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In her experience, “hot espresso melts your ice, so the drink gets watered down” in the shaker. New bar manger Tahlia Bolden infuses vodka with Herkimer coffee beans to make Artusi’s version. Spinasse and its next-door aperitivi bar Artusi each has its own espresso martini recipe-fitting given their Italian bona fides. The result has a satisfying cap of foam does pack the round richness-and deep, dark hue-of an actual midday espresso. The popularity reminds Derschang of the drink’s first go-round in the late ’90s, when she owned the Capitol Club on Pine-“we sold a million cosmos and espresso martinis.” These days, her all-day cafe pulls shots of Caffe Vita to order. Customers at Linda Derschang’s Oddfellows request the drink in droves, even though it’s not on the menu.
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Now, it seems, we’re participating again. Seattle is participating in the espresso martini’s renaissance, with very little actual espresso. As he tells it, a model approached him one night to ask, “can you make me a drink that will wake me up, and then fuck me up?” (Their 10-ounce version also sported that classic three-bean garnish.) The drink’s origins date back to the late 1980s and a British bartender named Dick Bradsell. “Is anybody really ready for the Seattle Espresso Martini?” The Seattle Times marveled in a 1997 writeup of Tini Bigs, the then-new bar specializing in oversize libations. How could we not? It was the era when our city asserted its coffee dominance, and joined the vanguard of a craft cocktail movement. Seattle participated in the espresso martini’s heyday 30 years ago. Pulling an espresso shot is a laborious interlude in a busy night of service the combo of hot coffee and cold ice can make a cocktail shaker pop its top at inopportune, potentially messy moments. The New York Times deemed it “everywhere” this summer, and the zeitgeist prompted follow-up stories about how much bartenders hate making it. Media to the east has chronicled the cocktail’s comeback for a while now.
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The Big Buck Hunter game and Sonics memorabilia blink their own form of nostalgia, but the espresso martini is powered by memories of the 1990s. “It drinks more old-school than it is,” he says of this espresso martini that’s a heavy seller at Trade Winds Tavern, the Belltown bar that Elford and his business partner, Anu Apte, revamped to resemble a 1980s basement rec room.