By Leila Molitor.
The espresso martini used to be the exclusive domain of Australian expats in the West Village and the kind of person who still thinks a Kate Moss anecdote is a personality trait. Born in 1980s London for a model who needed to wake up and simultaneously lose her motor skills, it spent decades as a niche relic. In New York, it was the "break glass in case of emergency" drink for when you hit the 11:00 PM wall at a Soho dinner but weren't ready to surrender to a $60 Uber ride back to Bushwick. It was a functional tool, a liquid battery with a side of vodka, served in a glass that demanded you stand still or risk wearing it.
Then came 2021, the year we all emerged from our apartments with the social stamina of a toddler and a collective yearning for 1990s nostalgia. Suddenly, the drink wasn't just on the menu; it was the menu. The accidental catalyst was a perfect storm of post-lockdown FOMO and the rise of "vibe dining," where the quality of the food is secondary to whether the lighting makes your skin look like a filtered sunset. It started at places like Dante and Saint Theo’s, where a well-made, frothy version felt like a legitimate reward for surviving a global pandemic.
The acceleration happened when the "Sizzling Fajita Effect" took over every high-volume bar from Hell’s Kitchen to Williamsburg. You know the drill: one person orders the dark, foamy coupe with the three-bean garnish, and suddenly the entire communal table follows suit like a caffeinated cult. This was the moment the trend detached from reality. Media outlets like Grub Street and The New York Times began documenting the "revival" with the urgency of a war dispatch, and the influencer industrial complex realized that a dark liquid with a white foam head is essentially Instagram bait in a glass.
By 2023, the trend was well into its "detonation" phase. It moved from high-end cocktail dens to sports bars that don't even own an espresso machine, resulting in lukewarm mixtures of bottom-shelf vodka and sugary cold brew concentrate that tasted like a battery leaked into a Starbucks frappuccino. The NYC "ugh" reaction peaked when "Espresso Martini Bars" began opening in Hudson Yards, signaling the final death rattle of cool. We went from a city of discerning drinkers to a city of people paying $24 to have a heart arrhythmia in a room full of neon signs.
The cultural fallout is a landscape littered with "Nitro" cans and flavored riffs—salted caramel, pumpkin spice, mezcal—that nobody actually asked for. The drink has become the Red Bull Vodka for people who shop at Aritzia, a symbol of a monoculture that prioritizes the "aesthetic" of the night over the actual quality of the spirit. It’s no longer a cocktail; it’s a chore for the bartender and a prop for the patron.
So who ruined it? Dick Bradsell made it. The New York Times detonated it. TikTok worshipped it. And the rest of us? We were just trying to get to work without stepping over people photographing three coffee beans on a foam head in the middle of a Friday night rush.
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