When you picture a communal cocktail, you probably imagine something along the lines of the NoMad’s “cocktail explosions” or perhaps the Scorpion Bowl and its many modern iterations—something fruit-forward, garnished to the max, paired with oversize curly straws and presented in a playful serving vessel. Perhaps there’s a cascading cloud of liquid nitrogen. However it’s served, the more-is-more approach of the shareable cocktail screams: “Fun!”
But what does fun look like in 2025?
Apparently, a giant Martini. The first one I saw, courtesy of Bar Planet in Newtown, Australia, was clearly a joke. Posted on April 1 of this year, the caption for the Mega Martini declared: “Available for a limited time only (never).”
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But here in the U.S., the giant Martini is very real. At Deux Chats in Brooklyn, New York, the Martini Fountain contains 13 servings dispensed from four spigots. For $199, it can be made dirty or clean, as a Vesper or built to the bar’s house spec. At Judy & Harry’s in Asbury Park, New Jersey, the vodka Martini, known as The Judy, can be made into a “BFM (a big fucking Martini)” for a surcharge. And at Holiday on 7th in Austin, Texas, the Giant Martini serves four to six people. The humongous V-shaped glass it comes in has such a tall stem, explains co-owner Erin Ashford, that “it requires guests to stand up.”
Most shareable drinks follow some variation on the basic formula of punch, the original large-format cocktail—one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong and four of weak—and are designed to be enjoyed slowly as the block of ice continues to chill and dilute the drink over time. The giant Martini, by contrast, contains no citrus, no sweetener, and, in most cases, no ice—it is all “strong,” no “weak.”
Like the musicians who played aboard the Titanic as the ship began to sink, the behemoth of a drink demands a willful, welcome—if momentary—pause on the chaos engulfing us. The world might be going to pieces, but at least we have the Giant Martini.
This is an excerpt from our Saturday newsletter, a weekly dispatch from our editors on the latest news in the drinks world. Subscribe for more takes like this in your inbox.
