Where’s the Line Between the Gibson and Dirty Martini Cocktails?

Many classic cocktails can be quickly identified upon first glance, but few so easily as the Gibson. One of the core members of the wide-ranging Martini family, the sophisticated drink’s characteristic garnish—a pickled pearl onion—gives it away. But recently, as the thirst for dirty Martinis has spilled beyond the confines of the brine-spiked classic (everything from spritzes to Negronis has been given the “dirty” treatment), the serve has become far less distinct. At cocktail bars across the country, you can find Gibson iterations flavored with botanicals like rosemary and saffron, spiked with viognier and pear eau de vie, and lightened with heirloom tomato water, raising the question: Where does the Gibson end and the dirty Martini begin?

To be fair, the Gibson’s template hasn’t remained fixed since its creation. Born sometime in the late 1890s, it once was closer in spirit to a 50/50 Martini, featuring a 1:1 ratio of gin (or genever) to dry vermouth. Its defining characteristic was its lack of orange bitters, which were then a typical component of the classic Martini. Its early days have been traced to San Francisco’s Bohemian Club in 1898, where stories held that it was named after either a businessman or an artist (Walter D.K. Gibson or Charles Dana Gibson, respectively). Based on a column published in the San Francisco Examiner two years prior, though, it’s possible that the drink came out of New York City, where it was created by the managing editor of humor magazine Puck, another Gibson (William Curtis).

In any case, it wasn’t until sometime in the early 1900s that bartenders began serving the drink with a single pickled pearl onion—and to this day, the garnish is the drink’s most distinguishing feature. But much like the dirty Martini, which has gotten even dirtier in recent years, the Gibson has recently entered stranger, more savory territory.

At all of Dante’s locations, you can find the Upside Down Dirty Gibson, wherein gin takes a back seat to both sweet and dry vermouth while onion brine lends savoriness and acidity. In Los Angeles, La Dolce Vita’s LDV Gibson is upgraded with giardiniera brine and black garlic oil. Across the pond, Side Hustle at the NoMad London has the Walter Gibson; originally created in 2016 by bartender Pietro Collina during his tenure at the NoMad Hotel in New York City, the drink combines gin, vodka and apple eau de vie, all of which is batched and chilled in a beeswax-lined bottle and served alongside assorted pickled vegetables. Meanwhile in New York City, the Mirepoix Gibson at Sip (of the bilevel bar Sip & Guzzle) is built on the traditional French trifecta of carrot, celery and onion: The carrot comes in the form of carrot eau de vie, while gin is infused with dehydrated celery root and the dry vermouth is fat-washed with onions that have been cooked low and slow with butter. A splash of chardonnay adds acidity, and tricolor powdered pickles adorn the glass. At Temple Bar, the House Gibson follows a 50/50 format, made with London dry gin and manzanilla sherry in place of dry vermouth, and is accented with the bar’s house onion brine and sherry vinegar. 

If there’s a common denominator to be found in the above iterations, it is, logically, the presence of onion or another allium; in the spring, seasonal iterations with ramps tend to appear on bar menus. Whereas a dirty Martini is all about the olive and its brine, “a Gibson is about an onion,” says Samantha Casuga, head bartender at Temple Bar. “Simple as that.” 

But in spirit, some bartenders reason, the two Martini types don’t share all that many similarities. “We see the Gibson as a less-savory, and subtly sweeter option,” says Linden Pride, co-owner of Dante, who cites the historically vermouth-forward build of the original. In the eyes of Ben Yarrow of Sip, the dirty Martini “can get kind of hectic at times,” he says, adding that the Gibson is a “much more elegant cocktail.”

“Once you start adding too many things to it, I think you’re kind of venturing away from what a Gibson really is—it has a tighter definition,” Yarrow explains. But at the same time, the dirty Martini formula can be limiting, in part because of its ubiquity. As La Dolce Vita’s bar lead, Blake Antrobus, notes: “By and large, the person ordering a dirty Martini knows what they are expecting from the cocktail.” 

The Gibson, meanwhile, simply offers another avenue to explore the Martini’s savory side. In many instances, bars iterating on the drink already have a dirty Martini, in some form, on the menu. And as guests’ taste for briny Martini-style drinks grows, so does the Gibson’s audience appeal. “I consider the dirty Martini a gateway Martini—I should know, since it was the first cocktail I had ever had—so once you are hooked as a Martini drinker, you tend to be a bit more curious about trying the variations out there,” says Casuga. At La Dolce Vita, for instance, “we wanted to highlight Martini-adjacent drinks that might be slightly outside a guest’s typical Martini order,” says Antrobus. (The LDV Gibson sits alongside a thrown 50/50 and the Flame of Love, a vodka-and-sherry iteration created for Dean Martin in 1970.) 

Perhaps Martini mania simply set the stage for the Gibson’s inevitable turn in the spotlight. “I think we see riffs on basically any classic cocktail, and it’s for a reason,” says Casuga. “We have been given the backbones to tried-and true-cocktails, so it’s up to us, the newer generation, to reinvent and bring these drinks to the modern drinking palate.