Sometimes, in the small hours of the morning, I have a nightmare so fitful and terrifying that I’m jolted wide awake, quivering with fear. It’s a nightmare I’ve had countless times, based on a memory from my first job as a waitress. And there’s a sound, I always wake up as I hear that terrible sound: the wild screeching of seven plastered women as I approached their table with a round of espresso martinis.

On the day of the event in question, the screeching was so loud that I almost dropped my tray. I returned to the bar so shell shocked that my boss came over to comfort me:

I laughed, because he was right, and then set about making their next round of Espresso Martinis, which were on us, because the boring people in question were all teachers at his son’s primary school, and he told me to.

Few drinks have a worse reputation than the espresso martini. There’s the Pornstar Martini, sure, but the name is so gauche it’s not actually in the running. A revived love of Sex and the City has lured the Cosmo’s reputation out from the cave it was hiding in, and if you have the hubris to order a Sex on the Beach then honestly, more power to you. But the Espresso Martini. It reeks of midlife crisis; of seven lairy primary school teachers on a girls night out, of shame, of regret.

There’s one individual we can blame for it all. One man—a bartender by the name of Dick Bradsell—who, at a particularly low point of the 1980s, was making a cocktail for a supermodel (rumour suggests she was either Naomi Campbell or Kate Moss), who wanted a drink to help her “wake the fuck up”. Or so the story goes. Three decades on and this drink is (allegedly) the most-ordered cocktail in Australia, which I find easy to believe on the grounds that Australia is a country populated largely by the descendants of criminals and lunatics.

But it’s not just the criminals. A recent Drinks Business survey concluded that last year, it was the most-googled cocktail in Britain. They proliferate: you can purchase them in a can (everywhere) or on tap (like at Brat, Climpson’s arch). They even sell them at Wetherspoons.

At its core, the Espresso Martini is a simple thing—espresso, coffee liqueur, and vodka, roughly to the ratio of 1:1:2. The cocktail is known for being annoying to make, but many of the bartenders I spoke to don’t really mind it. Yes, you have to make espresso, and yes, that’s a ball-ache if you’re doing it fresh. But lots of them keep a stash of pre-made espresso chilled and ready to go to avoid the issue. Once assembled, the drink is shaken—making that pleasing foam that gives the drinker a charming moustache and mimics the crema of an espresso proper. Most bartenders serve them with a trio of coffee beans floated on top (which, as I’m sure you know, make a strangely satisfying snack).

When the Americans are allowed to have their way with it, it’s unsurprisingly, a vastly different monster. They tend to make it longer, weaker, and sweeter. They sometimes put Bailey’s in it. Sure, I’ve seen a few Espresso Martinis that resemble Espresso Martinis floating around Manhattan, but I’ve also seen Espresso Martinis that resemble the type of milkshake you might buy yourself with your pocket money if you’re an eleven-year-old influencer making food content for TikTok. You don’t want to be the type of person who orders the latter.

You don’t really want to be the type of person who orders the former though, do you? The Espresso Martini has become a symbol of a particular type of drinker—the basic, the good-time-gal, the chronically unimaginative. When customers used to ask me for them, they’d lower their voices. Sometimes they’d even apologise (“I’m so sorry, it’s so embarrassing, but could we have a couple of…”). It is embarrassing, and nobody wants to be the type.

But we all are. We’re all exhausted. We’ve all spent the week trudging through a grey city to our thankless jobs, a cog in the great wheel of capitalism. We’re all tired. We all want a drink. Like Naomi Campbell and/or Kate Moss, we just want to wake the fuck up.

There’s a wonderfully camp drama to the espresso martini, it’s a silly drink. You might as well order one in style. Sessions Arts Club’s is, for my money, unrivalled (thanks to the genius of Indre Poskaityte), and made all the better by the ludicrously beautiful room it’s served in.

At a house party the other week, I made espresso martinis. Everyone wanted one (they always do), apart from one, grumpy-looking bloke who waved a bag of cocaine in my face:

“Espresso Martini? That’s just cocaine for boring people.”

A flashback of my first job and the screeching teachers sent shivers down my spine. I retreated into a corner.

An hour later, I was backed into that same corner by the bloke with the cocaine, thinking about how I would rather listen to anything other than his infernal, drug-addled chatter. I’d rather listen to a community choir, or nails run down a chalkboard, or the fox’s relentless midnight shagging, or—it suddenly occurred to me—the harrowing screech of seven, piss-drunk primary school teachers, beckoning me over for their second round of espresso martinis.