At university I had two elective modules to complete alongside my English literature degree. During what must have been a short out of body experience, I chose Japanese and Marketing. In the first, I learned hiragana and katakana, which promptly shot out of the part of my brain that remembers things the moment the module was over. In the second, I learned about impulse buying, an unplanned decision induced by convenience and informed by our deepest desires. I have never understood it so completely until the Hawksmoor Martini Bar opened last month beside the London train station I use the most.
The new outpost from the steak empire is housed in the St Pancras London hotel, in what was most recently The Midland Grand. The restaurant is every bit as reliable and perfect for pretty much anyone as Hawksmoor ever was, so I won’t waste any breath chatting about it. Steak good. Chip good. But Martini we talk now.
Its Martini Bar is a casual obsession become material, with a section of the menu dedicated to so-called “direct Martinis”, where the spirit is simply poured into the glass with a splash of vermouth added, a method popularised by Dukes Bar in Green Park. The object of my attention (this time around, anyway) is the Sub-Zero Martini list. Specifically, the Steakhouse Martini, a blend of Grey Goose, chardonnay, green peppercorn and olive brine.
To a wine brain, a Martini feels an unobvious opener to a steak dinner, where I’ve been trained to look for the biggest red on the list. “I’m not sure it is unobvious,” co-founder Will Beckett points out. “The steakhouse and the Martini are both pretty quintessential American things that transport us to the golden era of the 1950s. It’s a low-volume, high-alcohol, palate-cleansing hit, developed from many evenings spent in the classic bar rooms of Gibsons [in Chicago], Keens and Gallagher’s [both in New York].”
But I needn’t go to Chicago or New York now, when St Pancras is the station I travel from whenever I’m visiting my parents in the Midlands. Now I have a reason for arriving an hour earlier: to order a Steakhouse Martini. Just don’t ask me to do it in Japanese.
The Drink is a regular column from writer Hannah Crosbie about what she’s drinking in London right now.
