There was a time, not so long ago, when the attendant question after ordering a Martini was not “Olive or twist?” but instead, “What flavor?” The options could range from the ubiquitous apple to Key lime with a crushed graham cracker rim or even chocolate finished with a drizzle of fudge. During what we now refer to as the cocktail’s dark age, the Martini consisted of anything but gin and vermouth. (In fact, if you wanted a genuine Martini at Lola’s in Los Angeles, the home of the original Apple Martini, you had to order a “Martini Martini.”) 

It was an era in which the glass mattered more than what was in it. “Wedging whatever god-awful concoction one might come up with into one of those V-shaped, ill-starred coupes made it automatically a ’tini to whatever group of neophytes was willing to cough up for it and, subsequently, cough it up,” summarized Toby Cecchini, proprietor of Brooklyn’s Long Island Bar and creator of the Cosmopolitan, one of the most respected drinks to come out of the ’tini era.

“Drinks companies in the late 1980s, desperate to get their new flavored spirits and luxury brands into cocktails, decided to promote the return of the Martini as the vehicle,” explains Dale DeGroff of the original ’tini craze. “It was easy, just tack your flavor onto the suffix ‘-tini’ and promote the idea that the Martini is back!”

By the early ’90s, DeGroff and a few like-minded contemporaries had made it their mission to eradicate the ’tini, which represented the nadir of cocktail culture and a roadblock to modern cocktail literacy. As DeGroff recalls, even the creator of the Espresso Martini, legendary London bartender Dick Bradsell, tried to push back as his creation assumed the Martini moniker against his will. “‘It’s not a fucking Martini! It’s a Vodka Espresso!’ he would shout over and over, until he finally surrendered and just let it wash over him,” explains DeGroff. 

Today, the ’tini is several years into a revival; the modern Appletini, for instance, is practically a cottage industry unto itself. But something else is brewing. The more I looked around, 12:1 Martini in hand, I started to notice something. It was hard to spot at first, stripped as it was of its telltale Technicolor. Something ’tini-like, hiding in plain sight, gliding by under the Martini moniker utterly devoid of anything Martini-like at all, not unlike the ’tini of the 1990s. The thought startled several of the bar professionals I reached out to. “I’m not sure if you’re trolling us at this point,” wrote Jamie Boudreau, owner of Canon in Seattle. “You’re doing an article on the ’tini after all the good work we’ve put in the past two decades to remove the abomination?!?!?!” Asked Cecchini: “Am I too sequestered in my Brooklyn hipster perch to have noticed some kind of swelling of a virus I thought we killed off in the ’90s?” 

Look around and you’ll see it too. I’m not talking about the clarified Appletinis, reimagined Lycheetinis and the myriad other ’90s originals that have been rescued and resuscitated with the help of modern techniques. What’s emerging is a new breed of ’tini, a band of playful, fruit-forward cocktails, absent the defining Martini ingredients, happily sporting the Martini name, pedants be damned.

They may not be sloshed into V-shaped glasses (although those, too, are back), but in their cavalier attitude toward the guardrails of a classic Martini, they share DNA with the ’tini of the dark ages. Despite their visual proximity to the crystal-clear Martini, however, these modern ’tinis are in some ways even more removed from the genuine article than the neon ’tinis of yesteryear. They represent an abstraction, a 35,000-foot view of the drink, the Martini viewed through a deliberately out-of-focus lens. The modern ’tini is to the classic Martini what Rem Koolhaas’ monolithic Lo Res Car is to the Lamborghini Countach—the original subjected to “extreme deresolution” resulting in “the purest shape possible,” as it was described by the Petersen Automotive Museum. 

What does that leave us with? “In the end,” says Andy May, head bartender at The Golden Swan, of the New York City bar’s house Martini—which contains no gin or vodka or vermouth—“a stirred and spirit-forward cocktail, using liqueurs and a dash of bitters.” It’s a definition that aligns with that of Nacho Jimenez of New York’s Superbueno, who believes retaining the spirit-forward structure of a Martini warrants the Martini moniker, even in the absence of the drink’s traditional ingredients. His Green Mango Martini, for instance, builds on a tequila base with Sauternes swapped in for vermouth and mango eau de vie added for a fruity note without bringing down the proof. Though not originally conceived as a ’tini, Jimenez admits that his creation “does play into those ’00s fruit-forward ’tinis that got people excited about flavorful, spirit-forward drinks.”

Such an exercise in abstraction is only possible thanks to the dedicated cocktail revivalists who shaped the current drinking landscape into a space where people on both sides of the bar know what constitutes a genuine Martini. It’s no wonder, then, that today’s ’tini proliferates alongside the classic Martini. Consider Silver Lyan in Washington, D.C., where the Silver Service Martini allows guests to select from four distinct blends—two gin-based, two vodka-based, each staunchly classic. Or New York’s Tigre, which offers several takes on the drink capable of being personalized by base spirit and vermouth ratio, ranging from 4:1 to 16:1 (and even 1:nothing). There, too, liberties are taken with the drink: The Cigarette Martini, for instance, builds on a base of Empirical’s smoky, category-bending spirit Charlene McGee alongside vodka and blanc quinquina.

“If it weren’t for the rigid mentality of the cocktail vanguard, we wouldn’t be able to have fun with the rules they created now,” explains Kavé Pourzanjani, creator of the Lesser Key Martini at New York’s Paradise Lost, made with coconut and pistachio fat-washed rum and plantain brandy among other ingredients. “Part of that means finding a new way to be especially serious about the craft, to fill your Martini with infused spirits or in-house ingredients that are difficult to make outside of a bar setting or oddball modifiers,” he says, “but it often also means imbuing what we’ve been taught is a super serious craft cocktail with something fun and silly.” Jimenez agrees, stating that drinks like his Green Mango Martini are “very much for today’s drinking culture.”

Purists might balk at the non-Martini-ness of the modern ’tini—that is, if they can spot them, clarified and unassuming as they are—and cynics might read their arrival as the start of an inevitable slide back toward cocktail illiteracy, an unraveling of the hard work bartenders undertook to teach the public what a real Martini even was. But the modern ’tini is nothing to fear. A relaxing of the rules, an opening of the gates, does not mean a second dark age is upon us. “At the end of the day, we’re all just ready to have a little fun with what we make and consume,” says Pourzanjani. “The self-serious bartender with a handlebar mustache has given way to the Malört-slinging goofball who can make you the best damn Midori cocktail you’ve ever tried.”