The Story Behind The Breakfast Martini

We don’t condone booze for breakfast, but if we did, the most balanced metaphorical meal would have to be an Espresso Martini alongside the lesser-mentioned Breakfast Martini. In a world where boozy brunch menus are generally limited to Mimosas, Espresso Martinis, and Bloody Marys, it’s unfortunate that the Breakfast Martini has somewhat faded from the public consciousness, as it’s not just a delicious drink, but one that pushes the boundaries of what we consider when it comes to cocktail ingredients.

Like the aforementioned Espresso Martini, the Breakfast Martini’s story begins in London. In 1996, bartender Salvatore Calabrese was working at the Library Bar in the Lanesborough Hotel near Buckingham Palace. Every morning before work, Calabrese would religiously drink an espresso, but refrain from eating anything with it. His wife, Susan, would join him at the table with a plate of toast and marmalade. “I’m a very Italian person. The first thing in the morning, all I can do is an espresso,” Calabrese says, as quoted in Robert Simonson’s 2016 book “A Proper Drink.”

One night, Calabrese came home a bit later than usual. When he woke the next morning, Susan gave him one look and brought him a piece of toast topped with orange marmalade. “She gave me a command: Have it,” Calabrese tells VinePair. Despite his strict espresso-only policy, Calabrese obeyed, and was immediately struck by the bitter, tangy flavor of the marmalade. He set off to work, marmalade jar in hand, and began brainstorming a cocktail on his commute. “I started thinking about the ingredients I wanted to put with this marmalade,” Calabrese says. “It had to be British because marmalade is very British, so it had to be gin. Then, I started to think that it needed something sweet, so I picked up Cointreau. It needed a little bit of sharpness — something to give it a bit of zest — and that would be lemon juice.” Just like that, a modern classic was born.

A similar drink (minus Cointreau) called the Marmalade Cocktail appeared decades earlier in Harry Craddock’s 1930 recipe guide “The Savoy Cocktail Book,” but Calabrese claims that he was unaware of the drink when he created the Breakfast Martini. And just like all the other “tinis” created in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the Breakfast Martini’s spec is a far cry from that of a traditional Martini. At the time, “Martini was a flexible term, basically covering anything a bartender cared to put in a cone-shaped, long-stemmed glass,” Simonson writes in “A Proper Drink.” “This sort of thing made the Martini purists livid, but it kept the cocktail’s name alive.”