GREAT DRINKS #4 THE MARTINI

Here’s what the taster is up against the obvious problem with these “Sent for the Great Mar-tin!” deals: after you polish off your first martini of the evening, they all taste good, and they all taste great by closing time.

The Lounge at the lnwood Theater. ton know how hard it is to go back to a place where you’ve made yourself unwelcome? But you go back, because they have something you want? The martinis are what The Lunge has that we want and they’re why we’re not real welcome there-and in both uses, blame the olives. The Lounge’s olives are not those poor, rancid, curdled, soft boogers who’ve been dying in the garnish tray for weeks. They’re the big, fat juicy, huge, pimientoey Bar-fresh large Stuffed Spanish Olives, three to the glass. Perfect for martinis. To die for.

Also perfect for chunking at other customers across the room. And, last year, three martinis and nine beaned customers later, perfect to get thrown out for.

Terilli’s. The bartender piles ice four inches high into a crystal ’tini glass, molding it into a giant mound. In a separate glass, be pours Bombay gin over ice.

He leaves it to fill another order. The glass and the gin thill. He draws beer for a customer. They chill. He talks to a waitress. Still chilling. “It’s brewin’. ” be tells us. He totals tabs, mixes drinks, maybe even takes his supper break, knocks off a hundred pages of a novel.

This is amazing. Glacial amounts of subjective time pass. Icebergs melt in tropical seas and still the glass and the gin chill, unstirred, unshaken, edging on down toward zero centigrade When we finally get it, we perceive that it suffers only slightly from the melt-though a more epicurean drunk might squawk that it’s been bruised to hell and gone. No matter-rt is colder than Tom Landry’s stare if he had to watch Herschel Walker juggling porcupines. We like it. and put him through his paces two more times. Now the drinks are even colder-colder than a Kuwaiti terrorist’s heart After the third, we pass him a note. It says, “We are doing a story on the best martinis in Dallas, and we think we have found one here, but we can no longer talk. “

State Bar. Here you’ll get an above-average, straightforward little ’tini in terms of quality. But in terms of quantity, on the Bang For Buck Meter it’s the Champeen, arguably the largest in town, weighing in at around three ounces. After a couple of these mamas, you’re God’s own drunk and a fearless man. You just don’t care if the State Fair neighbor-hoods mug you in the parking lot Heck, you might just decide to mug them, or puke on ’em, or something.