Back in 2019, I was on a photo shoot at The Grill for my book The Martini co*cktail, when photographer Lizzie Munro suddenly halted proceedings. She would not photograph the Martini the bartender had just prepared. It had two olives in it.
Two olives, she explained, is bad luck. A Martini must have either one or three olives.
This was news to me. But a little research confirmed that this superstition did indeed exist. I have since embraced it. It is one of only two drinking superstitions I put stock in. (The other is I will toast only with glasses that contain alcohol. Water is a no-no.)
Since that day, I’ve become the Lizzie Munro in these situations, informing bartenders who serve me Martinis with two olives that they are playing with fire. I have found that in half of the cases, the servers have never heard of this tradition. The same goes with my fellow booze writers.
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I have tried to discover the origin of the superstition, but have not been successful. I reached out to several Martini experts. Lowell Edmunds, who wrote the classic Martini study The Silver Bullet (1981), noted that 1 or 3, and not 2, is a principle in flower arrangement and, more broadly, in design. Barnaby Conrad III, who wrote a 1995 book about the Martini, had never heard of the tradition. Jared Brown, another co-author of a Martini book, said he has always preferred a twist, and so hasn’t had to muck about with olive numbers.
I contacted Three Olives Vodka, thinking that their name was an obvious reference to the habit. I didn’t hear back from them, but I was put on their mailing list. Thanks, guys.
Grey Goose, another big vodka brand, is aware enough of the 3-olive thing that they have a paragraph about it on their website.
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The superstition seems to be of fairly recent vintage. In the 1940s, there was a common joke, reprinting in newspapers numerous times, about a dog walking into a bar and ordering a Martini with two olives. After the pooch leaves, a barfly asks if that wasn’t quite unusual. “No,” replies the bartender, “I often serve customers who request two olives.”
This doesn’t prove anything, but suggests that the idea that two olives wasn’t exactly connected to bad luck yet.
Frank Sinatra, another thing that was big in the 1940s, had a habit of ordering his Martini with two olives. He’s eat one and share the other with a friend. Nice idea. Frank lived by his own rules.
Bartender Tony Abou-Ganim recalled first hearing of the tradition from the late Harry Denton, who was famously the host of the Starlight Room in San Francisco when it reopened in 1995. "One olive on a pick was elegant and proper, two was bad luck, and three was a meal,” Denton told him. “I still use his quote to this day,” said Abou-Ganim.
Veteran bartender Lynn House got the intel from the kitchen. “For as long as I have worked in restaurants I was taught by chefs that evens were unlucky,” said House. “So when you served items like pancakes or scallops you always served uneven numbers.This translated to bar world where even skewered garnishes were also bad luck.I have always followed those rules.”
Francis Schott, an owner of Stage Left Steak, a co*cktail destination in New Brunswick, NJ, for more than 30 years, learned about the rule on his first day as a bartender in 1986, “bartending at my cousins pub, the townhouse pub in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. A dive.”
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The only instance in which the three-olive issue was examined in print in any depth came in 2007. It was an article by Bill Nash, columnist for the Ventura Star in California. He had heard that two olives were bad luck. This disturbed him, because he customarily had his Martini with two olives. So he vowed to get to the bottom of it.
He didn’t.
He had read about the curse of the two olives in an article by Eric Felten, who was then a co*cktail columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Nash wrote:
Apparently, my bad luck was being caused by olives. Specifically, the two green olives I enjoy in my martinis. It turns out that two olives in a martini is considered bad luck (by some). If it's true, I'm in for a long run of bad luck.
It all started with Eric Felten's "How's Your Drink?" column in the Wall Street Journal. The co*cktail-themed column concerned martinis on this particular Saturday, and one line in it pierced my soul like one of those little plastic swords bartenders use to skewer olives.
It read, "For example, I like to have an olive or three in the glass (two olives is bad form) "
I immediately e-mailed him because I always order a martini with two olives. In response he said, "It's just a venerable superstition (it) is bad luck. I need to do some research to find out the origin of the belief, but there used to be bartenders who would refuse to make a drink with two olives for just that reason!"
And that was that. I would have tried to reach Nash to see if he had learned more, but he died in 2021. Felten did not respond to my inquiry.
A survey of old co*cktail books finds no precedent for anything other than a single olive. Prior to Prohibition, a lemon twist was the norm in Martini garnishes. After Prohibition, olives became more common, but recipes in co*cktail books always clearly called for “an olive”—singular. There were no multiple olives. In the 1960s and 1970s you begin to see calls for a “large olive,” but it was still always a solitary fruit. No modern co*cktail books I have found get into the whole number-of-olives rigamarole.
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For some mid-20th-century epicures, any olives in a Martini were a thing to avoid, something too awful to contemplate. Both Maurice Dreicer and Bernard DeVoto— who had definite ideas when it came to Martinis—considered the garnish verboten and advocated for the lemon twist.
In the past, you’d often hear Martini mavens joke that the olive took away critical space in the glass that would have been more profitably occupied by additional gin. More recently, however, more olives have been considered a good thing, presumably with an eye towards greater value. More is always More, after all, in America.
A likely culprit in this jump from one to multiple olives is the rise of the Dirty Martini over the last 35 years. Dirty Martinis fans always want more olives in their drink, in order to make it even dirtier. A Dirty Martini drinker will Bogart the entire bottle of olives if they get a chance.
