The Corner Table at The Swiss Hotel

No. 112 | Five of us order five different drinks. None of it is why we come.

“A martini. Shaken, not stirred.” — James Bond, Goldfinger (1964)

You can read a man by his martini order, which is inconvenient for my friends, because last night the five of us sat down and ordered five different drinks. Only three of them were martinis.

Our Martini Club meets Tuesdays at half past five, five o’clock when the Stompers are playing, which they were, because no one should have to choose between a cold martini and small-town baseball. Last night was the first sitting of the season. I see most of these guys in San Francisco all year, but that is not this, and we all knew it the second we sat down.

Lincoln and Donny had the corner spot we all covet, Sonoma royalty the both of them, gaveling the club to order before I could sit. It was north of 90 degrees, which settled the case for something cold. Donny’s son pitches for the Stompers, which is why we moved to five, and Donny ordered a Coors Light at the martini club with the clean conscience of a man who stopped keeping score a long time ago. The man with nothing to prove orders the plainest thing on the list and is somehow the most convincing person at the table.

Lincoln is a connector to the bone, the sort who cannot get through a drink without talking up somebody else at the table. Last night I was the project. He told Donny he had been reading AirSugar and really ought to subscribe, which is a strange thing to sit through when you write the thing. I let him, and enjoyed it more than I should admit.

Jason arrived in the Travis Scott Air Jordan 1 Lows, Shy Pink, reverse swoosh and all. Being a sneakerhead myself, I told him they were incredible. He told me his 13-year-old picked them out. The shoes cost more than the round, and the only part that mattered to Jason was that he was wearing something his son chose. He takes being a father more seriously than anything, and he is better at it than he knows.

Our last man is a wine drinker, which is a problem, because in a valley full of the best bottles on earth we meet at the one room without a list. He ordered a Chianti and made his peace with it. I told him to bring something from home next time.

Then Lincoln, Jason, and I ordered martinis, no two the same. Put three martini drinkers at one bar and you get three martinis, each defended like a thesis. Mine was Hendrick’s, straight up, dry to the point of rudeness, announced as if the choice were a personality. The waitress brought back the drink I would have gotten without the speech.

A Coors Light, a Chianti, three martinis no two alike. Nobody comes to the Swiss Hotel for the drink.

I price companies for a living and cannot stop doing it to a cocktail order. Everyone argues about the gin, the way every pitch spends its first hour on the product. The gin is never the hard part. You can buy good gin, and these days you can nearly buy a good product too. What you remember is never the loud part. It is the founder, the part the deck never shows.

The vermouth is where the lying starts. People brag about leaving it out, and the drier the pour the more virtuous the man feels.

What decides a martini is temperature, and nobody boasts about it. A cold one made carelessly beats a warm one made perfectly. Temperature is timing, the truest thing I know about why one company wins and its twin dies. Cold is a window, not a technique.

But look at what actually happened. Five men, five different drinks, and not one order wrong, not one man in the wrong seat. Every founder is strange in his own direction, and somehow the best ones keep finding the same table.

The second martini is always a mistake, and I ordered one anyway, which makes me a liar about the one I promised myself. I would do it again tonight. Next week I am back on Diet Coke in the same chair, because the martinis were only ever something to do with my hands while the real thing assembled in the corner.

At six we broke apart. Lincoln and Donny left for the ballpark, the wine drinker went home, and Jason and I walked to the plaza, where the heat was finally letting go and a band played past the fountain.

Nobody asked what anyone had ordered. Donny’s boy takes the mound tonight, Jason will be wearing the latest and greatest picked by his son, next year the corner table will be a season older and so will we.

Our families were already out in the grass, the same patch we find every Tuesday all summer, and they looked up when they saw us coming, the way people do for the ones they have been waiting on.

The martini was never the point.