Quick service tip before the story: the full ingredient list is right here, ready to order. Here's how this cocktail came to be.
The Dry Martini's origin is shrouded in legend. The most popular theory places it in San Francisco, 1860s, at the hands of bartender Julio Richelieu, who supposedly served it to a gold miner bound for the town of Martinez, California. A parallel theory credits Jerry Thomas or the Knickerbocker Hotel's Martini di Arma di Taggia in 1910s New York.
Over a century, the Dry Martini became the drink of presidents, writers and spies: Franklin Roosevelt personally mixed them at the White House, Winston Churchill joked that a true Martini was gin with "a glance toward a bottle of vermouth," and James Bond turned it into cinema history. Timeless and austere, it remains the single most iconic cocktail of the 20th century.
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