Tequila Cocktails, page 2
26 recipes, page 2 of 2
Base Spirit
Difficulty Level
Tia Mia
The Tia Mia is the Mai Tai crossing the border. Ivy Mix built it at Leyenda, her pan-Latin cocktail bar in Brooklyn, by splitting the sacred base between Jamaican rum and mezcal so that Trader Vic’s 1944 masterpiece picks up Oaxacan smoke. The name puns Mai Tai into Spanish, tía mía, my aunt, and honours a regular of the bar. Everything else is left exactly where Vic put it. Lime, orgeat and orange curaçao in their classic measures, crushed ice, an unstrained pour, the spent lime shell sunk in the glass and a slapped sprig of mint on top. The only revolution is the passport. It works because smoke and funk turn out to be related. Jamaican rum’s esters and espadín mezcal’s ember are both wild and both loud, and the orgeat referees them exactly as it referees a blend of rums in the parent. It is now the standard pour for anyone who thinks the Mai Tai stopped evolving in 1944.
Tommy’s Margarita
The Tommy’s Margarita was born at Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant in San Francisco, where Julio Bermejo, working his family’s floor from the early 1990s, made two changes to the house margarita that became modern doctrine: out went the triple sec, in came agave syrup, and the well tequila became 100 per cent agave or nothing. The result carries his family’s restaurant name into every serious bar on earth. The logic is like-with-like. Orange liqueur, the classic margarita’s sweetener, brings its own flavour to the party; agave syrup brings only sweetness with the plant’s own accent, which lets the tequila stand at the front of its own drink. Three ingredients, and the spirit finally audible: the Tommy’s is less a variation than an argument about what a margarita is for. It is also the drink that taught a generation to read tequila labels. Bermejo evangelised 100 per cent agave bottlings from behind his bar decades before the category boomed, and the Tommy’s remains the fastest way to taste why the words on the label matter.