![]() ![]() Our drinks may as well be inciters, even as they are balms. Life can be deadening, and we all want to feel something, anything. Sometimes, it wears no disguise at all, as with the Spicy Margarita, hot with habanero shrub, at Grand Army in Brooklyn. The spicy Margarita is now a near-requisite on cocktail menus across the country, even if it goes by other names, like For Old Times Sake, with apricot and green chile liqueur, at Maxine’s Tap Room in Fayetteville, Arkansas, or El Guayabero, with cayenne-agave syrup and guava marmalade, at Miami’s Café La Trova. Eventually they started asking, ‘Well, can you make a spicy Margarita then?’”īartenders did. “People would ask what made the Pliny’s spicy, and we’d tell them about our serrano-and-habanero tincture. “At first, I would get more calls for a Pliny’s than a spicy Margarita,” says Bailey. The cocktail became so popular that people would ask for it at other top Houston bars, including Johnny’s Gold Brick. One forceful impetus: the Pliny’s Tonic, a fiery take on the gin-based Southside cocktail, created in 2009 at legendary Houston cocktail bar Anvil. The highbrow cocktail scene was likewise influencing Houston drinkers from the top-tier down. SPICY MARGARITA FULLShortly after, the restaurant began serving a spicy peach Margarita by 2014, “a full spice craze” had been ignited. Bailey recalls guests’ chile heat–curiosity during his first days working at the Tex-Mex chain restaurant Pappasito’s Cantina, in 2010. The inextricable culinary tie between the Lone Star State and Mexico ensured that, in time, every kind of bar and every kind of drinking demographic started swerving spicy. “I want to say the food here caused the shift in people’s drinking,” says Rich Bailey, now a brand ambassador for Santa Teresa rum and a former bartender and assistant general manager at Johnny’s Gold Brick in Houston. The first one he remembers introducing was the Southern Heat, with blanco tequila, Cointreau, cucumber and jalapeño, for Central 214 in Dallas. “I started putting spicy tequila drinks on menus only when it made sense for the city,” he says. The same year, Bezuidenhout began working with the Kimpton Hotel & Restaurant Group, traveling the United States and implementing cocktail menus at the company’s hotels. Before long, a peach-chipotle drink joined the Sweet Heat on the Tres Agaves menu, and the bar started seasoning agave nectar with puréed jalapeños to scorch the Tommy’s Margarita with a pepper conflagration. “On the West Coast, our bartending style came up with access to the kitchen,” says Bezuidenhout, offering his theory as to why the city became awash with muddled jalapeños in the mid-2000s. Jacques Bezuidenhout, a San Francisco–based bar consultant who ran in the same circles as Nepove and Bermejo, remembers putting the Sweet Heat on the opening menu of Tres Agaves, a sprawling Mexican restaurant and bar that opened the same year near what is now Oracle Park, the home of the San Francisco Giants. The drink featured muddled jalapeño with lime, Licor 43 and tequila. Then, in 2005, a local bartender named David Nepove won a Gran Centenario competition at Tommy’s with his Sweet Heat cocktail. (I remember one sceney San Francisco restaurant, Frisson, where essential oils were so common they practically dribbled themselves across the drink menu.) If a guest at Tommy’s drank four shots of habanero tequila, their name would be added to the bottle. These, after all, were the heady days of deep infusions and scented cocktails. In the early 2000s, Julio Bermejo, the owner of Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant in San Francisco and creator of the Tommy’s Margarita, in which agave nectar supplants the drink’s traditional orange liqueur, started infusing blanco tequila with habanero peppers. Once, the standard guest request was “fruity, not too sweet” now, it’s “spicy with tequila.” 1 seller,” says Ivy Mix, author of Spirits of Latin America and co-owner of the agave-centric Brooklyn bar Leyenda. “If it’s got jalapeño-infused tequila listed, it’s going to be our No. Over the past 15 to 20 years, drinkers that wearied of the classic Margarita’s fine-tuned balance of tequila, lime juice and orange liqueur began demanding spicy heat. These days, that simulacrum often arrives ringing with a peal of chile-pepper burn. We think the Margarita is Mexican but, instead, the Margarita is a zippy cipher for how the United States perceives Mexico and consumes its culture. Yet, it is within the pervious borders of the United States alone that the drink reigns. Yes, most of the cocktail’s origin stories suggest the Margarita was created in northern Mexico in the first half of the 20th century. ![]()
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