Tiny Martinis

“Originally it was just a joke,” says Monica Berg, the co-founder of Tayēr + Elementary in Shoreditch, about her bar’s most famous creation, the one-sip Martini. “Working in London you’re used to all these American tourists coming in and asking for a vodka Martini with a blue-cheese olive, because it was a huge thing in the US, but not really in Europe. But the problem with that is the drinks are quite big. By the time you got halfway down, the cheese had bloomed out into the liquid and it looked like you were drinking a weird milk solution, and that was off-putting. So when we opened in 2015 we thought, ‘What if we made it proportionally to fit to the garnish?’ The one-sip Martini was born.”

Ten years on, it is one of London’s most recognisable cocktails, with countless pieces of press dedicated to it and even its own range of merchandise. Berg says she sells between 100 and 150 of the drinks a day, at £4.50. Almost everyone who comes in orders one. Some have 10. “People bring their friends and their colleagues, and they all want a one-sip,” Berg says. “They’ll start and finish with a one-sip, they’ll have a one-sip between rounds. It’s a movement more than anything else.”