The pistachio Martini is no more Italian than the Espresso Martini, but stroll down the main street in Boston’s North End, one of the United States’ most enduring Little Italys, on a hot summer night, and it’s nearly impossible to find a bar without one on the menu. Competing sandwich boards each claim to serve the best version of the cocktail.
The dessert drink is unmistakable: It arrives in a wide-mouthed Martini glass, filled to the frothy brim with a blue-green mixture of vanilla vodka, amaretto or pistachio liqueur, a splash of blue Curaçao, maybe a bit of Baileys and, depending on which bar you’re sitting at, a scoop of pistachio gelato bobbing at the center of the glass.
The origins of this candy-sweet cocktail are as murky as the drink itself. But each bar stakes a claim to it. One of the most popular pistachio Martinis in the North End comes from Caffè Paradiso, a coffee and gelato shop open daily from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m. Owner Adriana De Stefano claims that she invented the drink over a decade ago for a cocktail competition in Lowell, Massachusetts. When her Lowell shop shut down and she relocated to the North End, the pistachio Martini came with her. Copycats are everywhere, she says, but she rests easy knowing that she makes the best because she’s the only one who adds a scoop of gelato to the drink.
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Others would beg to differ. Phil Frattaroli, Ristorante Lucia owner and North End native, says that Lucia’s has been serving a version of the drink since the ’80s. Meanwhile, about 500 feet away at Ciao Roma, bartenders are busy plunking spoonfuls of gelato into their pistachio Martinis, too. Phillip Rolfe, the bar director at Ciao Roma’s sibling cocktail bar, Farmacia, guesses that the drink proliferated in the North End because many restaurants in the neighborhood run on cordial licenses, thanks to Boston’s Prohibition-era liquor licensing laws. An 80-proof vodka is hard to come by, but a lower-proof vanilla-flavored vodka? Every bar’s got a bottle.
Or maybe it’s just a love of country. “What’s more Italian than pistachios?” a bartender at Trattoria Il Panino casually shouts over the din on a warm Thursday night. “We have the best one, too.” The menu also claims that Trattoria Il Panino serves the world’s best pasta. (Hyperbole is second nature in this neighborhood.)
As for why you don’t see pistachio Martinis much outside of the North End, nobody is quite sure. Rolfe theorizes that the drink components are easiest to get through the Italian distributors and gelato shops that already fuel the neighborhood, or perhaps pistachio is not an ingredient that owners want to add to a menu not already doused in it due to allergy concerns. Maybe pistachio Martinis outside of the North End just don’t hold the same appeal. But when in the North End...
