A Guide to Garnishing Your Martini

From olives and citrus to pickled onions and chillies, the right addition can transform any martini into a masterpiece. 

A martini-with-a-twist is sophisticated and pure – zesty, dazzling, on-point. A martini-with-an-olive is more naughty and salty – it has a bit more mystique (olive advocates also regard themselves as intellectually superior to twist-ers, though they’re too polite to say it).

For the record, I like my martini with an olive and a twist, which shocks people no end. They look at me, outraged, as if I’m trying to have my cake and eat it. I’ve seen bartenders blanche, as if what what I’ve ordered may actually be illegal.

Ideally, I like three olives (nocellara, please, with the stone left in), plus a few more on the side. And then a twist spritzed and discarded, so the drink is scented but the glass is not too crowded. This way, you get a martini that does everything, from the most delicate top notes all the way down to the most savory umami.

Simply changing the variety of citrus is enough to re-frame a martini completely. I love the Vodka-tini at The Dover, in Mayfair, which comes with an out-sized orange twist that makes the cocktail very slightly sweeter and dangerously drinkable.

A Gibson, of course, is garnished with pickled onions, which provide a bit more tang. The famously bibulous writer Ernest Hemingway liked his silverskin onions frozen to 5°F (he also liked thinly-sliced onion on his martini, which I wouldn’t recommend). The onion-spiked Gibson was particularly fashionable in the 1950s and ‘60s, when it was often served on the rocks. I like a martini with ice, though you need to drink up, quick, before it gets too dilute.

There also seems to be a micro-trend at the moment for pickled onions steeped in beetroot juice so they look like cocktail cherries – which is fun and very easy to do, if you want to try it at home.

Pickled chillies also seem to be in vogue right now. At the London Carbone, the picante Pepe Martini is garnished with a trio of tiny red DeLallo Pepper Drops, which look very cute. Hawksmoor’s new St Pancras Martini Bar also does an excellent Steakhouse Martini (Grey Goose vodka, green peppercorns, olive brine and a splash of Chardonnay) topped with a green olive and a long guindilla pickled chilli, skewered together so they look like a Spanish gilda.

While researching my book, The Martini, I tried many variations on the garnish theme – blackberries, cherry tomatoes, lychees, shiso, and cypress leaves. I drilled down into the virtues of twist-discarded versus twist-left-in (the latter produces in a martini that’s more intensely zesty and slightly bitter). And re-created a Futurist Martini garnished with an anchovy and a communion wafer.

I tried atom bomb creator J Robert Oppenheimer’s perfect serve, which comes in a glass with a lime juice and honey ‘rim,’ and the Argentinian answer to a martini, the clarito, which sees the coupe wiped with lemon and dipped in sugar. (I have to say, though, I find all that stickiness decidedly un-martini.)

The other aspect of the garnish to consider is the cocktail pick. You may decide you don’t want one – which is absolutely fine – but I rather like having something to fiddle with. Martinis suit minimal – my go-to set are stainless steel, quite plain, but thrillingly sharp. But I also have a set of vintage picks a friend gave me which are topped with miniature bottles of Noilly Prat, Byrrh and Bols Advocaat (you can see a similar example here), which I absolutely treasure.

And there is definitely a time and a place for a cocktail pick that’s a little kitsch – at the neo-dive Best Intentions in Chicago, I recently had a martini topped with a giant stuffed olive speared on a plastic sword.

But be warned: picks can be hazardous, as the novelist Sherwood Anderson discovered to his cost. He inadvertently swallowed one while drinking a martini in 1941, resulting in a fatal case of peritonitis. It puts a rather different spin on the phrase: ‘I’m dying for a martini’.