Column: A weeklong celebration of the martini is coming to town

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Do not let the current and, frankly, silly focus on that beverage known as Malört blind you to the fact that it is not to everyone’s taste.

“I think it’s the oddity of it that makes it so popular, and a perverse kind of local pride at this point. It’s gone from obscure dare drink to beloved local product,” says Robert Simonson, a 61-year-old born and raised in Wisconsin and, after many years in New York City, happily back now in Milwaukee. “My wife and I were able to buy a house, and I had always thought that I would one day return, and we are happily here.”

Simonson has tasted Malört. He provided a book jacket blurb for former Tribune reporter Josh Noel, who has written “Malört: The Redemption of a Revered and Reviled Spirit.”

Simonson is a writer, and he is a drinker and has combined those activities to become one of the leading liquor experts in the land. He is on his way to becoming to booze what the great Anthony Bourdain was to food.

He is slightly younger than his brother Eric Simonson, a longtime member of Steppenwolf Theatre, a screen actor and author of the recent memoir, “Between the Lines: Steppenwolf’s Seagull and A Reluctant Actor’s Journey Back to the Stage.”

Robert too began his career in theater, writing about it for 20 years. Since 2009, he has been writing about booze for the New York Times and is the author of six other books, including “The Encyclopedia of Cocktails” and “A Proper Drink: The Untold Story of How a Band of Bartenders Saved the Civilized Drinking World.”

His wife, Mary Kate Murray, is also a writer and editor and both are graduates of Northwestern University, though they didn’t meet there. They collaborate on a terrific Substack newsletter called The Mix.

They are the creators of Martini Expo, launched last year in Manhattan as a day-and-a-half affair. It was such a great success that it has expanded into a week. In Chicago, there will be tastings, seminars, dinners, and other programming focused on the martini, which, Simonson told me a few days ago, is “not just a drink but a history, a culture.”

He calls the martini “the greatest cocktail of all time.” It is his drink of choice, his wife preferring a Manhattan. He also tells me of the cocktail’s significant connection to Chicago, ever a hard-drinking town, saying, “the drink has been around since the 1880s and the first recipe to ever appear in print did so in a book published in 1888 in Chicago and written by a French Canadian fellow named Théophile Proulx.”

This distinctively named man was a bartender at the swanky Chapin & Gore downtown saloon, a ritzy joint once visited, it is said, by Mark Twain, and his recipe appeared in his self-published book “The Bartender’s Manual.”

Simonson is loaded with interesting facts and will share them during the Expo, which will include visits to such places as Shaw’s Crab House, The Duck Inn and Hawksmoor. Most intriguing to me personally is Thursday’s “Martini Tour Through Time,” billed as “a bus tour of Chicago’s Martini landmarks, with accompanying drinks.” It is set to stop at Club Lucky, the Green Mill, the Drake Hotel, the former site of the Pump Room in the Ambassador East Hotel, and will end, of all places, at the Billy Goat, a great tavern but not one immediately associated with the martini.

Still, there will be three versions of the drink available there that night, and so will the tavern’s very famous cheeseburgers, but with an added attraction. They will be grilled and served by a man named George Motz, a friend of Simonson’s but also, for more than two decades, my go-to hamburger expert.

I first met him when he was researching and filming his 2004 documentary, “Hamburger America,” which prominently featured the Goat. He crisscrossed the country for the film and for the 2018 book, “Hamburger America: A State-by-State Guide to 200 Great Burger Joints,” currently in a new fourth edition. He has hosted a Travel Channel show about burgers, co-founded and runs New York City’s Food Film Festival and in 2023 opened his own restaurant in New York City. It is called, naturally, Hamburger America.

Motz will be donating whatever he makes at the Goat’s grill — “Double’s the best,” you will hear and hear and hear — to charities in honor of the late Sam Sianis, the Billy Goat’s patriarch, who once gave this immortal response when asked why people like hamburgers: “The people like them because they’re good.”

I suppose one could say the same thing about martinis, as Simonson does in his 2019 book, “The Martini Cocktail: A Meditation on the World’s Greatest Drink, with Recipes.”

In that book, he writes, “The king of cocktails was late to the cocktail party. American drinkers lived under many liquid monarchs — the Mint Julep, Sherry Cobbler and Whiskey Cocktail — before they heard the word ‘Martini.’ The difference was the Martini, once it climbed upon the throne, it never stepped down, nor was it usurped or overthrown. The king was here to stay.”

rkogan@chicagotribune.com

If you go

The 2026 Martini Expo takes place Sept. 13-20 at multiple Chicago locations; tickets and more information at martiniexpo.com