I have a theory. It’s pretty simple. It goes like this: The worst olives make the best dirty Martinis. I’m talking about the soggy, splintered, deflated olives that come in gallon-size jars. Bottom-shelf bulk olives. The kind that line the Metro shelves of your neighborhood pizza parlor. What one might call “dive bar olives.”
There was a time, not that long ago, when these generic jars of Manzanilla or Queen olives made the default brine for just about every dirty Martini. Even in their more upmarket expressions, these Spanish olives are the workhorses of the category. Compared to, say, Cerignola or Castelvetrano—two flavorful, plump, fruit-forward alternatives—the more common Manzanilla and Queen olives are salty, subtle and ubiquitous. They have, by virtue of being the default, inadvertently become the standard-bearer.
But at a moment when bars are serving thousands of dirty Martinis a night, the drink has become an object of renewed experimentation, resulting in a boom of specialized brines featuring everything from chicken broth to tomato shrub. For many drinkers, however, leaning into alternative brines—even if they’re derived from olives, be they Kalamata or Gordal—just seems wrong, sometimes even warranting a drink be sent back. “I don’t know how to explain it,” says Murilo Ferreira, senior video producer at Eater and a longtime dirty Martini drinker. “When it’s a fancy brine, it just tastes off.”
Brooklyn’s Long Island Bar has experienced this firsthand. “We couldn’t keep up with the dirty-birds asking for more and ever-more brine in their Martinis,” says owner Toby Cecchini, explaining that the team has cycled through a number of brine formulas in their efforts to meet demand. What began as a Castelvetrano-forward solution—a natural option for a bar where Castelvetranos are the Martini garnish of choice—morphed into a short-lived MSG-spiked iteration before settling on the hybrid Castelvetrano-Manzanilla brine that they currently use. “It seems everyone is happy enough with this,” says Cecchini, who adds that the bar, of late, has become “little other than a Martini-purveying machine.”
For William Elliott, bar director at New York’s Maison Premiere and Tigre, a stint employing an alternative olive brine, specifically Gordal, was also short-lived. He posits that its success, or lack thereof, is less a judgment on the quality of the brine in question and more a reflection of expectations. “I don’t know that I would say that [Gordal] brine is not good,” he says. “I just don’t think it’s what people want.” It’s buttery, more vegetal, nutty. “It’s not the punchy, almost MSG vibe that divey jars of olives tend to have.” For dirty Martini die-hards, he likens the disappointment of using anything other than “divey” olive brine in a dirty Martini to reaching into a bag expecting Doritos and ending up with Terra chips. “Every time I tried to innovate on the olive end of things, which I gave up on years ago, the common complaint would be that it was just too fruity or too far afield or not savory enough,” says Elliott.
To improve upon a drink so firmly entrenched in the public consciousness, and so far from objectivity, does indeed seem a futile task. The name alone just about says it all: The dirty Martini is a dirty pleasure, and those who enjoy it are often not seeking refinement or anything other than the one-two punch to the palate that ice-cold spirit and a side of suspect brine can provide. To distill the drink to its platonic form would yield, I suspect, not a sophisticated olive-flavored Martini, but a liquid salt lick. In fact, when we tasted about a dozen dirty Martinis to find the best, an olive-less iteration came out on top. Who needs sophistication when you can have salt? As Elliott summarizes, “People punish their palates all the time—it’s a story as old as time.”
