#MARGARITA DRINK FULL#

That’s when the nightlife columnist from a suburban Los Angeles newspaper asked around and found John Durlesser, the head bartender at the Tail o’ the Cock and the dean of Los Angeles mixologists, and the story that he invented the drink “way back in 1937, when tequila first appeared here.” In 1966, Durlesser, still in the same job, elaborated for Bon Appetit magazine: it was actually 1936, and he “was asked to duplicate a drink a lady customer had once tasted in Mexico.” Her name was Margaret, and he named the drink after her.īy 1966, however, another claimant had been thrust forward: three years before, a columnist for the Houston Chronicle, noting all the fuss about the Margarita, wrote that “Santos Cruz. With the Margarita, that process started as early as January, 1955. Then you’ve got a thousand barstool detectives trying to walk back the cat to figure out how it got here and where it came from. Slowly it moves from bar to bar and town to town, just another drink among the many that people order, until for whatever reason it suddenly catches on. Some bartender has a clever little idea, shakes it up and tests it out on a couple of the customers.

#MARGARITA DRINK FULL#

The answer is rarely straightforward: cocktails are rarely created in the full light of history. The Margarita InventorsĪny time a cocktail reaches widespread popularity, people start wondering who invented it and under what circumstances, and the Margarita is no exception. By the middle of the 1960s, the Margarita was everywhere. Over the next couple of years, the Margarita starts popping up in newspapers from coast to coast. He investigated, found that the Margarita was to blame, and took to advertising the drink both locally and around the country. The evidence suggests that it was Vern Underwood, a Los Angeles liquor importer and distributor, who really got things going when he noticed that one of his accounts, McHenry’s Tail o’ the Cock restaurant, was selling more tequila than the rest put together. The world is a big place, though, and it would take another couple of years for the drink to really get going.

Margarita drink