Bulletin Board 60
Proper martini fixings, fountain pens and a mid-holiday reset
HAPPY HOUR
Few topics in the annals of drinking are so hotly debated as the question of how to properly garnish a martini. To settle the matter we reached out to our friend William Elliott, who oversees the bar program at Brooklyn’s Maison Premiere, where an Old King Cole Martini comes with both olives and a lemon twist on the side.
On lemons vs. olives:
When [Maison Premiere] opened, I made the choice to serve both olives and lemon twists. And part of that was just out of my own dislike for olives. I really wanted to subvert it and push lemon twists into the fold a little bit more overtly. I felt that by serving both, you were opening peoples’ eyes to olives being food, and lemon twists being aromatics.
On the lemon twist:
You want to cut a nice, wide swath of peel from a nice-looking lemon. There’s been a lot of concern and hand-wringing about the amount of pith left on the lemon twist. But I’m going to go one step farther in my dogma here: I don’t believe in inserting lemon twists. I think that everything that you need or want to accomplish is accomplished by a lemon twist just three or four inches over the glass. And when people see the spray of essential oil from the lemon twist just cascading out over the drink, they realize precisely the effect that it has and that it would be redundant to put it in the drink.