The History of the Margarita

The Margarita is the best-selling cocktail in the United States. It is served at more American bars than any other drink, in more variations — frozen, on the rocks, straight up, flavored — than any reasonable taxonomy can contain. It has been the subject of more competing origin stories than almost any other cocktail, a reflection of how deeply it is embedded in the cultural imagination. Getting to the truth of the margarita requires navigating through a thicket of charming fictions.

Multiple Origin Stories

The Problem of Origins

At least a dozen distinct origin stories claim the margarita, spanning roughly from the late 1930s to the early 1950s and ranging from Tijuana to Galveston. The common elements are a Mexican or Mexican-American bar setting, a female customer (often named Margarita), tequila, lime juice, and triple sec or Cointreau. Each story has its local advocates and its circumstantial evidence. None can be definitively proven.

The most frequently cited origin places the drink at Hussong's Cantina in Ensenada, Baja California, in 1941. Bartender Don Carlos Orozco allegedly mixed tequila, triple sec, and lime juice for Margarita Henkel, daughter of the German ambassador to Mexico. Whether or not this is true, Hussong's still serves the drink today and makes no apology for its claim.

Another popular account credits Dallas socialite Margarita Sames, who said she invented the drink at her Acapulco villa in 1948 and served it to her guests, including Tommy Hilton of the Hilton Hotels chain. The Hilton connection, if real, would explain the drink's rapid spread through hotel bars in the 1950s.

What Historians Can Establish

What is documentable: the margarita appears in print by 1953, when it was featured in Esquire magazine as the "drink of the month." It was established enough by that point to be considered menu-worthy by a national publication. The margarita as a category — tequila, citrus, salt rim, served in a V-shaped glass — was coherent and recognizable by the early 1950s, however it arrived at that form.

The Daisy family connection is worth noting. "Margarita" is Spanish for "daisy," and the Daisy cocktail family — spirit, orange liqueur, citrus — predates the margarita by decades. The margarita may simply be an application of the daisy template to tequila, which was becoming more available in the American Southwest as Mexican trade routes expanded.

The Frozen Revolution

Jimmy Buffett and the Blender

The frozen margarita machine was patented by Mariano Martinez in Dallas in 1971, using a converted soft-serve ice cream machine. Martinez had a margarita bar on Greenville Avenue and needed a way to serve consistent drinks quickly. The result was a cultural landmark: the frozen margarita became as associated with Tex-Mex restaurants as tortillas and salsa.

The frozen margarita's rise coincided with the broader Sunbelt culture of the 1970s and 1980s — air-conditioned restaurants serving a cuisine that blended Mexican tradition with American convenience, serving drinks that were cold, sweet, and visually appealing. Jimmy Buffett, whose 1977 song "Margaritaville" made the margarita a symbol of tropical escapism, was perhaps more responsible for the drink's cultural entrenchment than any single bartender.

The Flavor Explosion

Once the frozen margarita machine existed, there was no stopping the flavor variants. Strawberry, mango, peach, raspberry — the margarita became a vessel for whatever fruit puree was available. The relationship to tequila became almost incidental: the drink was a frozen, sweetened, slightly citrusy vehicle for color and fun, with the alcohol present but not prominent.

This flavored frozen margarita represents the dark ages' approach to the drink, and it remains enormously popular. The craft revival's challenge was not to eliminate it — the market was and is too large — but to establish that the original, unflavored, properly made margarita was a different and superior category.

Tommy's Margarita

Julio Bermejo's Innovation

The most significant contribution to the margarita in the modern era came from Julio Bermejo, whose family owns Tommy's Mexican Restaurant in San Francisco's Richmond District. In the early 1990s, Bermejo began making margaritas with 100% agave tequila and agave nectar instead of triple sec and simple syrup.

Tommy's Margarita — 2 oz 100% agave tequila, 1 oz fresh lime juice, 0.5 oz agave nectar — is the Tequila: Blanco to Añejo Decoded applied to the margarita family. It is simpler than the classic triple-sec formula, which means the tequila must be of higher quality because there is less to hide behind. The agave nectar amplifies the agave notes in the spirit, creating a coherent flavor profile where everything points in the same direction.

The drink also changed the conversation about tequila quality. By specifying 100% agave tequila, Bermejo drew a line between tequila made entirely from blue agave and "mixto" tequila, which can contain up to 49% non-agave sugars. The difference in flavor and hangover profile is significant. Tommy's Margarita effectively argued that you cannot make a good margarita with bad tequila — a position that the craft cocktail movement embraced enthusiastically.

Global Spread

The World's Cocktail

The margarita's global spread is a story of American cultural export, tequila's international marketing success, and the universal appeal of the Sour family — spirit, citrus, sweetness — in a warm-weather package. It is served, in some form, on every continent. In Mexico itself, it occupies a peculiar position: a drink associated with American tourism and Tex-Mex culture rather than traditional Mexican drinking, which tends toward beer, mezcal, and spirits served neat.

The contemporary margarita is actually a family of drinks sharing a template: tequila or mezcal, citrus (lime, grapefruit, or other), and a sweetening agent (triple sec, Cointreau, agave, simple syrup). The Paloma — tequila, grapefruit soda, lime — is a cousin that has overtaken the margarita as the most-ordered cocktail in Mexico. The Pisco Sour shares the same sour template applied to a different spirit and geography.

The margarita endures because it is, at its best, exceptionally well-designed: the salt rim bridges the gap between the tequila's earthiness and the lime's brightness. The Balance of the classic version, with fresh lime and quality triple sec, is a genuinely great achievement in cocktail architecture. That it is also available in strawberry flavor from a frozen machine in a Tex-Mex chain is not a contradiction — it is simply evidence of how good an idea the drink is.