What’s in a Tomato Martini?
After a particularly hot, drippy September day visiting family in St. Louis, I found relief in a tomato martini at the Gin Room. First thought up by owner Natasha Bahrami, “The Tomato of My Eye” has been on the menu for about ten years and comes with a background as storied as the Gin Room itself.
Bahrami opened the bar in 2013, inside her family’s Persian restaurant Cafe Natasha. It's significant that she chose St. Louis, her hometown; people told her a gin-focused place couldn't succeed in a city stereotyped as preferring beer and whiskey. (Similarly, her mother Hamishe Bahrami noted on a recent podcast, when she and her husband Behshid opened their first restaurant in 1983, Persian food wasn’t well-known in St. Louis.)
More than a decade and many national and international accolades later, the Gin Room prevails, and, after a four-year retirement, Hamishe is back in the kitchen, offering Cafe Natasha’s biggest hits on the food menu.
“We are a woman-run generational restaurant,” says Bahrami. “It's me and my mom running it, and I think that's very special in this current world.”
But about that martini: Made with tomato gin, sherry, vermouth, and a little sea salt, I initially thought “tomato gin” meant infused with tomatoes—that's how clearly the bright minerality of the fruit comes through.
“Any of our spirits that we work with are much more meaningful than just the spirit that is pouring out,” says Bahrami. It’s par for the course that excellent and unusual gins will find their way to the bar. That was the case with Moletto Gin, made by a family of vintners in Italy’s northeastern Veneto region. Started in 1960 by Mario Stival (who recently died at the age of 95), his wife Annamaria and their children Mauro, Giovanni, and Chiara still operate the company, producing wine, grappa, and their delightful tomato gin.
“It doesn't really say ‘tomato gin’ on it,” says Bahrami. “What you actually get out of this is a bright plumy-ness, a stewy salinity—sometimes people confuse it with a strawberry or a berry note. It just has this wonderful innate salinity to it.”
Bahrami and some of her staff visited the Stival family in September 2023 to learn more about Moletto Gin. Or rather, to learn as much as the Stivals would divulge. “We had a four and half hour lunch that Mauro’s mother cooked for us. She’s in her 80s. I would say it was akin to a two Michelin star meal out of her kitchen, the size of maybe an elevator in width,” explains Bahrami. “We had maybe 41 bottles of wine. And still, at the very end, they still wouldn’t tell us what tomatoes are in this.”
Rather than an infusion, there’s an eau de vie, brandy-like quality to it, “as if they’re exuding the flavors of it,” says Bahrami. San Marzano are the one known variety, with three other mystery tomatoes—likely unique to that region—going in the mix.
After the meal, Annamaria Stival, who doesn’t speak much English, tried to convey the importance of these tomatoes. “She’s standing there in front of us after she fed us this amazing meal and she's shaking these tomatoes at us in the sweetest, most aggressive way,” says Bahrami. “But she's like, in Italian, ‘You don't understand how amazing are the flavors that come out of the tomatoes here in Italy because you don't have these tomatoes in the United States.’” Even without the help of a translator, Bahrami could read through the body language how proud she was of her region’s agricultural heritage.
As is the case when utilizing well-sourced ingredients, with such a special gin, not much is needed to make it sing. Fashioned in the style of a Gibson—“We can have some lovely banter about whether a Gibson is a martini or not,” Bahrami slyly notes—to make the Tomato of My Eye, you’ll need 2 ounces Moletto Gin, ½ ounce Manzanilla sherry (something salty, like Barbadillo), ¼ ounce Dolin Dry vermouth, and a pinch of flaky sea salt, such as Maldon. “Do not use salt water, it needs the pinch of flaky salt to really bring out the flavors,” she says. “And stir please, but if you need to shake, we're not here to judge you.” Serve up in a chilled coupe or other martini-destined vessel, with a pickled cherry tomato.
“When I make it, I put a little bit of onion brine in it, too,” says Bahrami, to pack even more savoriness to the punch. “Some martinis are built to celebrate on their own, but this Tomato of My Eye, I think it's really a food martini. Serve it with salty french fries — it is absolutely gorgeous.”
Kara Elder is a food and agriculture writer (and occasional recipe tester) living in Denver. Her work appears in The Washington Post, FoodPrint, Offrange and more. Find more at karaelder.com.
