Martini A Memoir

J.D.Rockefeller is said to have once remarked to friends: " Before choosing your hotel order a martini cocktail at the bar. Then you will know if the hotel is good enough for you....." One of the most fashioable changes of the new millennium is the reapearance of the 'cocktail' as a way to end the day or start a party. In particular the return of the most classic of all drinks -- the dry martini--which has once again swept the world (not that it ever went away). And in all Australian cities and in many parts of the world the "cocktail bar" or "lounge" has replaced the traditional male-oriented pub. This book evolves in part from a long conversational exchange between Moorhouse and his "Manhattan Friend"--part a fictional creation and partly based on his screenwriter friend Steven Katz--which has also spawned the Martini Dialogues, which Moorehouse has preformed in Sydney, Hong Kong and Shanghai (at the famous M-on-the-Bund Glamour Bar). Moorehouse's musing to Katz about the martini cocktail has carried him into strange territory, zen philosophy, aesthetics, the nature of the alcohol experiance, the confusion between 'martinizing" as a drycleaning process and the martini icon and even to an exchange with Katz on the strange similarity of the modular structure of DDT to that of wormwood (an ingredient of absinth and vermouth and hence of the martini). It takes him into his connection to the past through his research for his novels GRAND DAYS and DARK PALACE and his meeting with the 90- year-old Mary McGeachy, a martini drinker from the old days, who by an odd mental drift, took him back to an earlier version of the martini. The book is envisaged as an artfully produced small book which registers this remarkable shift in social life, celebrates the joys of drinking and sociability as well as tracing the history of this elegant cocktail -- the martini.