The One Drink and the No-Drink
Dial-Up Martini: Gin, Lychee, Fino Sherry, and Yuzu
Dial-up was the last technology honest enough to tell you up front how long it was going to take.
Serve alongside
Salted rice crackers with cold shrimp, or oysters. Fino and yuzu make this saline and sharp, and lychee is the only soft thing in the glass — the plate should side with the salt.
Tools
Shaker, fine strainer or a tea strainer held over the glass, a clean jar for the gin steep, coupes in the freezer. A coffee filter in a funnel does everything a fine strainer does, more slowly and slightly more smugly.
Ingredients · swaps in parentheses
London dry gin, fino sherry (manzanilla), canned lychees in syrup, yuzu juice (3 parts lemon to 1 part lime to 1 part grapefruit), orange bitters, saline
Magic
Clarifying the lychee juice leaves you holding a bowl of drained lychee bodies. Drop them in the gin for exactly 30 minutes, then strain them out. The gin comes back with the rose-and-muscat top note that lychee juice loses the moment you clear it, and the drink gets its perfume from the spirit instead of from sugar. Not feeling brave? Fifteen minutes with half the fruit gives you a hint of it and leaves no room to overshoot.
Gotcha
Past 60 minutes the lychee stops being floral and becomes soap. That is not a figure of speech — the same lactones that read as rose at low concentration read as hand wash at high, and once the gin is over the line it is over the line for good. Set a timer. Also: taste your yuzu straight before it goes anywhere near this. A lot of bottled yuzu is sold salted, and salted yuzu plus the pinch of saline already in the build makes brine.
Dial-up was the last technology honest enough to tell you up front how long it was going to take. It made the noise, it gave you the number, and then you went and did something else. Nothing since has been willing to do that.
This drink is thirty minutes, and it says so at the top. Twenty-eight of those minutes are gin sitting in a jar with fruit in it while you are somewhere else in the house.
What “clarified lychee juice” actually means here
Open a can of lychees in syrup. Drain them, keeping both halves of the operation. The syrup plus whatever juice you press gently out of the fruit goes into the fridge in a tall narrow container and sits four hours; the solids fall, and you pour the clear part off the top and leave the last half inch behind. That is the whole technique. It is not a lab procedure, it is patience.
Clear lychee juice looks like water and tastes noticeably less like lychee than cloudy lychee juice does, because a good deal of the aroma was riding on the solids you just dropped out. Which is a problem, and the reason for the gin.
The gin steep
Six drained lychees into a cup and a half of gin, in a jar, at room temperature. Thirty minutes. Strain, discard the fruit — it has given up everything interesting and gone rubbery.
Room temperature, not warm. There is nothing to speed up here and heat only pulls the coarse end of the fruit. This is enough gin for eight drinks, and it keeps indefinitely, which makes it the rare infusion that does not become a jar you feel guilty about.
Build
One drink, two minutes, once everything above has happened.
- 1 1/2 ounces London dry gin
- 3/4 ounce fino sherry
- 1/2 ounce clarified lychee juice
- 1/4 ounce yuzu juice
- 1 dash orange bitters
- Pinch of saline
- Thin lychee slice
Chill a coupe — an hour in the freezer, not fifteen minutes.
Add all liquid ingredients to a shaker with ice.
Shake briefly and fine-strain.
Garnish with a thin lychee slice, floated flat.
The sherry is the whole reason this is not a candy
Lychee has an enormous sweet perfume and almost no structure. Fino is bone dry, salty, and slightly bready from flor, and at three quarters of an ounce it is a large enough measure to change the drink’s character rather than season it. Take the fino out and you have a lychee martini of the kind that was on every menu twenty years ago and deserved most of what happened to it. Leave it in and the perfume has something to sit against.
Fino is a wine. It is finished about five days after opening, refrigerated. Buy the half bottle.
Glass and ice
Coupe, no ice in the glass, shaken with the coldest hardest ice you have. Shake seven seconds — there is only a quarter ounce of citrus here and the drink does not want a sour’s worth of water.
Fine-strain. There will be lychee sediment even from clarified juice, and it collects in the bottom of a coupe where everybody can see it.
For eight
Batch everything except the yuzu up to one day ahead: 12 ounces infused gin, 6 ounces fino, 4 ounces lychee juice, 8 dashes bitters, saline. Add the yuzu at service, or within the hour — it fades faster than lemon, and it fades into flatness rather than into sourness, which is harder to notice and worse.
Slice the lychee garnishes ahead and keep them in a little of the reserved syrup so they do not dry at the edges.
The zero-proof route
There is a proper one and it is not a substitution — white tea, the same clarified lychee, verjus blanc and yuzu, lengthened with sparkling water. Same pale color, same perfume, and it is built around tannin instead of alcohol. Make both. A tray where the zero-proof glass is visibly the odd one out tells everyone in the room something you probably did not mean to say.
What to eat with it
Yuzu tuna discettes and truffled pizza-roll tartlets. The tartlets are a joke that turns out to be genuinely good, which is the best kind.
The Dial-Up Martini cocktail-hour plan takes those bites, the batch, and the chrome-glass idea and turns them into a service sequence people can actually move through.
Part of Drinks & Zero-Proof.
