Recipe: Martinique Cocktail
An Old New York Hotel Reclaims Its Signature Cocktail
I knew a bit of the history of the Hotel Martinique from my days as a theater writer. For a time, in the 1960s, the hotel’s former ballroom served as an important Off-Broadway venue when that theater movement was still in its infancy. The Martinique theater’s famous first production was a 1958 revival of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible that restored that play’s reputation after a disastrous premiere on Broadway. A landmark revival of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author was staged here in 1963 and won several awards. James Earl Jones played Othello and Gloria Foster played Medea in the space.
Recently, however, during a brief visit to check out the hotel’s new ground floor restaurant, The Press Club Grill, I was surprised to find out the hotel had a significant history as a cocktail center.
The Martinique is one of those old hotels that New Yorkers pass by every day, but rarely have any interaction with. It’s quite grand and rather tall, things you don’t notice because it has often been wreathed in scaffolding. It was built at the corner of 32nd Street and Broadway in three stages, between 1898 and 1911. The hotel’s exotic name actually has a rather prosaic origin—it was named after one of its developers, William R.H. Martin.
Martin died in 1912 and his company unloaded the hotel in 1919, right before Prohibition—a smart move. After that, the property changed hands many times. From 1973 to 1988, after its heyday as a theatre venue, it hit hard times and became a notorious welfare hotel. Under developer Harold Thurman, it reopened in 1998 as a Holiday Inn, then a Radisson. In 2019, it joined Hilton's Curio Collection division and finally looks like it’s on the road back to hospitality health.
But back to the cocktails…