#FIRST FROZEN MARGARITA MACHINE HOW TO#

Instead of wasting away in Margaritaville, he bought a secondhand soft-serve ice cream machine and tinkered with Dad’s recipe.

“Besides,” Martinez was told, “everyone knows alcohol won’t freeze.” All the bartender had to do was open the spigot.’” But 7-Eleven’s parent company refused to sell him the contraption. The next morning while making a pit stop at a 7-Eleven, Martinez had a eureka moment: “For better consistency, I’d premix margaritas in a Slurpee machine. “I thought, ‘My restaurant will go bust and I’ve screwed up Dad’s formula.’” “I saw my dream evaporating,” Martinez says. Tired of slicing limes, he threatened to quit and return to his former job at a Steak and Ale, where the most complicated cocktail was a bourbon and Coke. The ones he’s making are terrible.”Īs it turned out, the barman was so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of margarita orders that he was tossing ingredients into the blender without measuring them. “Well, you’d better speak to your bartender.

#FIRST FROZEN MARGARITA MACHINE HOW TO#

Libations were poured faster than you could say “One more round.” The second night wasn’t quite as successful: A barfly cornered Martinez and asked, “Do you know how to make frozen margaritas?” And customers, serenaded by a mariachi band, were encouraged to order margaritas made from the old family recipe. On opening night, the amiable owner appeared in a bandido costume. Shortly after Dallas voted yes, the younger Martinez launched Mariano’s Mexican Cuisine in a shopping center near the campus of Southern Methodist University. In 1970 an amendment to the state constitution made liquor by the drink legal, in cities or counties when approved in local-option elections. The secret ingredient was a splash of simple syrup. (Introduced at a 1937 restaurant show in Chicago and bankrolled by bandleader Fred Waring, the humble Waring Blendor revolutionized bar drinks.) The elder Martinez used a recipe gleaned while working at a San Antonio speak-easy in 1938: ice, triple sec, hand-muddled limes and 100 percent blue agave tequila. Though at the time liquor couldn’t be sold by the drink in Texas restaurants, the elder Martinez occasionally would whip up frozen margaritas in a blender for his patrons. “They’d show up with a souvenir bottle a friend had brought back from a vacation in Mexico, and ask my dad, ‘What do we do with this?’”

“The customers were mostly Anglos who often had no idea what tequila was,” he recalls. He grew up in East Dallas, where at age 9 he started bussing tables at El Charo, his father’s Mexican eatery. The innovation forever changed the Tex-Mex restaurant business (placing bars front and center) and triggered the craze for Tex-Mex food.īefitting a musician who once recorded three versions of “La Bamba” on an EP titled Lotta Bamba, the convivial Martinez has a fresh, boyish manner and a beaming smile. Happy hour (and hangovers) would never be the same.īy adapting mass-production methods to blender drinks, Martinez elevated the frozen margarita from a border-cantina curiosity to America’s most popular cocktail. The beverage was teeth-chatteringly cold with a proper tequila face-slap. When it comes to margarita lore, about the only thing for certain is that on May 11, 1971, Martinez pulled the lever on a repurposed soft-serve ice cream dispenser and filled a glass with a coil of pale green sherbet-history’s first prefab frozen margarita. “Supposedly, the drink was named in her honor.” “After Margarita got a contract from a Hollywood studio, she changed her name to Rita Hayworth,” he says. One of Martinez’s favorites involves a teenage dancer named Margarita Carmen Cansino who performed at nightclubs in Tijuana. The origin stories date to the '30s and tend to feature a Mexican showgirl or a Texas socialite and a bartender determined to impress her. Martinez is the creator of what is arguably the 20th century’s most epochal invention-the frozen margarita machine-and, at the age of 73, the Dallas restaurateur is an indisputable authority on the cocktail in the salt-rimmed glass. The way Mariano Martinez tells it, accounts of the margarita’s beginnings should be taken with a grain of salt-and a wedge of lime.

First frozen margarita machine