We have Ava Gardner to thank. At least, that is, according to Joan Vallès, a customer at Casa Camacho, a nearly century-old bar in Madrid.
“A long time ago, there were many Americans in Spain, including Ava Gardner,” he tells me, over the roar of a packed bar on a recent Saturday evening. “She used to order dry Martinis, which was very strange for Spanish people—in Spain, we only had sweet vermouth. People would order gin and vermouth, and they would be served this.”
“This,” in this case, is the Yayo, a mix of gin, gaseosa (essentially sweetened soda water) and sweet vermouth, and it’s what Gardner was allegedly served when requesting her drink of choice. Joan, his friends and just about everybody else in Casa Camacho was clutching one. And understandably: The Yayo is delicious—subtly sweet and aromatic, refreshing and easy-drinking—and this packed bar in the city’s formerly gritty, now-gentrifying Malasaña neighborhood is where the drink was created and remains one of the only places it’s served.
Yet Ambrosio Alvarez Delgado, Casa Camacho’s current owner, wasn’t previously aware of the Ava Gardner story. “I’ve never heard of that,” he tells me via a translator on a subsequent, much quieter day. We’re sitting at Casa Camacho’s zinc bar, next to an ancient spout still used to serve tap vermouth.
I ask for Ambrosio’s version of the story, and he tells me that in the old days, vermouth was almost exclusively drunk by middle-aged men, and only during la hora de vermut, that two hours or so before lunch when Spaniards combine the sweet, subtly bitter, herbaceous drink with salty or pickled bites. After Spain’s longtime dictator, Francisco Franco, died in 1975, Madrid underwent a countercultural revolution known as the Movida Madrileña, during which arts flourished and societal norms changed, including when—and by whom—vermouth was enjoyed. According to Ambrosio, Casa Camacho’s previous owner, his cousin, decided to take advantage of the trend.
“Almodóvar, Sabina, Alaska, they would all come here for drinks,” says Ambrosio, citing some of the artists that made up the Movida Madrileña during the 1980s. “Our specialty was vermouth, but he wanted to invent something new, something different,” Ambrosio says of his cousin. “He combined vermouth, sweet sparkling water and different kinds of liquors—vodka and other things. But finally, he ended up using gin,” allegedly following a local tradition of supplementing vermouth with a few drops of the spirit. He called the drink the Yayo, Spanish for grandfather, because of vermouth’s geriatric associations, and an underground Madrid classic was born.
As we chat, I watch Ambrosio and his staff prepare Yayos. The drink begins with a few cubes of ice tossed in a small footed glass. To this, a splash of gin is added, followed by a hearty glug of gaseosa (Ambrosio and his employees never measure the ingredients). The drink is then garnished with a slice of lemon and topped up with sweet vermouth from a tap. Because this is Madrid, an order is always paired with some sort of bite—perhaps a few olives, a small bowl of salty, crispy chips, or a slice of bread topped with chorizo or smeared with Gorgonzola.
“It should taste mild and sweet,” Ambrosio says of the Yayo. “It shouldn’t have any flavor of gin. If I didn’t tell you there was gin, you wouldn’t notice.” He achieves this by using a low-alcohol gin and sweet vermouth that has been made exclusively for Casa Camacho since 1929. It’s a formula that seems to work; Ambrosio claims that he goes through 2,500 liters of vermouth per month, and he estimates that 80 percent of the bar’s drink orders are Yayos—an extraordinary number in beer-loving Spain. It also doesn’t hurt that Ambrosio sells the drink for the bargain price of 3.50 euros.
“People don’t say, ‘Let’s go to Casa Camacho,’” Ambrosio tells me. “They say, ‘Let’s go to Los Yayos.’”
Today, apart from those Yayos, it’s Casa Camacho’s stuck-in-time feel rather than any sort of counterculture movement that draws customers. The space, which dates back to 1887, was originally a bodega. It adopted its current name in 1929 (“I was invited to the opening, but I couldn’t make it,” Ambrosio quips). Ambrosio’s relatives took over the bar in the ’80s. The bar as it exists today is something of a time capsule that seems to touch on all those eras—ancient wine barrels that nowadays are purely decorative; painted wall tiles; a ’90s-era painting depicting a Yayo, a vermouth spout and snacks with overlaying text in a heavy metal vibe; and shelves piled with dusty bottles and bric-a-brac from all the decades in between. In a neighborhood that’s rapidly accumulating third-wave coffee shops and streetwear boutiques, Casa Camacho is an anomaly, a holdout.
“I like to come here because it’s old-school,” says Joan, the Ava Gardner theorist, who explains that this type of venue is nearly extinct in his hometown of Barcelona. “This is one of the most authentic places in Madrid.”
We order a fourth round of Yayos (“The hit comes after the third one,” Joan tells me), down them, and my newfound buddies and I head off as a group, having begun the night as so many in Madrid have done before us.
