Don't Drink Long Island Iced Teas, Even If You Have To

El Gran Ron weighs in on a fussily ordered he had, yes, at our Perbacco:

> As Luis Bunuel (and I) would respond, it is crucial to use only uncrushed, whole ice cubes in making martinis and to place them and the gin only into a shaker, not some beaker. Stirred martinis -- often and wrongly stirred in a beaker so as not to "bruise" the gin -- are for ignorant and often pretentious pussies. Gin does no bruise, but it does improve in lip-smacking "dryness" when served very, very cold and as undiluted as possible by (yech) water from (ugh) crushed ice. Martinis are serious business, not slushies. Moreover, the shaker should be agitated (without beating the ice to death and cracking it) for some several minutes. at which point the martini should be poured into an already chilled martini glass. We'll leave the choice and application of types of vermouth and olives, onions or other delicacies to be served within the martini for another time.

I hope you don't take offense, Antonio Luis, but that slick bartender at Perbacco, who you seemed to know by name [this would be Scott -AL] and vice-versa, did not make a good, not even a decent, martini, I am sad to tell you, despite the fact that he tried twice. If he focused less on his fancy hand-job routines in making drinks and various other showoff flim-flam behind bar and more time reading and studying and understanding what a good martini is and how to make one, he might be salvageable; though frankly he seems to too vain and hubristic to me to ever be a good bartender, whose major attributes have to be a total absence of needless flash and filagree and a basic, openly expressed sense of humility and compassion.

So, in the slightly altered advice of Abe Polonsky, I would encourage you not to give up and come to a false understanding before you have to. If you ever get any crushed ice in your martini, the putz behind the bar has flim-flammed you with fency hand jobs into believing that he knows what he's doing. The only defense is to know more and better than he does.

As ever,

El Gran Ron