🍸 Is the Martini giving vodka its moment back? 🍸

Vodka has long been the spirit every bar stocks but few people get excited about, so it’s been interesting to watch the Martini change that over the course of the last couple of years.

London has fully embraced the serve in 2026, with dedicated Martini bars like Brutes of Mayfair letting guests build their own Martini, and Bob Bob Ricard in Soho pouring what it calls the World’s Coldest Martini at −22°C. The dirty Martini in particular has become a calling card for some of the city’s best loved bars, from the house Dirty Martini at Three Sheets in Soho to the £8 Martinis at Ellie’s in Dalston, which Time Out named London’s coolest bar for 2026.

Given a Martini is built almost entirely around its base spirit, there’s nowhere for the liquid to hide, which puts vodka front and centre in a way a mixer doesn't. While the category as a whole is still fairly flat, the Martini revival has become one of its real bright spots, particularly in bars and restaurants.

For vodka brands, this feels like a genuine opportunity to move beyond talking about filtration and purity and start building stories around the occasion, the ritual and the theatre of the serve.

After all, isn’t a ‘build-your-own’ Martini at Brutes on a Friday night a far better story than another line about triple distillation?

It’s a good reminder that the right serve can make a familiar spirit feel new again. Which vodka brands do you think are doing it best?