WHY WE CHOSE IT · Nº 08 - FILTHY Blue Cheese Stuffed Olives
A beautifully made dirty martini is an exercise in restraint. Good spirit. Enough brine. Proper dilution. A very cold glass. There are remarkably few places to hide—and yet the garnish is often treated as an afterthought.
WHY WE CHOSE IT · Nº 08
FILTHY Blue Cheese Stuffed Olives
Because the smallest thing in the glass can change the entire drink.
There is a particular kind of luxury we return to again and again at Lello: not extravagance for its own sake, but attention paid to something most people overlook.
In a martini, that something might be the olive.
A beautifully made dirty martini is an exercise in restraint. Good spirit. Enough brine. Proper dilution. A very cold glass. There are remarkably few places to hide—and yet the garnish is often treated as an afterthought.
FILTHY approaches it differently.
Its Blue Cheese Stuffed Olives begin with large queen olives from northeastern Greece. Rather than relying on the accelerated chemical curing commonly used for commodity olives, FILTHY says its olives are naturally cured for four months using water and salt. The company argues that this slower process preserves more of the olive’s naturally rich, nutty character.
That alone caught our attention.
But then comes the blue cheese.
Each olive is stuffed with rich Wisconsin blue cheese and finished by hand in Miami. The result is exactly what a serious dirty martini wants: briny and savory at first, followed by a creamy, distinctly blue-cheese finish. FILTHY specifically designed them for martinis and Bloody Marys; its own dirty-martini recipe finishes each glass with two.
The detail that matters
What interested us most wasn’t simply that FILTHY makes a good stuffed olive.
It was the philosophy behind it.
Founder Daniel Singer built the company one bar at a time, initially selling to bartenders from the trunk of his car. FILTHY says its garnishes are now served by leading bars, restaurants and hotels around the world. The company also operates its own Miami facility, giving it control over production rather than treating the garnish as an anonymous commodity.
That feels very Lello.
We have never believed that everything in a beautiful pantry needs to be rare, expensive or centuries old.
It does, however, need a reason to be there.
How we serve them
Very cold.
Two olives on a proper cocktail pick, suspended over a dirty martini with enough brine to make its presence known.
They are especially good alongside our Ancient Olive Trees Dirty Martini Juice—the combination we’re using as the foundation of our first Weekend Edit: The Martini Hour.
But they don’t require a cocktail. Put a small bowl beside salted nuts before dinner, add them to an aperitivo board, or serve them alongside cheese and something crisp.
The point is not to complicate cocktail hour.
It is to make one small part of it considerably better.
That is why we chose them.