Espresso Martini History: From 1983 London to World Domination

Most classic cocktails have contested origins and rival bartenders claiming parentage. The espresso martini has none of that: one bartender, one bar, one year, and one famously blunt request. What it does have is a name that’s technically wrong and a comeback story better than most drinks’ origin stories.

London, 1983

Dick Bradsell — the bartender credited with dragging London cocktail culture out of its post-war slump — was working the Soho Brasserie when, as he told it, a young model asked for a drink that would wake her up and then some. The bar’s espresso machine sat next to his station. He pulled a shot and shook it with vodka, coffee liqueur and sugar: the Vodka Espresso. The spec he improvised — spirit, liqueur, fresh espresso, sugar — is essentially the classic recipe bars pour today, four decades later.

The name problem

The drink contains no gin and no vermouth; by any strict definition it is not a martini. Blame the 1990s: the martini-glass craze put everything in a V-shaped stem and named it accordingly, and Bradsell’s rechristened “Espresso Martini” rode the wave alongside the French martini and worse. The glass has since lost the argument — modern bars serve it in a coupe (why) — but the name was already permanent. Bradsell also spun off variations: his Pharmaceutical Stimulant for one venue riffed on the same wake-up premise.

Decline and improbable resurrection

By the 2000s the drink read as dated — a ’90s relic in a speakeasy decade. The revival, starting around 2018, had three engines: cocktail culture’s turn back toward crowd-pleasers, the specialty-coffee boom (which upgraded the drink’s core ingredient — see what coffee does to it), and social media, for which a black drink with white foam and three beans might as well have been designed. Craft coffee liqueurs like Mr Black arrived in the same window and rebuilt the drink’s most important ingredient. By the early 2020s it ranked among the most-ordered cocktails on earth — and spawned the kit industry this site exists to review.

Bradsell’s legacy

Dick Bradsell died in 2016, before the second boom he’d have found funny. His drink outlived the glass it was named for, survived its own decade of uncool, and became the rare cocktail that’s simultaneously a bartender’s test piece (the foam forgives nothing) and a home-kit favorite. Wake you up and mess you up — the numbers on both — remains the honest spec sheet.