It's depressing to find more examples of the Martini as the drink of excess and incivility, but they continue to appear, and in writers in whom one would least like to see them.  In his introduction to The Harry's Bar Cookbook (New York: Bantam Books, 1991), Arrigo Cipriani talks about keeping the atmosphere pleasant in his bar.  He contrasts Italian (social) and American (hard drinking) reasons for going to a bar, and then concedes that Italians, too, sometimes drink too much:
 

Of course, once in a while you're having such a good time seeing people that you find yourself getting a little drunk ....

But I'm always careful; if anybody drinks too many martinis, I intervene. (p. 14)

The mark of ellipsis is as in the original and the second sentence is set off from the first by blank space.  The Martini stands out in this format as the assumed cause of drunkenness.  This cocktail is the usual suspect, the source of the bad behavior that the proprietor of the bar feels that he has to police.

The same connection between the Martini and uncivilized drinking appears in an essay by James Villas, "A Few Choice Words about the Manhattan" (in Paul Levy, ed., The Penguin Book of Food and Drink, London: Viking, 1996, pp. 42-46).  Villas, who is the food editor of Town and Country, praises the Manhattan by disparaging its gin twin.  Martini drinkers, he says, "slug down their silver bullets day and night: at lunch, in the office, after work in bars, throughout a meal, and whenever a situation calls for getting smashed."  (On the historical relation between the Manhattan and the Martini see M,SU, pp. 80, 84.)

© 2001, Lowell Edmunds