Despite the name, the Vacation Martini has nothing to do with gin, vermouth, or the stirred, spirit-forward drink most people mean when they say "martini." It's a shaken, egg-white-foamed, tropical-fruit cocktail built from vanilla vodka and coconut rum liqueur, served up in a martini glass mostly because that's the glass, not because it earns the name. Simon Difford, founder of Difford's Guide, credits it as his own 2003 reworking of the then-signature cocktail at MercBar, a real Mercer Street lounge in Manhattan's SoHo that operated from 1993 until the building was demolished in 2013. No other source independently documents the drink or the original MercBar recipe it's based on — what follows is Difford's own account of it, not an outside history.
My 2003 adaptation of the then signature cocktail at the MercBar on Mercer Street in Manhattan, New York City.
Simon Difford, Difford's GuideA Martini In Name Only
MercBar was a deliberately hard-to-find SoHo lounge — a graffiti-covered door with no sign, tucked into a former garage and tile warehouse. It built a reputation in the 1990s and 2000s as a downtown art-and-fashion hangout, and by Difford's account it had a house cocktail built on vanilla and coconut. When Difford adapted it in 2003, he kept the martini glass and the vanilla-coconut backbone but built out a full tiki-adjacent spec: pineapple and lime for acidity, egg white for a frothy cap, and a few drops of blue curaçao dropped into the center of the foam to bloom into a blue eye against the pale drink.
The bar itself is real and well documented — it closed when its building came down in 2013 — but no independent source beyond Difford's Guide records the specific cocktail or confirms MercBar's original recipe, so treat the deeper backstory as a single, credible-but-unverified account rather than settled history.
The Spec
Vanilla vodka and coconut rum liqueur form the base, pineapple and lime keep it from tasting like dessert, and a dry-shaken egg white gives the drink its signature frothy cap — the canvas the blue curaçao drop is poured onto.
The Blue Eye Is a Trick, Not a Flavor
A few drops of blue curaçao poured into the center of the foam bloom outward on their own, giving the drink its signature blue spot without needing to build a full layered cocktail. It barely moves the flavor — it's there for the photo. Swap it for melon liqueur or cassis and the drink turns green or red instead, same construction.
Egg White Is About Texture, Not Volume
A quarter-ounce of egg white dry-shaken after the first shake produces a stable, frothy cap without watering down the drink underneath — the same technique used in a Whiskey Sour or a Pisco Sour, just applied to a tropical build instead of a citrus-forward one.
Bottom Line
Call it a martini and a purist will correct you, and they'd be right — this is a foam-capped, fruit-and-coconut tiki drink wearing a stemmed glass for the photo. Judged on its own terms, as a vanilla-coconut cooler with a fun visual trick, it's a good one.