N°10 · The Border Classic
Margarita
Tequila, lime and orange liqueur behind a salt rim. The most contested origin story in cocktails, and America’s most ordered drink.
- Spirit
- Tequila
- Glass
- Margarita coupe
- Method
- Shaken · salt rim
- Est.
- c. 1936–48 · Mexico (disputed, gleefully)
Where it comes from — as far as anyone can prove
No cocktail has more parents. Carlos “Danny” Herrera swore he built it in 1938 at his restaurant south of Tijuana for Marjorie King, a dancer allergic to every spirit except tequila. Dallas socialite Margarita Sames claimed it emerged at her 1948 Acapulco house party, with a Hilton in attendance to carry it north. A Juárez bartender, Pancho Morales, dated his to a misremembered order in 1942. All three stories are told with total confidence; at most one of them is true.
The drier explanation is that nobody invented it so much as translated it. The Daisy — spirit, citrus, orange liqueur — was a beloved nineteenth-century template, and a “Tequila Daisy” was being reported at the border as early as 1936. Margarita is simply Spanish for daisy. The 1937 Café Royal Cocktail Book even prints the exact spec under another name, the Picador, a decade before most origin stories take place.
“At most one of its origin stories is true. All are told with total confidence.”
— DRINKR, on margarita historiography
However it was born, America adopted it with abandon. Esquire printed the recipe in 1953; Jimmy Buffett turned it into a lifestyle in 1977; and in 1971 a Dallas restaurateur named Mariano Martinez, unable to keep up with demand, converted a soft-serve ice cream machine into the world’s first frozen margarita machine — a device now enshrined in the Smithsonian. The margarita has topped America’s most-ordered cocktail lists nearly every year since anyone started counting.
Things worth knowing by the second round
- 01
Margarita means “daisy” in Spanish — and the Daisy was a whole family of drinks. The name may be the recipe’s birth certificate.
- 02
The world’s first frozen margarita machine (Dallas, 1971) was a hacked soft-serve ice cream machine. It lives in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
- 03
The Tommy’s Margarita — agave nectar instead of orange liqueur — was created at a San Francisco family restaurant and became a modern standard.
- 04
The 1937 “Picador” is a margarita in everything but name, printed in London before any of the famous origin stories occurred.
- 05
Salt on half the rim is the professional move: seasoning as an option, not a sentence.
Famous company
“Margaritaville,” 1977
Jimmy Buffett’s three-minute beach ballad became a billion-dollar hospitality empire.
Esquire, December 1953
The magazine’s “drink of the month” — its first great American press clipping.
The Smithsonian
Where Mariano’s original frozen margarita machine retired as a national artifact.
National Margarita Day, Feb 22
A marketing holiday the drink has entirely earned.