A Romance Novel for Every Taste, and a Cocktail That Is Particularly for Mine

Recently I’ve read and loved…a whole bunch of romance novels.

Greetings from Newark Airport, where after eight exhausting, hella fun days in New York, I’m waiting for a delayed plane to shuttle me 375 miles north to Montreal so I can hang out with this badass award winner. (There will be all the delicious food and autumn colors, hurray!)

I have been so busy that my reading attention span has been shorter than usual, so I’ve been finding refuge in romance novels. Some recommendations for you:

-If you like fantasy, or horror, or just some zombies and amphibious horses to go with a sweet and tender enemies-to-lovers story: The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy by Megan Bannen

-If you dream of a parallel universe where Princess Leia runs off to star in her own movie where she becomes a bounty hunter and swaggers her way across the galaxy (and still gets the guy): Hunt the Stars by Jessie Mihalik.

-If you love reading profiles by Taffy Brodesser-Akner and always wondered one of those profiles might look like if the interviewer and the celebrity actually fancied the pants off each other: Funny You Should Ask by Elissa Sussman

-If you’ve been to visit a pumpkin patch recently and love Spooky Season totally unironically, with a bonus if you enjoy both starchy, intensely self-conscious heroes and talking cats: The Kiss Curse by Erin Sterling

And I’ve been drinking…martinis.

Which seems like a statement of the bleeding obvious - Sarah loves cocktails, therefore she drinks martinis. But no! One of my formative drinking experiences was my grad student tutor/crush making twenty-one-year-old me a martini which was literally a glass of neat gin. This didn’t put me off gin for life, but it definitely made me wary of drinks that were gin-dominant.

Fast-forward to two weeks ago, when a powerlifting friend who is hereby known as The Bad Influence came to London on vacation. The Bad Influence turned out to be a dry martini kind of guy, much to my incredulity. But despite my disbelief, he was kind enough to let me taste his drinks to test my dislike, which gave me my Eureka moment:

I didn’t hate martinis. I hated dry martinis.

But dirty martinis? Martinis that reminded me of being six years old and stealing the pickle off everyone else’s lunch plate at the diner, of the umami pleasure of anchovy-stuffed olives, of the crisp saline edge on my tongue after going swimming in the ocean?

Yeah, that was a martini I could love. And it’s particularly delicious sipped on my own in a bar in Manhattan, with a bartender keeping a kind eye on me, a good book to read, and excellent French fries to nibble on. (I see you and love you, Minetta Tavern.)

So, with the zeal of the newly converted, what I have for you is not a recipe but an order the next time you’re at the kind of bar or restaurant that takes Martinis seriously:

Tanqueray, very wet, and dirty. (Bonus points if you can order with a straight face.)