of the century dry-goods-general-store handbills in splintery wood frames and lynchin’ ropes, all hearkening back to a simpler, purer time, when rugged pioneers conquered the vast prairies and settled down to traditional home-cooked meals of bacon-and-cheddar potato skins, jumbo shrimp and portobello Swiss burgers. I got to wondering if these chains’ foreign locations attempted a localized variation on the same concept, if the one in Riyadh was plastered with Saudi Arabiana such as Bedouin daggers, kaffiyehs, torched Bibles and the severed heads of minor criminal offenders and presumed-unchaste teenage girls, and that was when I decided that I needed a drink.

Despairing slightly, I picked up the drink menu and was predictably presented with a long list of garish Cointreau- and blue curacao- infused concoctions ending in “-tini,” along with the strangely ubiquitous mojito and an awful, awful lot of fruity rum drinks cutely named after devastating natural phenomena. Slight relief came when I saw that they listed, as a service to people with any taste, all the liquors they stocked. I narrowed in on the gin, martini in my heart. Bombay Sapphire? No, too faltzani to order something specifically with Bombay Sapphire, and Bombay Sapphire is best drunk chilled and straight up anyway. Vermouth distracts. Tanqueray? Too brusque. Beefeater. There we go.

Thinking that this would ensure me a proper martini mixed without vodka, I asked the waiter to bring me a Beefeater martini and sat back to contemplate the dry-goods-general-store handbills. But the waiter did not bring me a proper martini. No, I got something else entirely.

The waiter, whom I do not blame, and whom I plan to notify, Irgun-style, before I plant the C4, brought out to my eternal horror the Abomination of Distillation - the Anathemartini. The Anathemartini came served in a tiny rocks glass over crushed ice, and was garnished with two absolutely monstrous olives skewered on a cocktail sword, the purpose of which was apparently to immobilize the olives long enough for me to finish the drink before they rolled off to attack Tokyo. I removed the garnish and the level of liquid sank nearly a third of the already puny glass; students of history and science will recall that Archimedes made his “Eureka!”-punctuated discovery of specific gravity when he realized that placing overlarge, liquid-displacing garnishes in his guests’ drinks saved him money on retsina. I took a trepid sip - it’s a shame to waste gin, even defiled gin - and thus was the full extent of the bartender’s Calvinist disregard for mixological orthodoxy revealed: the Anathemartini had no vermouth.

There is, of course, a school of thought which holds that a proper martini contains little to no vermouth, which manifests itself in behaviors that range from the ridiculous (swirling a drop of vermouth around a glass then pouring it out before adding gin) to the obscene (making statements along the lines of “To make the perfect martini, picture a passionate tryst you had with a woman who once while on vacation had a Cinzano Bianco with lemon at a sidewalk cafe in Perugia, then pour three jiggers of gin down your pants.”). These people are wrong, and if there is a just God, they’ll be cast into the seventh circle of Hell (blasphemers, sodomites and usurers) to wait, for all eternity, on a crowd of thirty-something loan officers in the midst of a perpetual “girls’ night out” who are earnestly discussing America’s Next Top Model and ordering appletinis. They tip poorly.

Sigh. So there I was, drinking a martini served in the wrong glass, missing a key ingredient, and rapidly losing flavor due to icy attrition. And I wondered: how could anybody who serves drinks for a living fail so utterly to conceive of what is arguably the classic American drink? What has gone wrong in the nation that invented the cocktail to bring us to the point where in order to get a real martini, you have to specify “with gin and vermouth, straight up”? Is the day far off when we’ll have to order a rum and Coke by saying “With rum and Coca-Cola, on the rocks, in a highball” to avoid getting served a plastic sippy cup of vodka and lukewarm Dr. Pepper? Will proper bar glassware eventually be entirely replaced by the Patron-filled navel of a sorority girl on her sixth Cosmo, “cuz that’s what Carrie drinks”? Am I only sticking my finger in the dike, vainly struggling against the inevitable drowning of cocktail culture by a Biblical deluge of Midori and “Hpnotiq”? Or am I just drunk?