On yesterday's Food and Wine blog, "Mouthing Off" posts, "5 Signs You've Picked a Bad Restaurant." It's a list I would have agreed with in the past, but might second guess now that I live here, where people's tastes are, well, different. Number one on the list of signs you've picked a bad restaurant? "There's more than one drink that ends in -tini."

The dry martini is as scarce as it is ubiquitous, both everywhere yet nowhere made with proper sacrament. How can it be the greatest of all cocktails? It's more often a warm bowl of vodka, with two slimy devils plucked by hand from warm brine and tossed in the felonious soup, or worse: a suffix tacked on a fruit, color, animal, mineral, or vegetable. Terrible. 

An aside on vodka and its current identity crisis. Author of Boozehound, Jason Wilson, Philly resident, beer columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle and drinks columnist for The Washington Post, has maligned vodka on numerous occasions. Before a vodka tasting he wondered, "Would we be tied to chairs and made to sniff herring and listen to Abba at high volume until we finally cracked and declared, on captured video, that we loved vodka?" 

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