This habit of adding more olives to the drink may have jumped over to the classic Martini drinkers.
There is perhaps a correlation between three-olive Martinis and the traditional Sambuca serve known as Sambuca con Mosca (literally “Sambuca with flies”), in which three coffee beans are placed on the surface of a glass of the liqueur. The beans are said to represent health, happiness and prosperity. Leave one bean out and you’ve got trouble.
“I think it was preceded bythe three coffee bean story that was proliferated by Sambuca Romano, that there had to be a odd number of beans or it was bad luck,” said legendary bartender Dale DeGroff.
Abou-Ganim also subscribes to the idea that the olive tradition grew out of the Sambuca one.
This bean tradition was continued in modern times in the form of the widely popular Expresso Martini, which has been adorned by three espresso beans ever since bartender Dick Bradsell invented the co*cktail in the 1980s.
Some bartenders still refuse to serve a Martini with two olives. Tara Dolin Wright, who used to bartend at the venerable “21” Club, told me, “Absolutely! Bad luck. Garnishes need to be in odd numbers.”
Bartender Adam Minegar told me he honors the three-olive rule not because he is superstitious, but because he assumes his customers are. That pleases me as a bit of above-and-beyond hospitality.
Jen Sandella does the same. “Always 1 or 3, because there’s always someone out there who loves to send their drink back and then school me on this bad luck rule,” she said.
Others pointed out that one or three olives are just more aesthetically pleasing, a sentiment I wholly agree with.
Alberto Ferrero in Naples gave me the best explanation as to why the superstition persists. “It's not true,” he said, “but I believe it... as we say in Naples.”
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The Milwaukee-based co*cktail companies Bittercube and Heirloom Liqueurs will stage the Botanical Battle Royale, a Wisconsin-wide co*cktail competition, on May 5 at The Ivy House on South Barclay Street in Milwaukee. Participating bartenders hail from such bars as Agency, Birch Restaurant and Lost Whale in Milwaukee; Cellar District in Fond du Lac, and Merchant and Lucille in Madison. The competition judges include myself as well as Toby Maloney; the alternative electronic retrofuture band and production duo of brothers Kevin and William Bush, known as Immortal Girlfriend; and Mikel McGee, owner of 414loral,a Milwaukee florist. Tickets are $30-$40… Tommy’s Italian Sausage & Hot Dogs, one of the most revered hot dog joints in the United States, is in trouble. Sales have dipped severely at the Elizabeth, NJ, icon, while cost of supplies have skyrocketed, causing owner Tommy Parrinello to raise prices several times on his dogs. In addition, Parrinello and his family recently lost their family home to back taxes. If you can, please patronize Tommy’s. If you’ve never been, you owe it to yourself to experience this one-of-a-kind place. If you have been, it’s time to revisit. Let’s keep Tommy’s open. The world is better for its existing! … My neighbor and fellow booze writer, Amanda Schuster, has launched her own Substack called Amanda’s Schustack. Be sure to check it out and subscribe!.. The gang behind Attaboy and Temple Bar are opening a new bar on Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side called Good Guy’s. It’s a wine bar and will be located at 134 Eldridge Street, right next to Attaboy. It will feature spritzes, amaro, snacks, espresso and vinyl records… Harry Nilsson’s 1974 album puss* Cats, which was produced by John Lennon, has marked its 50th anniversary with a colorful new vinyl pressing… Hannah Selinger wrote a long article for Delish about the rise and fall of TGI Fridays, which was once the hottest singles bar in America, and had a huge influence on the co*cktail revival of the 21st century. I chimed in with some quotes. Also quoted is former TGI bartender and genever maker Philip Duff. TGI Fridays plays a big role in my 2016 history A Proper Drink… I am a guest on the most recent edition of the Brooklyn Magazine podcast, interviewed by Brian Braiker… Booze writer Aaron Goldfarb will host an event for his latest book, Dusty Booze, at the Chicago amaro bar Billy Sunday on April 15. Tickets are $75… Porchlight will host a book party for John Maxwell Hamilton, a New Orleans professor who has written an entire book about the French 75 co*cktail. Tickets are $25-$40… Lizzy Young Booksellers, one of the nation’s premier sellers of vintage co*cktail and food books, is moving from Newport, RI, to Stamford, CT. Before Young moves, she is holding a two-day Moving Sale, with some books 35% off. Check out the website… Spuyten Duyvil, the influential craft beer bar that opened in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2003, will close its doors on April 21. When it opened, the craft beer movement was booming and Spuyten Duyvil was one of the best places in the city to get both craft beer and hard-to-find foreign beers. In recent years, its role as a beer leader was usurped by others and it switched, in 2002, to an amaro and vermouth bar, adding a co*cktail list of the first time. “For the 18-year period I’ve been doing this, the entire beer world has changed not once, but probably two or three times,” owner Joe Carroll told The Mix in April 2022. “It’s a different world from when we opened in ’03. In ’03, if was difficult to get enough domestic craft beer from anywhere in this country. Our focus at that time was imported—Belgian, French, German, Dutch… We’re at a place today where our entire role, our function is useless. There is no need for a destination craft beer spot the way there was. Beer is everywhere. Every bodega has an incredible selection. At the same time, all the cool sh*t we used to get doesn’t leave the breweries anymore. The breweries sell all that stuff at the breweries.” Thank you for your service, Joe!
