Born a star: the juicy history of the passion fruit martini | Hannah Crosbie on. drinks

Or how the pornstar martini was forced to change its name … so bundles of drinks companies could sell you ready-made versions

To many people, the expert combination of vanilla vodka, passion fruit puree, Passoã and champagne serves as a syrupy promise of a good night ahead. To me, however, even a whiff of a pornstar martini takes me right back to my waitressing days in the Midlands, and to sticky hands and broken glass after I dropped a tray of four of the damned things. I don’t need a drinks marketing report to tell me it was the most popular cocktail in 2018; I lived it.

The pornstar martini feels like a seedy, hedonistic concoction dreamed up in the 1980s by way of Miami’s South Beach, but it was in fact devised in London, by legendary Ghanaian mixologist Douglas Ankrah, who honed his skills at the Hard Rock Cafe before setting up the fabled London Academy of Bartending, or Lab bar, in 1996 (this later led to the launch of Lab Bar on Old Compton Street and later Townhouse in Knightsbridge).